1 Introduction
A global transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is underway to mitigate climate change (Bridge and Gailing, 2020; Newell and Mulvaney, 2013). Such climate action policies are centred on electrified transportation and energy storage that currently depend on batteries, which is accelerating the
Drawing on collaborative, engaged and policy-oriented research for the Natural Resources Defense Council (nrdc) and the Plurinational Observatory of Andean Salt Flats (opsal), this chapter interrogates how the reliance on brine evaporation as an extraction method for lithium mining has exacerbated conditions of ‘ecological exhaustion’ and undermined Indigenous sovereignty in South America (Babidge et al., 2019).1 Our study is primarily based on ethnographic and historical research conducted in the period 2014–19, including participant observation, document analysis and workshops and interviews with environmental activists, Indigenous leaders, international scientists and policy practitioners in the Puna de Atacama from across Chile, Argentina and Bolivia, with a particular focus on northern Chile (see Figure 10.1).2 Drawing on the interdisciplinary fields of political ecology and science and technology studies, or sts (Bustos-Gallardo, Prieto and Barton, 2015; Goldman, Nadasdy
The urgency of confronting hydrosocial impacts that transcend spatio-temporal scales of life has inspired many environmental movements throughout Latin America to protect their territories from immediate threats of development by extractive industries.4 Here, we consider under what conditions Indigenous and local participation may contribute new models and standards for monitoring ecological exhaustion, and we encourage concrete policy alternatives to lithium brine evaporation—the dominant method of lithium extraction used in the Puna de Atacama. We conducted 41 interviews and organised 13 workshops or public events with Indigenous leaders and those involved in environmental defence and campaigning in the region, from 2014 to 2019. Some community members feel they are benefiting from lithium development; some do not. Some mining operations have the support of local and/or national governments, while others do not. These communities are not monolithic, and relations with the mining industry are complex (Carrasco, 2020; Johnson et al., 2021). Informed by these heterogeneous local experiences with green extractivism, we argue that the intensive use of water and land for lithium mining through brine evaporation has altered life in and around salt flats, and we offer policy recommendations to prevent further social and environmental damage. Before presenting our policy recommendations, in section 2 we provide a historical background of the role of neo-liberal statecraft in resource development, as well as ethnographic and analytical perspectives on the slow violence of lithium brine evaporation and the upstream alterlives of green extractivism in the Puna de Atacama.
Selected salt flats in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile
source: authors, based on brenda j. rojas (blair et al., 2022)
2
2.1 Neo-liberal Statecraft and Resource Development
The Puna de Atacama—a high, arid desert region that spans northern Chile, north-western Argentina and south-western Bolivia—is known for vast, mineral-rich salt flats as well as for wetlands.5 The hypersaline lakes of this
While Chile and Argentina have been exporting lithium for several decades, Bolivia has sizeable reserves that remain largely unexploited due to technical and political hurdles, including higher levels of precipitation, greater concentrations of magnesium and more stringent state intervention (Narins, 2017; Sanchez-Lopez, 2019). Nonetheless, Bolivia has formed new alliances with China, Russia and US entrepreneurs, proposing new global production networks (Bos and Forget, 2021; Perreault, 2020). Argentina’s provincial governments have sought to leverage lithium mining as a source of foreign currency and economic growth with limited oversight (Nacif, 2015). The modern Chilean state, meanwhile, was built on revenue from nitrates and copper from this area, and some Indigenous communities welcomed mining (Carrasco, 2020). However, in the 1980s and 1990s when neo-liberalism took hold under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, there was a rapid development of large-scale mining for gold and copper, as well as for brine-based
Selected salt flats with lithium resources
source: authors, based on brenda j. rojas (blair et al., 2022)
18 Selected Indigenous communities and the four largest mining operations
source: authors, based on brenda j. rojas (blair et al., 2022)
2.2 The Slow Violence of Lithium Brine Evaporation
Bustos Gallardo et al. (2021) point out that the lithium extraction process is more akin to industrial harvesting than mining, presenting a particular set of socioecological contradictions that result in overall water depletion. To remove lithium from brine, operators drill the crust of the salt flat and pump the salty water out from underneath at a rate of up to 1,700 litres per second.6 The subsurface minerals are then distributed into a series of cascading evaporation pools. These vast bodies of mineralized groundwater soak up the desert sun and undergo chemical treatment before separation and transfer to a processing plant to produce lithium carbonate. The evaporation process takes up to 18–24 months, and 95 per cent of water from brine evaporates in the process, exacerbating conditions of ‘ecological exhaustion’ (Babidge et al., 2019). This water depletion is gradual, cumulative, and difficult to represent, as captured by Nixon’s notion of slow violence. It is also enabled by Chile’s 1980 Constitution, together with the Mining and Water Codes, which respectively privatised access and use of minerals and water under the then dictatorship
