New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Javiera Barandiaran, "Living Minerals: Nature, Trade, and Power in the Race for Lithium" (MIT Press, 2026)

Feb 13, 2026

Javiera Barandiaran, Associate Professor and director at CREW, studies lithium mining and environmental justice. She discusses the history and politics of brine-lithium, water and ecosystem impacts in desert mines, and how imaginaries about scarcity and national resources shape mining decisions. The conversation also explores rights-of-nature approaches and future research on extraction technologies and glaciers.

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INSIGHT

Rights Of Nature Need Political Life

Rights of nature must move from courts into everyday politics and policy to be effective.
Barandiaran argues scientists should be one voice among many, including ancestral and local knowledges.

INSIGHT

EVs Are No Universal Cure

Electric vehicles are better than fossil-fuel cars but not a one-size solution to climate change.
Barandiaran highlights that EVs shift environmental burdens to mining communities near extraction sites.

INSIGHT

Growth Imaginaries Drive More Mining

Mining expansion often follows a growth-first imaginary that demands ever more extraction.
Barandiaran warns this logic leads to mining in mountains, deep sea, poles, and even space.

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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 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.

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 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.

Javiera Barandiarán is Associate Professor in the Global Studies program at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Sandra Elizabeth is a graduate student enrolled at the Department of Sociology in Shiv Nadar University, Delhi- NCR. Her research relates to water- control projects implemented in a low- lying, deltaic region in South- West Indian state of Kerala called Kuttanad– which is dubbed as the state’s rice granary. She can be reached out on X

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