Why a Chilean salt flat is a microcosm of the extractive frontiers of green capitalism

Andean flamingos. All three of the Atacama salt flats’ endemic flamingo species are in decline. Photograph: Santiago Urquijo/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenAndean flamingos. All three of the Atacama salt flats’ endemic flamingo species are in decline. Photograph: Santiago Urquijo/Getty ImagesWhy a Chilean salt flat is a microcosm of the extractive frontiers of green capitalismIn the Atacama desert, the extraction of lithium – so crucial to addressing the climate crisis – comes with escalating social and environmental costs

A high-altitude desert plateau traverses Argentina, Bolivia and Chile. I am on the Chilean side, sitting in a Jeep along with two other researchers. The afternoon air is thin and brisk but the sun is piercing – a combination I am familiar with from years of living and travelling in South America’s Andean range.

The landscape is a study in contrasts and contours: broad basins suddenly cut off by sweeping curves; flat expanses sliced by near vertical ascents. The Licancabur volcano looms large above us. Vegetation and humidity levels change rapidly with the rising altitude, bringing cooler temperatures, wetter air and denser plant life.

We are driving to the Salar de Atacama – the Atacama salt flats – the largest of several dozen salt flats in northern Chile, and the third largest in the world. The brilliant white flat lies in a high basin 7,500ft above sea level, enclosed by the even higher Andean mountains to the east and the Domeyko mountains to the west.

View image in fullscreenLagunas Baltinache in the Atacama desert. Photograph: Kanawa_Studio/Getty ImagesThis striking landscape – the salt flat, the flamingos, and the neighbouring Indigenous communities – is under threat from a counterintuitive source: our efforts to save the planet from catastrophic climate change. Just beneath my feet is nearly one-quarter of the world’s lithium reserves, suspended in water saltier than the ocean.

Lithium is essential to addressing the climate crisis. It is a key ingredient in the rechargeable batteries that play a starring role in eliminating carbon emissions from transportation and energy – the two highest emitting sectors. But extracting this lithium will come at escalating social and environmental costs. It is this dilemma that has brought me to the salt flat.

When it does rain in the Atacama, it’s hard to overstate the intensity of the floods. I once found myself caught in what is called invierno boliviano, or Bolivian winter, a paradoxical name for a weather phenomenon that occurs during the southern hemisphere’s summer months. These rainy fronts originate in the Amazon and travel up the steep slopes of the Andean mountains, where Bolivia’s high-altitude winds then drive them up and over the ridges, until their torrents drench the Chilean high plateau.

View image in fullscreenFlamingos in Laguna Chaxa in the Atacama desert. Photograph: mFlower/Getty ImagesThe scientific term for closed basins like the Atacama is “endorheic” (etymologically, “inside” and “flow”), for water can flow down into the Atacama basin but it cannot leave – except by evaporation. And this is the key to Atacama’s extraordinary lithium brine.

After deluges like the one I experienced, water pours down the surrounding mountains; during the long dry spells between storms, it trickles down ravines from the precious mountain springs. As it flows, the water leeches lithium from the volcanic rock, picks up wind-scoured lithium dust, and carries it down to the nucleus, or centre, of the salar. This pooled surface water can only escape through evaporation, and with every drop of water that evaporates, the concentration of lithium in the remaining brine increases. Without the parched and sun-blasted Atacama’s extraordinarily high evaporation rate, lithium concentrations would not reach the “economical” levels prized by mining companies.

Yet further lithium enrichment takes place out of sight. Remaining water gradually seeps into the ground, creating underground wells of lithium-rich brine. These wells are linked to complex hydrothermal systems. Then the heat of magma, especially near the Andes’ active fault lines, drives circulations of subsurface brine through fissures and porous geological strata, dissolving even more lithium out of the subsurface rock.

View image in fullscreenThe Piedras Rojas, or red rocks, of the Atacama desert Photograph: Tatsuya Ohinata/Getty Images/iStockphotoThe resulting brine deposits anywhere from four to 200 feet below the Atacama’s salty crust represent a potential bonanza to corporations. The Atacama’s singular coincidence of climactic, geological, geothermal and hydrological conditions makes it one of the least expensive places on Earth to mine lithium.

