Stewardship - Prosperity - Representation
"100 % renewable energy only requires wind, sun, water, Earth's heat and Earth's minerals"
Our initiative plans to reinvent mineral exploration beyond just science. We plan to develop protocols whereby mineral exploration champions environmental stewardship and community representation. The most sustainable resource is the one that should not be mined, for economic and human reasons.
Our initiative aims to make significant contributions in understanding and mitigating possible downsides of increasing mineral supply, such as human exploitation, deteriorating national and international security, and environmental destruction. The energy transition should be a “just” transition, hence the initiative will ally with EJ (environmental justice) movements as well as global organizations in climate change and sustainability. We are looking to learn from indigenous communities by conversation, interaction and representation to decolonize the mineral world.
We want to prevent a repeat of the last 250 years in how humans have acted without regard to the environment and with a colonialist mindset in terms of resources exploration and exploitation for their own personal good, and not humanities’. At the same time, 100% renewable future will likely not happen without increasing the critical mineral supply through exploration and mining activities. This apparent paradox is poorly understood.
Our initiative will work on developing ways to create social impact assessment (SIA) starting with the exploration phase, while currently those documents are only required when minerals have already been discovered.
Initial questions we will consider
- How are indigenous / non-indigenous communities responding to mining for the energy transition?
- What are the implications of social licenses in the mineral exploration of frontier areas?
- How can exploration companies get involved in early and healthy relationships with the community?
- How can the new initiative assure sustainable and responsible critical mineral supply?
- How can progress in this new initiative be measurable?
Our ongoing project
- Community engagement for pioneering fair exploration of energy transition metals in Greenland.
Partners
Mineral-X is a proud to collaborate with the Environmental Justice Working Group at Stanford.
In recognition of the ancestral lands of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe where our academic institution sits, we offer our grateful appreciation for the opportunity to live and work here and we celebrate the culture and perseverance of the Muwekma Ohlone people, and their strong identity.