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Javiera Barandiaran, "Living Minerals: Nature, Trade, and Power in the Race for Lithium" (MIT Press, 2026)
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Dr. Javiera Barandiarán
The New Books Network.
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Sandra (Interviewer, New Books Network)
Greetings to all our listeners. Today on New Books Network, we have with us Dr. Javiera Baranjan, who is an Associate professor in the Global Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara at UC Santa Barbara. Dr. Barandran serves as the Director and co Founder of CRU center for Restorative Environmental Work, a research hub that explores emergent frameworks and strategies for achieving environmental justice. Dr. Baran Ran earned her PhD in 2013 from the University of California, Berkeley, in Environmental Science, Policy and Management. Her research has been awarded support from the National Science foundation, the Andrew Mellon foundation, the Social Science Research Council, Chile's National Agency for Science, and others. Her work explores the intersection of science, environment, and development in Latin America. Her first book, Science and Environment in the Politics of Expert Advice in a Neoliberal Democracy, published in 2018, critically looks at environmental governance within a context where the state fails to be an arbitrator of authoritative knowledge. Today we are together with Dr. Javiera to discuss about her most recent publication, her monograph titled Living Nature, Trade and Power in the Race for Lithium, published by the MIT Press. It is an open access publication and it's available for free on the MIT website. In Living Minerals, Dr. Javiera provides us a holistic perspective on the genealogy of lithium mining in Chile by offering a comparative analysis of two lithium brine mines, Silver Peak, Nevada and Salar de Atacama, Chile, regions where lithium is found in its compound form mixed with salts, minerals, or other organisms. Dr. Javiera's work becomes topical in today's scenario where climate change discourse pivots around a certain framework of sustainability. Looking at lithium mining, Living Minerals forces us to confront questions around mineral dependency and address thorny issues pertaining to the projects of energy transition and conservation. First of all, Dr. Bharan Ran Congratulations on the publication of your book. It manages to be quite comprehensive while also being concise, and that's quite brilliant. Let's begin with a simple question that could pique the interest of our prospective readers. What do you mean by the usage of the term living minerals? And how does looking at minerals as living reorient our ways of thinking about nature?
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Dr. Javiera Barandiarán
Well, thank you, Sandra. It's a real pleasure to be here. I really appreciate the invitation and you reaching out to me. And I think that the New Books Network is a really special podcast and a special place that facilitates these kinds of conversations across the world. You're in India, I'm in California right now, and also conversations across different levels in the academy. So I'm really, really excited to be sharing this and discussing the book with you, who are in the middle of your fieldwork, research and sort of getting started with your academic career and your academic goals. And I really, I hope it will be a productive and fruitful conversation for you and for all our listeners. So what do I mean by Living Minerals? I offer this as a heuristic in the book. So it's not a hard and fast set of rules or a hard and fast process, but it's a heuristic for re seeing the world, seeing the world in new ways. Fundamentally, what I mean is that we need to put life, the preservation of life and the reproduction of life at the center of our policy thinking and our regulations. For a long time I've been writing about some of the complexities of environmental memory and environmental legacies and our tendency to forget the ways in which we have already harmed the environment. A lot of environmental science operates through baselines, and these baseline studies create a register of conditions as they are now, and then anticipate impacts into the future. So that's how environmental impact assessments work. And this is the primary policy tool that's in use in the United States, in India, in Chile and Argentina, practically all over the world. One of the most widely used policies right in the world. But these baselines sort of erase past accumulations of environmental harms because the scientists are focused on trying to inventory present conditions, to anticipate future impacts. For a time, I've been thinking about how do we change the calculus of those baselines? How do we change the questions that we're asking when we do these scientific studies? And now in this book, the questions that we're asking when we think about mineral policy? And so that's where living minerals comes in. Instead of asking, for example, is there enough lithium? We should be asking, what kind of life, what life forms will survive at this pace and scale of extraction? Instead of asking, is there enough lithium? Which is the question we hear all over the place right now. It's in the media every day. You turn around, you open a newspaper, you click on any kind of clickbait out there, and that's the latent question. People are asking, is there enough lithium for electric vehicles, for decarbonization, for whatever it is that might come next. But that's the wrong question to ask. I say, and so under a living minerals heuristic, the right questions to be asking are, what kind of life forms are going to survive this pace and scale of extraction, production and consumption?