Resource extraction’s stressors with regard to water availability and quality pose a significant threat to the area’s wildlife. The most immediately impacted life forms are unique species of microorganisms, including diverse archaeal and bacterial communities that are at risk of extinction due to brine evaporation (Cubillos et al., 2018). Scientists are concerned that this may have knock-on effects for more charismatic megafauna higher up the food chain (Dorador et al., 2018a). The collective memory of local residents suggests that flamingos are disappearing, and this perception is supported by scientific modelling that shows a reduction in two of the three local species of flamingo due to lithium mining and declining surface water (Gutiérrez et al., 2022). At the same time, climate change is hastening the retreat of glaciers and the disappearance of lakes from the landscape (Babidge et al., 2019; Garcés, 2011; Garcés and Alvarez, n.d.; Garcés, Alvarez and Marambio, 2017). As a result, the area has been suffering from the slow violence of ‘extractivist droughts’ in an ongoing water crisis (Nixon, 2011; Acuña and Tironi, 2022).
Mining activities overlapping with salt flats, protected wetlands and communities
sources: authors, using brenda j. rojas with data from esri, usgs and noaa (blair et al., 2022)
2.3 The Alterlives of Green Extractivism
Water relations have long been crucial to Atacameño/Lickanantay Indigenous peoples’ efforts to adapt to one of the driest deserts in the world (Neville and Coulthard, 2019; Prieto, 2015a; 2016; Yáñez and Molina, 2011). Water from springs allowed the first human settlements to take root perhaps earlier than 10,000 bce.7 Atacameño/Lickanantay culture and livelihood adapted to the
Development starts in Toconao, and the agriculture in that area begins to decay; craftwork starts to decay; customs start to go down. This monster is called ‘mining with sqm or Albemarle’. It transforms the thoughts and way of life of Native people, in a way that causes division. They tell us lithium is clean. We can offer a way of life. But unfortunately, they’re winning over there, and we’re losing over here. They’re drying up our waters. They’re drying up the conscience we’re lacking.10
When we want to use water for our family gardens and see the winemakers are using the water to fill their accumulation tanks, we prefer to wait until the water is back in the canals just to avoid more arguments among farmers. So we don’t ask in the WhatsApp group and we instead come every 30 minutes to check it out because this little trickle of water is not enough for us to irrigate our parcels. Anyway, it’s better to avoid speaking of sqm or about the vineyards out loud because someone can hear us and that will cause us more problems.12
In fact, we have told the state: let’s put together a working group through which we can first speed up the handing over of lands, as per the constitutional acknowledgment of our Native people. And then let’s take a look at different ideas or interests that may exist regarding the law. But today, ideally, the most important things are those two things I just mentioned. Also much more important is to find solutions for issues as basic and tangible as drinking water, sewage, electricity, accessibility. I mean, right in the middle of the 21st century, a country that has come out to say they’re at the threshold of development, of being a ‘developed country’, still has communities that lack these types of services. That speaks very poorly of an administration. And what’s worse, the wealth in which the state lives, the wealth that the state has, which sustains the economy and the economic power of this country, comes precisely out of these communities
. . .Chile, unfortunately, is a country that’s still unable to see its Native people.14
In sum, green extractivism has not only exacerbated ecological exhaustion, it has also limited Indigenous peoples’ access to basic necessities and contributed to their erasure due to uneven development in the Puna de Atacama. In addition to such dispossession, mining is also often associated with toxic contamination (Hecht, 2012; Voyles, 2015). Murphy developed the concept of alterlives from their Indigenous feminist perspective, to re-conceptualise chemical pollution’s negative impacts in the built environment. Yet there remains a need to develop ‘alter-concepts of care and responsibility’ (Murphy, 2017, 496) that grapple with other expansive problems across the battery chemical supply chain: from water depletion, land use and underdevelopment at extraction sites to market demand in the global North and China, where the social and ecological costs of individual car ownership may fall only marginally if electric vehicles replace internal combustion engines (Marx, 2022). In what follows, we take ‘alterlife as a prompt’ (Murphy, 2017, 497) and propose policy recommendations for alternatives that are designed to protect water and regenerate more just, sustainable and equitable conditions of living beyond green extractivism.
