Coal blasting near Black Mesa, Navajo Reservation. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
A true green transition has to involve a massive project of electrifying transportation and scaling-up renewable energy storage.
That undertaking will require a wide array of inputs including copper, cobalt, and, maybe most critically, the lithium needed for the batteries that make both possible.
However, much to the consternation of environmental activists, extracting those necessary metals and minerals from the ground almost inevitably results in unsustainable water use and chemical pollution, harming local biodiversity and communities.
Thea Riofrancos uses lithium as a test case to work through this tension, exploring the communities and politics at the sites where extraction is happening, in her new book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.
“What does it mean,” Riofrancos asks in the book, “to defend people and the planet from extraction – when others frame this same extraction as necessary to save people and the planet?”
We recently spoke with Riofrancos, an associate professor at Providence College, strategic co-director of the Climate and Community Institute, and fellow at the Transnational Institute, about this question and more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism is out now from W.W. Norton.
Chris Mills Rodrigo: How did you land on Chile as a focus of this book?
Thea Riofrancos: Chile anchors the book, despite the fact that I also traveled to Nevada, Portugal, and other places to look at the politics of lithium. Chile was where I conceptualized the book because I have focused on Latin America as my main kind of region of interest for quite a while now, which is itself the reason that I work on the politics of extraction. It was in Latin America where I learned about the contentious politics and political economy of resource extraction, as well as the growing divides and differences of opinion on the Left — the clashes between those that primarily view the problem as one of ownership and nationalization and those that view it as a problem of ecology and indigenous rights and have a more anti-extractive approach. That’s how I got interested in resource extraction and these contentious politics in the first place.
In parallel, and as a result of my involvement in climate activism and thinking about a just transition and the politics of a Green New Deal in the United States, I started to think about what the implications of a transition here would be for mining and supply chains elsewhere in the world. If we were to undergo a rapid energy transition in the US, where would the lithium and copper come from? And one place that they may very well come from, and have come from, is Chile, which is the world’s number two lithium producer and number one copper producer, both of which are very relevant to the energy transition.
So I decided to do fieldwork in Chile to look at the intersection of mining and the energy transition in a regional context in which people were already thinking about the extractive implications of energy transition technologies.
CMR: What makes Chile an “extractive frontier” and what’s the benefit of understanding mining sites in this framework?
TR: Chile is what the industry would call a “mining powerhouse.” It has enormous copper mines and two mega lithium mines, and there may be more to come. It’s a fascinating place to understand the contentious and polarizing politics of resource extraction, as well as the very volatile economics of it.
Chile has been a major copper producer for many decades now and we have seen major transformations in how it has governed copper, starting with an earlier regime where American multinational companies, British and then American, basically laid claim to Chile’s resources. But beginning in the 1960s, a nationalist orientation in the Chilean government started to reclaim the country’s resource wealth and sovereignty, initially by taking partial ownership of those American mines. That process accelerated under Salvador Allende, who famously fully nationalized Chile’s copper mines in the early 1970s. That fact is not unrelated to the coup and installation of the brutal neoliberal Pinochet dictatorship. The US supported that coup in no small part because of the direct threats to US mining interests that Allende posed.
I want to make a minor point here that’s important for the present. Once he was in power, Pinochet did not privatize those copper mines, which we might have expected him to do as an arch neoliberal. Instead, he not only maintained them as nationalized, but established the state-owned company CODELCO that still manages them. That’s important to note as we see right-wing governments across the world, including in the US, engaging in what we might call state capitalism and blurring the boundary between states, markets, and private firms.
Over time, Pinochet courted more private investment, so while CODELCO continues to operate mines, its role has been diminished, with a growing proportion of privately owned copper mines. Regarding lithium, Pinochet played an important role in opening this sector up to investment by privatizing the company that now owns one of Chile’s major lithium mines. The other company is American, Albemarle, which shows us the enduring US-Chile relationship in the mining sector.
What does this all add up to? We can see big changes in governance, from nationalization to privatization and odd mixtures of the two. Chile is really instructive on that front. We’ve also seen growing socio-ecological consciousness and conflict in these zones of extraction — Chilean people are not quiescent about the impacts of extraction on their livelihoods, on their watersheds, on their indigenous rights. There’s been increasing environmental contention, protests, and pushback in some cases impacting mine operations, troubling financial relationships, and putting the industry on alert that they have to “engage local communities.” Of course, that engagement can be cynical and, in turn, divisive within the community.
What does this tell us about the concept of extractive frontiers? What I learned in the Atacama Desert, where roughly 20 percent of global lithium supplies emanate, is that extractive frontiers are marked by all of the harms, violence, and colonial legacies that we associate with extraction. But they’re not only that, and that’s part of what my book wants to show. Extractive frontiers are designated by powerful people as places where resources are going to come out of the ground, and hopefully people stay quiet — even deploying the framing of terra nullius. However, when we take a grounded perspective and visit those places, if you travel a little away from the mine, there is beautiful biodiversity still worth stewarding and preserving. These places are not empty of people — they are surrounded by indigenous communities that have not only protested the mining but also engaged in alliances with environmentalists. We have interesting coalitions forming around these extractive projects to contest and, in some cases, stall them or change their framework of governance. So extractive frontiers are never only defined by extraction, there’s always more going on, and that’s precisely why people have a stake in whether extraction proceeds or not, and why communities are increasingly feeling empowered to put forth their own demands and visions.
