published by Scribe

With the effects of climate change becoming more and more apparent, the need to shift to new “green” technologies has become a mantra and a rallying call for a generation. In the rush to embrace these supposedly cleaner and more efficient inventions what is often overlooked, however, is that many of them come with their own ecological cost.

Just as the disruptive effects of fossil fuel on the climate threaten our continued existence so, too, does this new revolution present its dangers. This is because so many of the items we now consider indispensable to modern living – wind turbines, electric batteries, solar panels, as well as smartphones computers and the like – are dependant for their manufacture on a cluster of little known rare metals found in terrestrial rocks in infinitesimal quantities.

Already, in some countries, most notably China, the mad rush to mine these metals has had dire consequences on the environment, as vast tracts of land are ripped up and rendered virtually uninhabitable by the extraction and refining methods. This pattern is being repeated elsewhere in the world – the DRC (Cobalt mining) and South America (Lithium) for example.

There are, of course, important geopolitical reasons for all of this. By capturing the lion’s share of the rare metal market China has been able to consolidate its growing global power, as well as gain greater economic and military leverage.

In short, rare metals have become the “new oil”.

One of the more worrying aspects of these developments is that the West seems to have been happy to allow China – in part because it means less pollution in their backyards, in part because of a poor assessment of China’s competitive streak – to develop its stranglehold on world production. Only now is the West waking up to the fact that they are lagging seriously behind in this new energy race – a case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted – and that it could leave them very vulnerable.

In this extensively researched investigation into the subject, Guillame Petron, a French Award-winning journalist and documentary maker, has talked to many experts as well as travelled around the world gathering information. The amount of data he has collated is vast, yet he succeeds in making it (mostly) comprehensible to the lay reader.

The book’s timely message may make jarring reading for those pinning their hopes on a greener future. As the author writes: “The energy and digital transition is sending humanity on a quest for rare metals, and is doomed to aggravate divergence and dissent. Rather than abate the geopolitics of energy, it will compound them.” Petron also argues that we need to be more sceptical about how many of the new technologies are produced.

For all this, The Rare Metals War is by no means a hatchet job intended to reveal the evils of the new technological order. Instead, it’s a careful analysis that sets out to both pose and answer some pressing questions, as well as suggest possible solutions and alternatives.

Published by Manilla Press

This book tells the incredible true story of nine women resistance fighters during World War Two who find themselves imprisoned in a country that has itself become a criminal conspiracy. Having been captured while fighting against their German occupiers, they were interrogated, tortured and sent east into Greater Germany to a concentration camp at Leipzig where their lives were made a living hell.

What comes over with striking force, on reading about their experiences here, is, once again, the sheer barbarity and depravity of the SS and the Gestapo, as well as a Nazi government that saw fit to licence mass slaughter as a political process.

Not all the German soldiers were complicit in this almost unimaginable cruelty. In the Leipzig camp, for example, there was, one kindly older guard who, realising the game was up, smuggled in a pair of wire-cutters for the prisoners.

They never got to use it.

With the allies closing in on all sides, the women, already badly malnourished, were forced out onto the open road. The German plan seems to have been to march them to their deaths since there was no longer any food at Leipzig and they had no gas chambers or efficient ways to execute them en-masse. Many were indeed slaughtered by machine guns along the way.

Determined that this would not be their fate, the nine women, by now close friends, made plans to escape. Led by the indomitable, well-educated, Helene they finally seized their chance.

Gwen Strauss, the author, is the great-niece of Helene and in this riveting, impeccably researched and extremely moving story of hope and courage in the face of seemingly impossible odds, she tells the harrowing tale of their capture, imprisonment and subsequent flight to freedom.

Nor did problems end when they finally got back to their homes. At the time, the population was urged to put the war behind them as quickly as possible and get on with their lives. This was easier said than done. Damaged and changed forever by their traumatising experiences in the German camps, they suffered from depression, shame, rage, helplessness and guilt and found it hard to settle back into a peacetime existence they hardly recognised at all.

Written from the viewpoints of each of the women involved, The Nine is always absorbing, frequently horrifying but with odd unexpected moments of humour to lighten the load.