3 Policy Recommendations to Support Alterlife in Andean Salt Flats and Wetlands15
Lithium-ion batteries may be, in the short and medium term, a critical component of the global strategy to fight climate change and mitigate air pollution by electrifying vehicles and providing storage for intermittent renewable energy (Sanderson, 2022). Yet the ecosystems that contain lithium resources—and the humans and non-humans that live in them—should not be sacrificed to extract this material. Fortunately, there are several ways in which actors throughout the lithium-ion battery supply chain can mitigate or eliminate negative impacts of lithium mining in the Puna de Atacama and other environments (Greim, Solomon and Breyer, 2020).
3.1
– ilo 169,
– undrip,
– The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (undrop), and
– The Escazú Regional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters in Latin America and the Caribbean.
ilo 169 has already been ratified and in force in Chile since 2009, and Chile’s President, Gabriel Boric, signed Escazú on March 18, 2022. Both should henceforth apply to all new mining projects and, ideally, apply retroactively to existing operations. In addition, while state agencies and corporations alike often ignore or only inconsistently adopt them, Indigenous-led protocols such as the Kachi Yupi Protocol, which applies in Salinas Grandes, Argentina, should be benchmarks for both governments and companies.16 This includes recognising communities’ rights to say no to mining proposals and instead continue making a living through established local economies, such as salt extraction, livestock raising and tourism.
3.2 Strengthen Environmental Standards to Reflect Local Demands and Needs
In addition to deeper engagement with Indigenous communities, mining activities should respect stronger environmental standards. Many organisations and institutions have produced recommendations that could be used
3.3 Build Collaborative Monitoring Practices Based on Indigenous Knowledge and Science
The lithium sector has applied conventional business practices, including flawed Western science-based impact agreements that ignore the millennia of experience gained by communities that have deep knowledge of local ecology (Li, 2015; Lawrence and Kløcker Larsen, 2017; Perreault, 2020). Companies and governments should prioritise learning from local Indigenous peoples and earnestly centre that knowledge at the heart of their practices. Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems may help with environmental monitoring, building local food production, and safeguarding biodiversity; for example, ethnobiological data on ancestral knowledge of watering sites for livestock herds may help identify monitoring locations and inform models of the area’s complex hydrogeological landscape (Geralda Armstrong and McAlvay, 2019). There are several models of Indigenous-led land-use planning, climate adaptation and environmental management to follow when seeking to protect biodiverse areas, and Indigenous knowledge and science may be complementary to the co-management of resources by local communities and governments (Wang et al., 2016; Whyte, 2013).
3.4
According to unesco’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (comest), ‘When human activities may lead to morally unacceptable harm that is scientifically plausible but uncertain, actions shall be taken to avoid or diminish that harm’ (unesco, 2005, 14). This is known as the precautionary principle. Because brine evaporation is thought to exacerbate ecological exhaustion and alter life in the Puna de Atacama, and because the actors responsible for this activity have failed to disclose clear evidence establishing that it does not do so, precautionary measures should be taken. The burden of proof is on the industry to show definitively that water and life are not threatened by brine evaporation, and until it has done so, it is in the public interest to cease this activity in the Puna de Atacama. Following demands from the cpa, as well as the non-binding verdict of the International Rights of Nature Tribunal (2020), a moratorium should be enforced on lithium mining through brine evaporation in the Puna de Atacama.
