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Living minerals: nature, trade, and power in the race for lithium

A sobering investigation of the rush for lithium for electric vehicles, the problematic history of lithium mining, and the consequences for sustainability.\\r\\n\\r\\nConsumers today are buying electric vehicles with lithium-ion batteries motivated by the belief that they are doing good and decarbonizing society. But is sustainable lithium extraction possible? In Living Minerals, Javiera Barandiarán examines the history of lithium mining and uses during the twentieth century, with a specific focus on the two oldest brine-lithium mines: Silver Peak, Nevada, and Salar de Atacama, Chile, where lithium is found as one more element in a liquid mix of salts, minerals, and organisms.\\r\\n\\r\\nFor six decades, mining experts have failed to ask about water usage, about waste or brine leakage, and about the ecosystem impacts in delicate deserts. Instead, they have relied on various fictions about the size of reserves, the fate of leaked brine, or the value of waste in facilitating mine development. These fictions, rooted in brine-lithium’s material qualities, could be sustained thanks to powerful mining memories that celebrated resource nationalism. Unique in its historical and multidimensional approach to minerals and mining, based on the novel Rights of Nature paradigm, and using new archival materials from both Chile and the US, the book argues that decarbonizing society requires that we reckon with these realities—or risk deepening our dependency on an unsustainable mining industry.

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Detail Information
Series Title
Urban and industrial environments
Call Number
669.725 BAR l
Publisher
Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press.,
Collation
xv, 280p. : ill.
Language
English
ISBN/ISSN
9780262385374
Classification
669.725
Content Type
-
Media Type
-
Carrier Type
-
Edition
-
Subject(s)

United States
Supply and demand
Electric vehicles
Chile
West (U.S.)
Lithium mines and mining
Specific Detail Info
-
Statement of Responsibility
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