While electrifying transportation is essential to addressing the climate crisis, the mining of nickel, copper, and lithium required to build out these green technologies brings its own environmental and social costs. To understand these impacts, author and political scientist Thea Riofrancos traveled to the Atacama Desert in Chile, home to one of the largest lithium reserves in the world. She joins Host Paloma Beltran to discuss her book, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.

I’m of the belief that one of the best ways to trigger better governance of mining is to have empowered, engaged and organized communities. It really starts that way, because communities are first of all on the ground. They know their local environment. They may have deep cultural attachments, and they tend to pick up on early signs of environmental threats as well as poor governance. When communities are organized but also excluded, that’s when we get more intense forms of protest, sometimes, which then are met with repression or criminalization, quite unfortunately, and even people getting killed. And there’s a lot of examples of this, tragically, in the mining sector. The other side to the coin of better governance is the government itself, right, what is the government doing? And there’s a range of things that governments can do, from monitoring the environmental impacts to regulation to helping to channel more economic benefits to local communities. But an even bigger type of intervention that a government can make relates to ownership. Ownership gives you leverage, it gives you power. And so it’s not for no reason that governments in the Global South, starting many decades ago, in some cases, soon after decolonization, we see governments taking over natural resources saying that the only way that we can have economic sovereignty over our own countries is if we have more control over these strategic resources within our territory. Latin America really stands out as a place where a lot of those types of nationalizations have occurred. This can create different types of tensions with local communities. Sometimes local communities support the nationalization, for sure. Sometimes they feel okay, now instead of fighting a private company, we’re fighting the state. But it really comes out of a lineage of a history of foreign control of resources being replaced with more national or state control in the Global South context.