3.5 Encourage Battery Recycling and Long-Term Planning for Alternative Transportation
At the international level, governments and institutions should encourage and invest in reducing the demand for minerals and implement alternative ways of obtaining lithium—other than onshoring more conventional mining to the global North or over-relying on direct lithium extraction technologies, for these approaches may risk increasing water use and waste streams (Riofrancos, 2022). Governments may engage in such efforts through educational programmes, infrastructure development, and industrial policy (e.g. cradle-to-cradle incentives to reconvert gas cars or establish battery recycling programmes). Several circular economy strategies and international standards may lengthen the life duration and life cycle of a lithium-ion battery or its components (Standridge and Corneal, 2014; Mulvaney et al., 2021). Once a lithium-ion car battery can no longer hold a sufficient charge to power a vehicle, it can still serve as an energy storage element in buildings. Recycling the pure chemical lithium contained in old batteries can reduce the need to mine more new materials (Xiong, Ji and Ma, 2020). Recent research for Earthworks found that recycling electric vehicle batteries at the end of their useful life can reduce primary demand for lithium by as much as 25 per cent, for cobalt and nickel by 35 per cent, and for copper by 55 per cent (Dominish et al., 2021). Recycling facilities are not yet focused on recovering the full range of materials in lithium-ion batteries (Gaines, Richa and Spangenberger, 2018). However, this could change with regulation and policy, as has been observed with lead acid batteries: recycling rates for these have
Pressure to protect the alterlives of extractivism and reduce the long-term costs of lithium mining on salt flats and wetlands should come from downstream in the battery supply chain, including from battery manufacturers and vehicle makers, as well as from policymakers and urban and regional planners. Governments and third parties should support the corporate efforts of lithium purchasers to exert direct pressure on mining companies without letting certification standards amount to greenwashing. Policymakers, private companies, and citizens can help push forward a range of complementary strategies, including: (1) planning and policy tools to allow greater access to public transportation, bicycling, and walking to reduce long-term dependency on single-passenger vehicles; (2) retrofitting or building affordable, energy-efficient, regenerative homes and buildings for all; (3) investing in and adopting long-duration methods of renewable energy storage (e.g. gravity-based or iron flow) that minimise extraction and maximise efficiency over time. Such actions to reduce downstream reliance on lithium-ion batteries may play a critical role in supporting the regeneration of alterlife at extraction sites farther upstream in the global value chain.
4 Conclusion
Green extractivism threatens biodiverse life forms across multiple scales in the Puna de Atacama (Bonelli and Dorador, 2021; Flexer, Baspineiro and Galli, 2018; Gutiérrez et al., 2022). The slow violence of lithium brine evaporation, compounded by over-exploitation of water resources for copper mining, has contributed to conditions of ecological exhaustion. As Murphy suggests, we must go beyond conventional biological categories that separate non-human organisms from individual bodies, and instead ‘situate life as a kind of varied
At Chile’s Atacama salt flat and nationwide, activists and advocates have been calling for more just, sustainable and equitable mining policies, including by calls for constitutional reform (Barandiarán, 2021). In a referendum held on September 4, 2022 in Chile, 62 per cent of voters rejected a new Constitution drafted by a democratically elected Constitutional Convention. With regard to the environment, this result postponed potentially transformative changes, and environmental activists are adjusting their work and strategies accordingly. For many advocates—including we, the authors—the proposed Constitution would have deepened democracy due to the process that brought it, and its content, about.