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Sandra (Interviewer, New Books Network)
Yes, thank you so much for the answer. And I was also wondering, while you were speaking, you talked about challenging the baseline assumptions of policies, environmental policies, of conservation and everything. And I think in your previous work you have dealt with this, looking at environmental impact assessments and everything. Can we see this monograph as a sequel or as in continuous to what you have written earlier?
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Dr. Javiera Barandiarán
Yeah, that's a great question. I think the big change in this monograph, it's a lot more ambitious in terms of the temporal scope that it's looking at. And I also bring in much more intentionally a rights of nature perspective into the analysis and into the way I approach the problem that I'm analyzing. And what I mean by that is that I'm trying to think through, what would it look like if we had a really dynamic politics of the rights of nature? I've been following the rights of nature movement for many years now. They've done incredible work in really institutionalizing rights of nature into laws. In the United States, primarily, these are local laws, but in other places like Ecuador, famously, it's in the Constitution. In many other jurisdictions around the world, we see rights of nature's laws in county charters, in state laws, all kinds of things. We see it propping up in case law as well. That's great, that's wonderful. And that's a huge achievement. You know, 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, people really didn't take rights of nature that seriously as a legal doctrine. So I'm really excited by that. I think the next step that's also necessary is to turn it into a politics or a political movement. And that way, in a way, sort of bring rights of nature out of the courtroom and into our policies, regulations, and into our politics. And so that's what the book is trying to do by calling attention to the ways in which, you know, how do we come to know things as they are? There's a trend in the rights of nature literature to look towards scientists as the authoritative voices in speaking for nature. Because of course, when we think of rights of nature in a court of law, the big question is who's going to speak for polar bears or palm trees or salt flats? And so there's this question of, you know, who will speak for them? And this idea that scientists are the ideal spokespersons of nature because they have the best methods and they're the authoritative voice. And the book really tries to challenge that view and show the ways in which scientists really should be one more of a range of voices that are speaking for and with nature. And so I bring in the importance of ancestral knowledges, of local knowledges, industrial knowledges, as well as. And so when we look at things from these different perspectives, a much more complex and living representation of these places emerges. So scientists are important, but they have also, as the book shows, been at the center of state power. They have been allies, they have been very important in the success of state and industrial designs on nature. And so they haven't, they're not always then the most trusted interlocutors or representatives of nature. And it really would be a grave mistake to leave to science alone the representation and the speaking for nature in a rights of nature world.
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Sandra (Interviewer, New Books Network)
Yeah, and I was also thinking that, you know, we currently live in a time where electric vehicles, for instance, are endorsed as a one size fit all solution. And what are the contradictions inherent in such thinking or such policies where you say, you know, if you use electric vehicles, we can achieve so and so sustainability goals, but are they really sustainable? And what are, who really brunts the, you know, who really bears the brunt of sustainability? That's one thing. I was curious about it. Could you speak on that as well?
