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.
Consumers 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 20th 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.
For 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 multi-dimensional approach to minerals and mining, based on the novel Rights of Nature paradigm, and the use of new archival materials from both Chile and the U.S., the book argues that decarbonizing society requires that we reckon with these realities—or risk deepening our dependency on an unsustainable mining industry.
Javiera Barandiaran: author bio
Praise:
"Lithium appears to offer us the hope of a renewable future. This powerful book shows us how much our thinking about the history and life of minerals must change for that hope to survive."
~Timothy Mitchell, author of Carbon Democracy
"Drawing on deep historical work, Living Minerals proposes a new paradigm for approaching the world’s resources in a time of planetary crisis: Rather than resource nationalism, we should understand minerals as parts of the ecosystems under threat of extinction. Brilliant!"
~Gabrielle Hecht, author of Residual Governance and Being Nuclear
"Telling the history of lithium mining in the US and Chile, this book reexamines nationalist memories of mining glory and growth, opening up the imagination to post-extractivist, post-growth alternatives."
~Giorgos Kallis, Professor, Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies and the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona
Media -- Podcasts:
Listen to the conversation with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer on their Cultures of Energy podcast – ep. #242: Living Minerals. We welcome Javiera Barandiarán to the podcast to talk about her new book, Living Minerals: Nature, Trade, and Power in the Race for Lithium (MIT Press, 2026), and what Javiera loves about the element of lithium. We discuss lithium’s futurity and multiplicity, why Javiera thinks it’s wrong to think about lithium as a single thing. From there, we talk about lithium’s role in nuclear fusion, what rights of nature minerals should enjoy, and why so many people believe minerals create wealth
EcoJustice Radio 350.org: Living Minerals of Chile’s Atacama: Ecosystems vs. Mining – Ep. 268. In this episode, we welcome Javiera Barandiarán, Associate Professor in Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a persistent advocate for environmental justice, as she shares insights from her research regarding the Puna de Atacama of Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina.
Rising Tides Episode 13: Rethinking Climate Action and Lithium Mining. In this episode, Ishana Wokhlu talks with Dr. Javiera Barandiarán about how dominant approaches to climate change often ignore justice, deepen existing inequalities, and rely on solutions that shift environmental harm rather than eliminate it.
Read the book:
This book will be available for download as an Open Access PDF (from 13 January 2026) directly from the publisher here: The MIT Press
The book will also be available for purchase at your local bookstore and via online outlets including Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org