The Constitutional Convention commenced under the presidency of Dr Elisa Loncon, an Indigenous Mapuche linguist, with regional constituent representation of Antofagasta by Dr Cristina Dorador, a microbiologist with expertise in the biodiversity of salt flats. Dr Dorador joined opsal in launching the Plurinational Initiative for the Valorisation and Protection of Andean Salt Flats and Wetlands, a community-based participatory project that forms the basis for a bill to recognise the importance of defending these ecosystems against further industrial extraction. According to Dr Dorador, ‘The north of Chile has been viewed by the country as an exploitable territory because “there is no life there.” Deconstructing that image implies profound changes. The extraction of lithium is like taking the soul out of the salt flats’ (opsal, 2021). To shift the narrative and raise awareness of overlooked alterlives at extraction sites, Dorador proposed and then led the Commission of Systems of Knowledges, Cultures, and Science—one of seven Commissions within the Constitutional Convention—which introduced articles that promoted epistemic justice, ethics in science, and integration of local knowledge into decision-making. Drawing on recent constitutional reforms in Bolivia and Ecuador, the Constitution would, if accepted, have established Chile as a plurinational, intercultural and ecological state, one that protects both human rights and the rights of nature (Barandiarán et al., 2022; Blair and Balcázar, 2022; Gudynas,
In this study, ‘exhaustion’ is an emic term from Chilean environmental law and policy declaring that a basin does not have enough surface water to allow additional water rights to be granted. For an exploration of exhaustion from critical Western philosophical perspectives on energy, see Toscano (2018).
The Puna de Atacama is a geographical term defined by the characteristics of the ecoregion such as its flora, fauna, elevation and geology (Matteucci, 2012). In contrast to the Puna, the term ‘Lithium Triangle’ just distils the region to its extractive potential (Jerez Henríquez, 2018).
We thank Philippe Le Billon for pointing out this distinction between Murphy’s use of the concept to refer to exposures to chemicals in buildings and its use to refer to alteration of water-and landscapes by extraction.
See Acosta (2017); Acuña and Tironi (2022); Blair (2021); Del Bene, Scheidel and Temper (2018); Gudynas (2018); Hernando-Arrese and Tironi (2019); Hommes et al. (2019); Hoogesteger and Verzijl (2015); Li (2015); Lins Ribeiro (1994); Riofrancos (2017); Svampa (2013); Swyngedouw (2004).
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Global Assessment has identified wetlands as the world’s most threatened ecosystems (ipbes, 2019). Many of the lagoons in this area host migratory and native wildlife, and several are already designated as Ramsar Wetlands of International Importance or nature reserves and/or have some sort of national protected status.
This rate is for sqm (Heubl, 2019). In 2016, Albemarle gained approval to increase brine pumping from 142 to 442 litres per second.
The R.P. Gustavo Le Paige Archaeological Museum in San Pedro states that archaeologists have found arrowheads or ‘colas de pescado’ for hunting large animals that have been extinct for 12,500 years. See also unesco (1998).
Cecilia Jamasmie, “Chile sues bhp, Albemarle, Antofagasta over water use,” Mining.com, April 8, 2022
Espíndola is a member of the Atacameño/Lickanantay Community of Toconao, the Association of Irrigators and Farmers of Quebrada de Soncor, and opsal.
Rudecindo Christian Espíndola, ‘Proyecto Paloma’, Presentation at 2019 workshop, Fundación Tantí, opsal, San Pedro de Atacama, transcribed by Bianca Delgado and translated by Amanda Maxwell and Language Divas.
Vino criollo is a local wine produced in Toconao with grapes introduced by the church during the Spanish colonisation for use during Catholic mass. It is also used during other celebrations and ritual processes, such as carnival or the San Lucas celebration.
Rudecindo Espíndola, from the fieldnotes of Ramón Balcázar M., 2021.
In 2019, Chile’s Superintendency of Environment (sma) approved sqm’s usd 25 million compliance plan for the expansion of its operations, but later that year the cpa filed a successful lawsuit in a regional court that paused the approval process due to the ‘particular fragility’ of the Atacama salt flat (Sherwood, 2020a). In 2020, the sma decided instead to develop its own comprehensive management plan, which would assess impacts of all four of the mega mining projects at the Atacama salt flat. Following its successful litigation campaign, the cpa went further, demanding that sqm’s environmental permits be revoked (Sherwood, 2020b).
James J. A. Blair, personal communication with Sergio Cubillos, 2019, transcribed by Bianca Delgado and translated by Amanda Maxwell and Language Divas.
This recommendations section is adapted with permission from Blair et al., 2022.
For example, see Comunidades de la Cuenca de Salinas Grandes y Laguna de Guayatayoc (2015); Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (2004); and Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (2011).
See, for example, 116th Congress, 2nd session, S. 3356: To support the Reuse and Recycling of Batteries and Critical Minerals, and for Other Purposes, February 27, 2020,
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