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Dr. Javiera Barandiarán
Yeah, absolutely. And I think you sort of set a key term that's important to focus on. One size fits all. They are really not a one size fits all solution. And so, and that's a useful way of thinking about it, electric vehicles are undoubtedly better than diesel and gas vehicles. I think we know that from our lived experiences and also scientifically, scientists have tracked and counted all the carbon footprint and the water footprint of EVs compared to diesel cars and everything that's involved in extracting oil and everything that means for global political violence, honestly, and military intervention. And so I think when we compare the entire package, undoubtedly EVs are better than diesel cars. That does not make them the solution to climate change, or it doesn't make them a one size fits all silver bullet, magic bullet that's going to cure and solve these problems. So EVs might be a very good solution in certain places, perhaps places that cannot be urbanized very well, or where very effective public transportation isn't a viable option. They might be good where walking and cycling aren't better alternatives. But I think for cities we have much better alternatives than electric vehicles. By the same token, there are some very rural areas where, where electric vehicles also might not work very well. And so what that helps to highlight is the fact that electric vehicles are primarily a consumer technology. And so this is really about selling more cars to more people. And we see that in the design of cars and the kinds of EVs that are available to most people, they're getting larger and larger. And the larger the car, the more minerals and metals it has, the, the bigger the impact, the environmental and ecological impact, and therefore the livelihood impact for all the humans and non humans that are living near these mine sites. So to your really important question of who bears the brunt of electric vehicles, I think right now there's a very well documented body of scholarship showing the ways in which communities near mines, both existing mines, new mines, existing mines that are being intensified, so they're expanding in lots of ways. They are really bearing the brunt of it. They're losing access to water, they are seeing their landscapes destroyed, it's sometimes threatening biodiversity, agriculture, producing toxic amounts of waste. And so it's simply not a sustainable pathway. And the ways in which sometimes they promote mining, and this imaginary mining everywhere is really problematic because the solution is to first exhaust all the minerals on earth near communities, and then turn to the deep sea, to the high mountains, underneath glaciers in the poles, the Arctic and the Antarctic outer space. So they're talking about mining the moon, mining asteroids. It's a voracious appetite where the solution to any problem is always more mining. And so if we continue to rely on mineral markets as they have existed, then the solution will always be more mining. And that's another one of the arguments that I make in the book.
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Sandra (Interviewer, New Books Network)
You know, growth and growth oriented approaches that you mentioned in the book.
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Dr. Javiera Barandiarán
Yes.
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Sandra (Interviewer, New Books Network)
There's a certain anecdote that you mention in the introductory chapter, and I feel like it would really allow our audience to grasp with what lies at the core of your inquiry as well. Like one thing that provoked you or alarmed you rather, was this particular piece in the New Yorker which compared Saudi Arabia and Bolivia, posing the question whether Bolivia will be the next Saudi Arabia. And to set up a context for our listeners, I want to ask you why would it appear unsustainable for Bolivia, or for that matter any other South American country, to become a key resource provider modeled in a way after Saudi Arabia? And what features is, you know, the resource nationalism that you talk about become evident vis a vis Chile and the U.S. when we look at how governance and policy coalesce with the question of lithium mining?
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Dr. Javiera Barandiarán
Yeah, the comparison of Bolivia and Saudi Arabia is fascinating because we see it kind again and again. It refuses to go away. And there's sort of two implicit comparisons that are happening, one of lithium and oil, as if lithium will simply replace oil. And so it's a comparison that sort of projects this imaginary where we'll have a new oil, which will be lithium. And so markets and politics and consumption and technologies and our style of living will be able to continue uninterrupted with the new oil, which will be lithium, in the same way that EVs will replace diesel cars. And then there's the comparison of Bolivia and Saudi Arabia, which is I've now seen it set up in multiple different ways. But in this particular article in the New Yorker, the journalist asks, could Bolivia become the next Persian Gulf of the electric car era? And so projecting this apparently desired imaginary where a new poor desert nation could hold some kind of strategic power, strategic levels of wealth and geopolitical power. And so what's really problematic about it isn't so much the ecological Sustainability part, but the assumptions it's making about development, growth and geopolitics, it erases completely what we know so well that for Saudi Arabia, this has its position, for the Persian Gulf, its