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, explores the history and politics of lithium mining in Chile and the US. She traces mining memories, rights of nature debates, and the water and ecosystem stakes of brine extraction. The conversation probes scarcity narratives, technical imaginaries around EVs, and emerging methods like direct extraction.

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INSIGHT

Center Life, Not Reserves

'Living minerals' reframes mineral policy by centering the preservation and reproduction of life over commodity counts.
Javiera Barandiaran urges asking which life forms survive extraction instead of asking 'is there enough lithium?'.

INSIGHT

Make Rights Of Nature Political

Rights of nature must move from courtroom doctrine into everyday policy and politics to protect ecosystems effectively.
Barandiaran warns against privileging scientists as sole spokespeople and advocates including ancestral and local knowledges.

ADVICE

Use EVs Selectively, Not Universally

Treat electric vehicles as context-specific solutions rather than universal fixes and prefer public transit in dense cities.
Evaluate transport choices by local needs and avoid assuming EVs are always the best environmental option.

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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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