A passage from the novel Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor reads:
La Matosa was slowly dotted once more with shacks and shanties raised on the bones of those who’d been crushed under the hillside; repopulated by outsiders, most of them lured by the promise of work, the construction of the new highway that was to run right through Villa and connect both the port and the capital to the recently discovered oil wells north of town, up in Palogacho, enough work for fondas and food stalls to start cropping up, and in time even cantinas, guest houses, knocking shops and strip clubs where the drivers, the travelling tradesmen and the day labourers would stop to take a moment from the monotony of that road flanked on either side by cane fields, cane and pastures and reeds filling every inch of land for miles and miles, in every direction, from the very edge of the tarmac to the low slopes of the sierra to the west, or running eastward to the coast, to its eternally raging waters. (2017: 25)
When the novel won the 2019 German International Literature Award, the jury called it “the novel of poverty in twenty-first-century global capitalism” (HKW 2019). If poverty feels central to this novel, I believe it is because it lays out the political economy of oil from the perspective of a site of extraction, exploring the violent and exploitative labour and gender relations that orbit and enable the production of the fuel of 20th-century capitalism. In other words, it is not poverty but rather capitalism in its oil-powered dimension that might be considered central, and poverty part of its social world.
In this post, I want to use a similar approach to explore lithium, an essential component of lithium-ion batteries, which have been called “the backbone or ‘holy grail’ of the transition toward a clean energy and low-carbon emission economy” (Heredia & Allende 2019). My goal is not to focus on lithium itself but rather on the social relations, connections, and conflicts that sustain and are set in motion by its existence as a central element in the technical infrastructures of clean energy storage—a literal power of capitalism in its green momentum.
By briefly going over its social biography (an approach found at its best in works like Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power), I hope to offer an example of ways in which anthropology can interrogate the magic tricks and technofixes that have come into existence in the context of global cooperation for climate change mitigation.
Coming into Being
Lithium is not a scarce element. It is found worldwide in volcanic rocks and below salt lakes (salares). Its largest concentrations are in Australia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and the “Lithium Triangle” of Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, which alone holds over 75% of known reserves (Ahmad 2020). In Australia and the DRC, pegmatites are mined using the open pit system, then crushed and treated to remove other minerals and obtain spodumene, which is later processed to obtain lithium. In the Lithium Triangle, holes are drilled in the crust of salares (salt flats) to pump brine—water with a high concentration of salts—from beneath. The brine is then put to evaporate in ponds under the sun and the resulting salt mix is exported for further processing into pure lithium.
Although lithium has been known since 1817 and used as a mood stabiliser throughout the last century, its importance has surged due to global climate concerns. Alongside cobalt, it is a key component of rechargeable and fast-charging lithium-ion batteries, which can store large amounts of energy from non-fossil-fuel sources such as the sun, the sea, and the wind. These batteries are especially attractive for the Electric Vehicle (EV) industry.
At the crossroads of a fossil-fuel-dominated model and the push for clean energy, the efforts to electrify and decarbonise energy-consuming machines, engines, and mechanisms have intensified. As Jens Kersten points out, capitalism “is not blind to climate change or to the social and ecological ‘issues’ that surround it; rather, it wants to be part of their ‘solution’” (2013: 43). This context has been shaped by collaborative agreements and initiatives undertaken between governments, NGOs, universities, and research institutions—a “global social contract” in the joint and market-driven fight against climate change explicitly set in motion by the Paris Agreement of 2015, signed by 195 countries, which established a goal of a 50% reduction of greenhouse emissions by 2030.
China leads EV production and consumption, producing around 80% of the world’s lithium-ion batteries (Sanders 2022). It has implemented a series of subsidies and benefits for EV owners to incentivise the transition to electromobility. Countries like the Netherlands, France, and Germany plan to ban combustion engine vehicles soon. The largest battery manufacturer in the world—Tesla’s Gigafactory—is based in the US, and American mining companies such as Albemarle control significant portions of lithium extraction worldwide. U.S. government reports have highlighted the need to “collaborate with Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile in the fight against climate change,” given “both the importance of lithium for the development of clean energy technologies and the vast quantity of commercially viable lithium reserves in the Lithium Triangle” (Berg & Sady-Kennedy 2021).
Identity Conflicts
Lithium extraction, however, is far from clean. Open pit mining, as done in DRC, degrades soil, produces toxic waste, pollutes water, and has historically involved exploitative and dangerous labour practices (Niarchos 2021).
In South America’s Lithium Triangle, brine extraction is water intensive, threatening the already scarce water supply in the Atacama region and deeply impacting Indigenous communities. Anthropologist Cristóbal Bonelli and microbiologist Cristina Dorador (2021) have referred to the disruption of salares by lithium extraction as “micro-disasters,” highlighting how these activities disturb the microbiological relationships between humans and ecosystems, and the interdependence between human and non-human life.
In Chile, conflicts between the State, lithium companies, and Indigenous communities centre on the rights to mine and use water and land. While agreements like the ILO Convention 169 exist, brine is defined legally as a mining resource and not as a body of water. This legal framing dismisses the hydrosocial complexities of salares and their importance as a water source for the Indigenous people living in those areas. Communities defend salt lakes as territories of water, vital for life, while companies insist that “brine is unusable for everything else but to be deposited and evaporated to obtain the minerals it contains” (Interview with manager of Albemarle lithium company, in Jeréz, Garcés & Torres 2021).
These differing understandings of brine reflect diverging valuations of the substance itself. As Appadurai argues, value is “politically mediated by individual and institutional strategies” (1986: 12). For companies, brine is a source of lithium—part of a narrative of a future where environmental damage is relegated to the past. For people, brine is a source of water, essential to life in the present.
