Green Extractivism: Can Our Deserts Survive Our Thirst for Lithium?
High & Dry surveys the legacy of human enterprise in the California desert and beyond. Together, writer Jack Eidt and photographer Osceola Refetoff document human activity, past and present, in the context of future development.
According to South American Andean tradition, Yakana, the cosmological mother of all llamas, roams the sky from her kingdom in the Milky Way, conceived as Mayu, a celestial river. In the spirit of documenting the global push for sources of lithium to power a “green” energy revolution, we traveled to the highlands of the Atacama Desert to compare the environmental impacts on fragile ecosystems with similar operations underway at Southern California’s Salton Sea.
High in the Altiplano, we observed via telescope a dark sky figure with a long neck and two glowing eyes. Yakana is said to descend from the firmament to drink from the rare springs of these arid lands. Anyone who might encounter this cosmological llama would have good luck raising livestock in the desert.
In our ancestral Indigenous culture, everything connects and acts together. Nature does not have a fragmented disposition, but scientists and modern people prefer to think the environmental functions are not connected to everything else. We disagree. What one sees here in our territory, we have metallic and non-metallic mining, which would be copper and lithium. Both unfortunately work with water. For us, water is puri in our language, which is a spirit that irrigates Mother Earth. When we lose our water, it disrupts everything.— Sonia Ramos Chocobar, Atacameño/Lickanantay community activist and water defender
Sonia Ramos spoke with us about the importance of underground springs, and survival through herd farming in one of the most arid environments in the world. We interviewed her in the oasis town of San Pedro de Atacama, whose existence depends on water mostly unseen on the surface of this wild land. Lithium mining is changing that balance.
A silvery-white metal that can ignite or explode when combined with water, lithium is essential to our digital world in lithium-ion batteries and what we call the “green” economy. It is considered an “energy transition mineral” for mitigating climate change by allowing for the displacement of carbon-intensive fossil fuel burning in favor of electric vehicles, smart devices, and renewable power plants.
Lithium is produced around the world in three ways. There’s conventional open pit mining in Australia and proposed in Nevada, brine evaporation in the Atacama Plateau of Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina, and a new process called Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE). The last is proposed for the Salton Sea in our Southern California desert, one of the largest known lithium deposits.
Last year, we published a High & Dry dispatch about the White-Gold Rush at the Salton Sea. Many, in fact, assert that the yet unproven and water-intensive DLE process is environmentally friendly compared to what’s happening in Chile. Yet both places share water scarcity in common.
The implications for water, land, and communities from open pit mining in Australia and Nevada are significant. For brine evaporation in the Atacama Plateau, however, the mining companies assert that it does not impact freshwater supplies. Many scientists disagree. And though DLE claims to avoid the pitfalls of the other two processes, it presents many potential impacts to the environment.
We are left with the question in this rush to transition to “green” energy: Can we sustainably extract lithium while protecting communities and their ecosystems?
The Indigenous Atacameño (also known as Lickanantay) culture in Northern Chile has adapted to the hostile high-desert environment through growing maize, quinoa, alfalfa, and fruit as well as herding llamas and other livestock. They depend upon water deposited in irrigation channels, in a method known as "sowing water." But the main reservoir of above ground lagoons and underground water is embedded in massive salt flat ecosystems called salares that are unique to the region and have become popular tourist attractions in the Andean highlands around San Pedro de Atacama.
The local people are split on whether it is a blessing or curse that lithium mining companies, Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile (SQM) and Albemarle, operate in the region of 18 Atacameño/Lickanantay communities. They extract a massive amount of brine per year from aquifers beneath the desert and evaporate it in surface ponds. Brine is a mixture of salt and water. Though mining laws in Chile consider it a mineral, critical scholars have backed Sonia Ramos’s perspective by referring to it as "water mining." The subsurface minerals emerge through a series of cascading evaporation pools carved on top of the salt flats, before separation and transfer to processing plants.
I feel sorry for salt flats The spring that emerges from the earth, The chachacoma that scents the twilight, The vicuña that connects solitudes.-- Cristina Dorador, Chilean microbiologist and author of Amor Microbiano (2024)
Adjacent to the Cosmological Llama Yakana along the Milky Way sky-river, the Andean world recognizes as a symbol the constellation of the Southern Cross, since ancient times called Chakana in the Quechua language. It is a complex graphical representation of the Three Worlds of their cosmovision: the celestial, the Mother-Earthly or Pachamama, and the lower, or inner world of mystery. Sonia Ramos wanted to make sure we understood that the world below is an ecosystem too.
Sonia has been working closely with prominent scientists from Antofagasta, the main city in the region. One of them, Dr. Cristina Dorador, is a Microbial Ecologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Biotechnology at the University of Antofagasta. She noted that salares are specialized places where bacterial microorganisms have formed structures over literally billions of years. Thus, lithium brine is not a renewable resource. We met her in her office in Antofagasta. Poring over maps of the Atacama and photos of cyanobacteria and microbial mats, she told us:
"The problem now with the lithium brine extraction is that they are accelerating depletion in just a couple of decades of an aquifer connected to the fresh water for local communities. This resource that could maybe last for a thousand years, is now being consumed in very short human time."
How do we rectify the imbalance between green energy minerals and water? We met closer to home with Dr. James J. A. Blair, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cal Poly Pomona, who has done research and collaboration on lithium mining in both the Salton Sea and Chile. In a recent paper he and his co-authors advocate for a framework of community engagement and consultation. Inevitable environmental degradation can be addressed through the implementation of community benefits agreements to establish a just water-energy transition.
