Extracting the Future: Lithium in an Era of Energy Transition

Bolivia’s troubled efforts to develop a commercial lithium industry.

Bolivia’s lithium accounts for a significant percentage of the world’s known reserve. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Mark Goodale traces the development of Bolivia’s closely guarded lithium project through the perspectives of a wide array of people and institutions, including workers at the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat; the state lithium company in La Paz; Latin America’s first electric vehicle company; and energy entrepreneurs in Bolivia, the United States, and Germany. He points to a fundamental contradiction: a so-called green energy transition dependent on the ever-greater extraction of yet another nonrenewable resource.

But without access to Bolivia’s lithium, and at megaindustrial scales that far outstrip current production, there won’t be sufficient lithium supply to make the batteries needed for a truly global EV revolution. Extracting the Future shows how the lithium economy is deeply embedded in a global capitalist system that continues to rely on resource extraction, unsustainable economic growth, and geopolitical violence.

Mark Goodale is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Lausanne and author of Reinventing Human Rights and A Revolution in Fragments.