Manuel Pastor, Chris Benner and Emiliano Rodriguez Nuesch

Lithium Mining as the Next Frontier of the Climate Crisis 

If you’re looking for the future of power, head for the Salton Sea. The region around the landlocked, highly saline lake in southeastern California is home to huge deposits of lithium, an element that plays a critical role in renewable energy storage. 

But beneath the technological promise of lithium extraction are complicated questions of environmental health, labor exploitation, and racial and economic justice. The Salton Sea is home to one of the state’s greatest environmental disasters. Toxic, pollution-rife dust from the drying lakebed have led to skyrocketing rates of childhood asthma. Social and economic inequities are carved deep.

“The area has long relied on cheap agricultural labor, including exploitation of immigrant labor. It is 85% Latino, rich with Latino poverty and poor with Latino political power,” said Dr. Manuel Pastor. “Yet it sits on enough lithium to redo the American auto fleet to all-electric, one-and-a-half times over.” 

The shift to renewable energy sources in the face of climate change has sparked a “lithium gold rush.” Manuel and his longtime collaborator Dr. Chris Benner came to the Bellagio Center in April 2023 to write a book examining the implications this has for communities in the region and the renewable power transition as a whole. 

Within the month at Bellagio, they successfully completed a first draft and struck up a friendship with Emiliano who helped expand their view to a global perspective. Documentarian and risk communications expert Emiliano Rodriguez Nuesch saw the challenges and questions facing the Salton Sea as strikingly similar to what was happening in South America’s Lithium Triangle, a region stretching over parts of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia that is home to the planet’s largest lithium reserves. 

“The conversation with Chris and Manuel very quickly became personal to me,” Emiliano said. “We were talking about the kind of serious problems happening in the north of Argentina, where lithium is being extracted today.” 

Emiliano helped telescope the story out, moving from a localized focus on lithium in California to put the issues in the context of the worldwide renewable energy supply chain. He also brought a deep understanding of how to make those issues connect and resonate emotionally with a wider audience.

“Researchers often just speak to our colleagues. But if you’re trying to have research that’s informed by and engages with the public, it has to have a story,” Chris said. “That was part of what was so exciting about meeting a master storyteller like Emiliano at Bellagio.” 

Three Communities at the Center of the Movement for an Equitable Green Transition

The three began to look at how communities around the world were being impacted by this process. In examining the promise and impact of lithium extraction, they saw tremendous difference in the experiences and perspectives of the communities in which it was taking place.

“Environmentalists are excited by how lithium extraction can expand our green energy supply. Companies are excited by the prospect of profiting off this valuable resource,” Manuel said. “Then you have communities that are wary, because every time, they’ve been promised it would be different.”

Manuel, Chris and Emiliano’s discussions became the jumping-off point for a documentary telling the stories of three different communities affected by lithium extraction, in Argentina, Chile and California. In it, they speak with community members, scientists, artists, activists and others, sharing the conversations that are taking place, the commonalities, and the conflicting views that they found.  

In Argentina, Emiliano found that just mentioning the word lithium could be so divisive that it became hard to do interviews. While in Chile, where they’ve been mining lithium and copper for the past 40 or 50 years, the issue was treated as just a part of life. 

And though all three communities sit at the center of the global shift to renewable energy, they have differing ideas of how much the transition will mean for them.

“In Chile and Argentina, many people feel they won’t ever benefit from this transition or have an electric car. In the Salton Sea, people are already driving them,” said Emiliano. 

The global transition to renewable energy is history in the present tense, and its supply chain is developing in real time. In highlighting how these communities are adapting to the reality of lithium extraction, the documentary looks at the strategies they are using to respond and what impact they are making.  

“Manuel and I often talk about the importance of having both weavers and warriors,” Chris said. They see the weavers as the people who build collaboration across the different industries and institutions—companies working with community colleges to train locals to operate the plants or the labor unions and community groups pushing for high-quality jobs and community benefit agreements. The warriors are the activists and protestors who force industry and others to answer tough questions about safety and waste disposal and water use. 

“They’re an important part of ensuring this industry gets developed in the right way,” Chris said. “Sometimes you have to disrupt the process, because otherwise your voices will continue to be marginalized.”

A moment of transition is a moment of possibility. Chris posits a vision that is more than the one-way extraction of wealth, one in which the jobs and infrastructure from battery manufacturing, electric vehicle plants and other parts of the supply chain are co-located in the community. 

“It’s a long shot, and maybe it’s a moon shot,” Chris said. “But there are many, many people who want to see that happen.”

Carrying the Story Forward

Manuel, Chris and Emiliano’s work will soon reach the public. Manuel and Chris’s book is scheduled to be released by the New Press in October 2024, and the three hope to use the documentary as the basis for a convening in Argentina in 2025. 

The final product is something no one could have anticipated when they first stepped into the Bellagio Center in April 2023. But to Chris, it’s something that couldn’t have happened anywhere else. 

“This collaboration would not have happened without the time and Bellagio together,” Chris said. “The trust and relationship we built enabled us to collaborate and move forward from thousands of miles apart.”