In the Atacama, both SQM and Albemarle have reached accords with local stakeholders to mitigate some of the complaints. The deals have granted these groups a significant share of companies’ sales as direct payments. Yet there is disagreement within the community, despite a strong base of support — and dependence — on the mining economy. In fact, while mining is a way of life for many in the Atacama, the devil, as they say, is in the details.
Last year, we experienced the embodiment of this dichotomy at the major socio-religious festival at La Tirana. Communities of mine workers send troupes of performers that include dancers clad as roaming devils who could be interpreted as representing the difficulties of survival in the desert.
In that spirit, the same Council of Atacameño Peoples who negotiated compacts, filed a complaint in October 2024 against the mining companies operating in the Atacama Salt Flat. They accused them of causing the land to sink from over-pumping around their extraction wells. The brine, essentially fossil water, comes from only a few meters below the surface.
All payments aside, the Atacama Desert has shown what permanent damage past mining over the centuries has wrought on the landscape. It started with silver mining, then saltpeter, later copper, and now lithium. The collapsed economy built around saltpeter, also known as nitrate fertilizer, has left almost 200 ghost towns and abandoned mining outposts across the desert. Ingrid Garcés, another scientist we talked to in Antofagasta called them, "abandoned industrial saltpeter cemeteries." In the driest desert on Earth, these scars endure for generations.
Dr. Garcés teaches in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Mineral Processing at the University of Antofagasta and works with the Native communities including Sonia Ramos. She summed up the impacts of lithium water mining to the salares by saying, "Similar to the human body, at a young age, the body is taut, beautiful, but over time, water dehydrates, the skin ages, wrinkles, and when it's old, it's already damaged inside, the organs are damaged."
Thus the "Green Extractivism" push to supplant climate-haywiring-fossil-fuels has looked to California’s Salton Sea as an "environmentally superior" alternative. The intention is to scale up the DLE process from geothermal brine, which is plentiful one mile underground at the existing electricity generating plants located on the southeast shore. This contrasts with the shallow brine reservoirs extracted from in the Atacama.
The Hell's Kitchen 1 plant is the first of as many as seven planned to extract from an underground lithium brine reserve by the company Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR). It is billed as the world's first "fully integrated" lithium and renewable power production facility. By extracting boiling, mineral-rich brine, the plant would generate steam power, then separate raw lithium out of the waste stream, and produce a massive amount of commercial-grade lithium hydroxide each year. Enough for approximately 415,000 electric vehicle batteries.
Two groups, Comite Civico del Valle (CCV) and Earthworks, charged in a suit that Imperial County violated environmental laws by approving a project that failed to adequately analyze and alleviate impacts, including possible air pollution, hazardous waste, and impacts to diminishing county water supply. A judge dismissed their suit and they quickly filed an appeal. A representative from CTR egregiously dismissed them recently as a “self-interest group” on a public webinar.
Therefore, the question remains for the “Lithium Valley” planning efforts: how can the mining industry and the community work together for a legally binding Community Benefits Agreement that ensures proper mitigation of outstanding environmental and social impacts? Christian Torres, Director of Climate Equity and Resilience for CCV, pointed to how water impact fees based on usage could fund mitigation programs like restoration of the Salton Sea from the air pollution and ecological effects. The important thing to remember, going back to Dr. Blair’s research, is that a just water-energy transition depends upon collaboration, consultation, and legally binding financial agreements with the community.
Understanding the impacts of the green extractivist model points to the necessity to source lithium and other minerals from existing materials. One example is to require recycling of electric vehicle batteries, which has the potential to reduce demand for mined lithium by at least 25%. We met with a public-private company in Chile called Lithium I+D+i doing ground-breaking research on using microbes from the salares to recycle batteries.
Moreover, scientists in China have found a hack to extend lithium battery lifetime to 18 years by injecting a special compound that replenishes the lithium ions. The U.S. could benefit by collaborating with these important innovations.
And let’s ensure we all step up and do our part for the environment. Not necessarily by buying a Tesla, but by reducing your own carbon footprint, consuming less, taking public transit, walking, and biking, living a life of efficiency and conservation. This lithium rush will continue in both California and Chile, and water scarcity from the drying of our deserts and over-pumping of aquifers must be regulated. Yet by reducing, reusing, and living in our own circular economy, we as individuals can make a difference and feel part of the solution.
In the Atacama Desert we experienced geoglyphs, carved lines and shapes of cosmological llamas and star-beings etched into the vast mountainsides for centuries, before even the Inca People. Considered by some as ley lines, lines of pre-planned arrangement, visible only from a great distance, connected with upper world equinoxes and solstices. Sonia Ramos and the Atacameños challenge our drive for Green Extractivism by invoking the inter-connections between underground springs, survival of the people and the wilds of our Pachamama, and the astral oversight of Yakana looking out for us from the celestial river.
Chief Seattle, a leader of the Duwamish and Suquamish tribes in the Pacific Northwest, summed it up in 1854 when he said: “If we do not own the freshness of the air and sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?” Survival for all of us will come from stewarding these life-giving forces for tomorrow, while finding ways to power only what green devices we absolutely need with recycled lithium for many tomorrows to come.
We wish to thank the people of the SACO Cultural Corporation in Antofagasta for their essential assistance in coordinating our investigations, Victor Loyola, our invaluable guide to the María Elena region, Veronica Moreno of Fundacion La Tintorera, astroturismo guide José Ardiles, and curator Rodolfo Andaur. High & Dry returns to the Chile this summer to participate in the SACO Contemporary Art Biennial and to continue our explorations of the unique cultural and ecological communities that flourish in the Antofagasta region.
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