As a commodity within the global green energy market, lithium becomes disconnected from its extractive origins and its social relations of production. Being a critical material for the transition from petro-capitalism to non-fossil capitalism—the first explicitly ecologically damaging and predatory, and the second imagined as clean and sustainable—lithium and other critical materials like cobalt carry unresolved tensions, frictions, and paradoxes that give rise, I believe, to magic tools. As a representative from Albermarle put it, “Each kilogram of lithium that is produced enables orders of magnitudes of avoided greenhouse emissions through green miles driven by electric vehicles” (Palmer 2021). In this framing, the only human contribution to climate change mitigation is buying and driving an EV, and the rest is magic.
Manono Lithium Tin Project in DRC. Photo by Christopher Halloran via Shutterstock
Manono Extension Project Overview in DRC. Image by AVZ minerals.
Magic Tricks
In their ethnographic study of wind farms in Oaxaca, Mexico, Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer argue that clean energy developments in Indigenous territories, given the lack of proper consultation and the increasing risk of displacement for people living there, could legitimise resource exploitation and extractivism under the guise of climate change mitigation, which could result in “a form of climatological imperialism in which the global South is tasked with rehabilitating the (much more historically contaminative) global North” (2016: 218). Similarly, lithium extraction has been described as “green extractivism,” where extractive practices performed in the context of climate change mitigation end up “transferring the environmental cost of zero-carbon lifestyles of the Global North to the ecologies of the Global South” (Jeréz, Garcés, & Torres, 2021: 3).
Ultimately, the production of new energy forms remains entangled in the political and economic structures and infrastructures of colonial and carbon modernity, as Timothy Mitchell called the era of oil-powered capitalism and democracy (Mitchell 2011). This raises questions such as those posed by the Mexican Network of People Affected by Mining (REMA):
The hegemonic proposal built to face the socioecological crisis produced by the capitalist system tries to replace fossil energy matrix with other sources of energy, without touching the model of accumulation, exploitation, and consumption that this model sustains. They propose a transition where the winner is the capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal system that causes this same crisis; we demand a socioecological reformulation that has at its core the following question: energy for what, and for whom? (REMA n.d.).
More than only questions, these entanglements usually lead to violent outcomes. Across Latin America, land defence in Indigenous territories, especially when facing state-backed infrastructural projects, is known to be a deadly job (Galarraga, Hernández & Maldonado 2022; Gudynas 2009).
These tensions reveal that part of producing the future of green energy involves detaching its machinery from the social relations that actually make it possible. Lithium and cobalt are a token, a medium that serves to draw the contours of an energy model that overcomes its dependence on fossil fuels, but that carries deeply ingrained in it the conflicts that sustain energy transition.
Returning to the start of this post, I’ve tried to sketch an initial social biography of lithium, suggesting that materials essential to the energy transition offer a rich site for anthropological study. With a political economy and a social biography approach to mining and minerals, we can trace their journeys and uncover the social relations, labour, and narratives that make the transition appear smooth and abstract. Projects like Worlds of Lithium are a big inspiration. Much like a geologist tracing the journey of a rock, examining these materials closely, learning their intimate stories, and building their social histories allows for engagement with the magic tricks that make our futures seem very much like a smooth and effortless continuation of our present.
References
Ahmad, S. (2020). ‘The Lithium Triangle: where Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia meet’, Harvard International Review, 15 January.
Appadurai, A. (1986). The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Berg, R & Sady-Kennedy, A. (2021). ‘South America’s lithium triangle: Opportunities for the Biden administration’, Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Bonelli, C. & Dorador, C. (2021). ‘Endangered salares: micro disasters in Northern Chile’, Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology, and Society, 4(1).
Boyer, D. (2019). Energopolitics. Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Galarraga, N., Hernández, J., & Maldonado, C. (2022). ‘Un continente mortal para los defensores de la tierra’, El País, 18 June.
Gudynas, E. (2009). ‘Diez tesis urgentes sobre el nuevo extractivismo’, in Extractivismo, política y sociedad. Quito: Centro Andino de Acción Popular & Centro LatinoAmericano de Ecología Social.
Heredia, F. & Allende, J. M. (2019). ‘Battery minerals: a view on lithium brine projects in Latin America’, Lexocology GTDT Practice Guide to Mining.
HKW (2019). ‘Prize for Contemporary Literature in Translation 2019’
Howe, C. & Boyer, D. (2016). ‘Aeolian extractivisim and community wind in southern Mexico’, Public Culture, 28(2): 215-235.
Howe, C. (2019). Ecologics. Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Jeréz, B., Garcés, I., & Torres, R. (2021). ‘Lithium extractivism and water injustices in the Salar de Atacama, Chile: The colonial shadow of green electromobility’, Political Geography, 87.
Kersten, J. (2013). ‘A new political anthropology for the Anthropocene?’, RCC Perspectives, 3: 39-56.
Melchor, F. (2017). Temporada de huracanes. CDMX: Random House. English translation by Sophie Hughes, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Mintz, S. (1986). Sweetness and Power. The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin.
Mitchell, T. (2011). Carbon Democracy. Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso.
Niarchos, N. (2021). ‘The dark side of Congo’s cobalt rush’, The New Yorker, 24 May.
Palmer, C. (2021). ‘Can Chile avoid resource curse from lithium?’, Reuters Events, 16 March.
REMA (n.d). ‘Minería y transición energética capitalista’.
Sanders, R. (2022). ‘The uncertain politics of South American lithium’, The National Interest.
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