And at each step, the process of “mining water” is intimately related to the very environmental conditions that formed the valuable deposits in the first place: miners pump the underground brine to vast evaporation ponds on the surface, where natural evaporation concentrates the brine yet again, increasing its lithium levels 40-fold, from approximately 0.15% to a whopping 6%. One cycle of the process can take 10 to 24 months, depending on brine quality and weather conditions.

But this relatively low-cost, low-tech and supposedly low-impact extractive process nonetheless imperils the species and communities that call the Atacama desert home. And it is a microcosm of a planetary phenomenon: the expanding extractive frontiers of green capitalism. Everywhere that mines are dug up to provide raw materials for the energy transition, global climate action comes into conflict with local environmental protection.

View image in fullscreenThe expanse of the Atacama salt flat. Photograph: Atlantide Phototravel/Getty ImagesMining always transforms, in many ways irrevocably, the landscapes in which it occurs. In remaking the earth in the image of extractive capital, physically and chemically separating what is deemed valuable from often toxic waste, mining evokes the image of terraforming so central to science fiction.

But if terraforming is supposed to make a lifeless planet as verdant as Earth, mining, to the contrary, often leaves parts of Earth itself uninhabitable. While the environmental impacts of mining brine are less obvious to the naked eye than, say, mountaintop removal, extracting the lithium-rich liquid does in fact threaten a fragile, desert water system, along with the ecosystems and people that depend on it.

The world’s oldest, driest desert may appear bereft of life. Ecologists call it a “polyextreme” environment, given its altitude and high direct solar radiation, its intense aridity, its huge diurnal temperature swings and its densely saline lakes. Those who study such polyextreme environments alternately describe them as low-diversity, with relatively simple webs of life, or astonishing in their biodiversity. It all depends on perspective. Plants and animals have evolved to make do with less and saltier water and, above all, the abundant energy of relentless sun. Extremity stimulates nature’s creativity.

Artemia, or brine shrimp, thrive in hypersaline lakes that would be intolerable to most species. These tiny creatures are a key node in the plateau’s food chain. The brine shrimp eat bacteria and phytoplankton (microscopic plants) and are, in turn, food for Chilean flamingos. The flamingos, too, have adapted to the saline lagoons, evolving a filter in their bills akin to the lamellar membranes of oysters or whales to strain the microscopic plants and animals from the brine.

View image in fullscreenFlamingos at Laguna Chaxa park in the Atacama desert. Photograph: DoraDalton/Getty ImagesThe flamingos are a barometer of wetland health. As the birds travel the salt flats in search of food and mates (attracted through a courtship ritual of synchronised dancing), they link together the saline lakes into a web of habitats. And as these habitats suffer, so do flamingo populations: all three of the Atacama salt flats’ endemic flamingo species are in decline.

The distinct drivers of this population loss reveal the compounding harms afflicting this fragile environment. Warmer average temperatures due to climate change evaporate surface water faster, reducing the blue-green algae essential to flamingo and Artemia diets. And the noise and traffic associated with mining operations appear to directly disrupt the flamingos’ breeding.

Read moreResearchers are struggling to predict the overall direction of the multiple processes changing the Atacama. Science can only play catchup, documenting the impacts long after the harm has occurred. Lithium extraction’s threat to the liquid supporting its ecosystem is a slow-motion disaster, with planetary causes and consequences.

This fact raises existential questions for the planet’s zero-carbon future.

In the Atacama, global supply chains intersect with local food chains, webs of economic production undermine webs of life, and colonisation and postcolonial state-building erase ancient histories of continuous Indigenous settlement. And these unexpected entanglements are just the beginning of the story. In more ways than I could have imagined when I first stepped foot on the Atacama salt flat on that blustery day, this extractive frontier is a portal into our planetary future.

The task of achieving a globally just energy transition is daunting. But it is possible. Achieving it requires understanding supply chains in reverse, starting from what we produce and consume and working backwards to their material inputs and, further still, to the relentless scramble for new extractive frontiers. Policies that promote alternatives to car use, reduce sprawl, encourage more compact batteries and require recycling would all reduce the scale of mining needed for carbon-free transportation.

We can start by demanding supply chains organised around justice for everyone they touch, rather than profits for just a few. Just as any workplace is simultaneously a site of exploitation and locus of worker power, and any mine is at once a setting for extraction and a potential scene of community resistance, the supply chains of green technologies are both a means of domination – of people and of nature – and fertile ground for making the world anew.

This is an edited extract from Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism by Thea Riofrancos, published by Icon Books at £20 in the UK. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.