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

Feb 13, 2026

Javiera Barandiarán, Associate Professor at UC Santa Barbara and author of Living Minerals, studies the politics of science, environment, and mining in Latin America. She explores the history and myths of lithium extraction, water and ecosystem impacts in desert mines, and how narratives of scarcity, memory, and market uncertainty shape the global rush for lithium.

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INSIGHT

Prioritize Life Over Resource Counts

The 'living minerals' heuristic centers life and reproduction as the primary policy concern for minerals like lithium.
Javiera Barandiaran argues we must ask which life forms will survive extraction, not just whether there is enough lithium.

ADVICE

Broaden Who Speaks For Nature

Include scientists, ancestral knowledges, local knowledges, and industrial knowledges when speaking for nature under rights-of-nature frameworks.
Avoid leaving representation of nature solely to scientists because they can be allied with state-industrial interests.

INSIGHT

EVs Help But Aren't A Silver Bullet

Electric vehicles reduce emissions versus fossil cars but are not a universal solution and often serve consumer growth agendas.
Mining impacts concentrate harms on communities near extraction, risking further cycles of environmental injustice.

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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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