position as the oil producers of the world has come at the expense of intense military intervention from the United States. Previously, other European powers, it has come with intense high amounts of inequality. Right? Petro states are amongst amongst the world's most unequal societies. And as someone who is from, you know, I was born in Chile, my family's from Argentina. I had never gone to Bolivia until I did this research. But now I've also been to Bolivia. But, you know, this is my home, right? The South America is my home. And the idea of reproducing the trajectories of development that we've observed in petro states was really alarming to me. And it really just signaled that the electric car era would mean more conflict, more intervention at the global level and more social conflict and environmentally driven social conflict at the local level. There's so many ways in which this part of the world is not and will not be the Persian Gulf, right? These are really dynamic and vibrant democracies with some of the world's most robust social movements that have proven again and again their ability to make governments and topple governments. And so it seems really unlikely, almost impossible, and incredibly, an incredibly violent process that would be required to turn this part of the world into, you know, monarchic monarch. Monarchies with the levels of inequality and civil disenfranchisement, honestly, that exists in the Middle East. So not a comparison that makes any sense unless you are in the United States. And so that's why I argue that it's an imaginary that says a lot more about US anxieties and fears and loss of control than it does about Bolivian or South American desires for growth, development, or anything else. And so it really is reflective of the US's brand of resource nationalism, where the US for the last century really at this point has been the global policeman in terms of setting the terms of the mineral trade to, you know, advance its own economic and political interests.
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Sandra (Interviewer, New Books Network)
Thank you so much. So now coming to some questions. Methodology. You know, you follow the material flow of the element and also rely on archives to study the lithium trade interface between US and Chile. And the archival quality of the work really stands out in chapter four, where you look at memories of industrial mining. How has this particular methodology that you've adopted, how has it been helpful in the pursuit of your central queries? And mainly I'm interested. How did you so deftly manage the shift in narrative between two places? The Chilean US Archives as well.
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Dr. Javiera Barandiarán
Yeah, yeah, Sandra, it's not easy, as you quite quickly picked up right. On the shifting narrative voice between the two places. That takes. Takes writing and rewriting. I always say to my graduate students, there's no such thing as writing. There's only rewriting. And you have to continuously be editing your own work. And because that's the process by which we think and analyze. And so that's the short answer of how I manage those shifting voices. Many, many drafts and paying close attention. It was really. And so this goes back to your question about methodology. It was really important to me to work from a relational perspective, and this was a hard sell. I got a lot of pushback and a lot of questions from reviewers and others when I've presented this work, asking me if I was comparing mining in Chile and the United States. And honestly, I think the answer to that is that. That that's a comparison that wouldn't make any sense because it's, you know, you're comparing mining in sort of almost two different planets when in reality these two are relational entities. Chile has been the world's primary producer of nitrate fertilizers, then copper, now lithium for 150 years. The vast majority of those minerals were consumed, you know, by Europeans and by many others, but primarily by the United States. And so this is a sort of primary exporter, primary importer relation of two countries that have been trading minerals with each other for a very long time. They're also allied nations. You know, Chile and the United States have always been good friends. Of course, that relationship has gone through ups and downs. But these are two countries that have never. There's never been a policy of neutrality and certainly not one of the outright hostility or of opposition, you know, in the case of Chile, to US Policy, you know, beyond, you know, the. Unless it was in the kindest of terms. So these were two friends, allied nations. And so in a sense, it provides us a way of looking at the mineral trade in what I would call as good as it gets conditions. So mineral trading usually happens from poorer developing countries and that are exporting their mineral wealth to wealthier consumer countries where both the industry and the consumers are located. And that's the relationship that the US And Chile had. Both countries understood very well their position on the global trade. One is a superpower that has consumed the lion's share of global minerals, and one as a developing country that until recently was very poor, and that understood that its best pathway to some sort of development or growth was through the mineral trade. And so I wanted to focus on that relational quality, that relational encounter, but in a way that didn't assume the subordination of the actors. I've read too many books that are told only from a US perspective, that don't really give you the South American or the specifically Chilean perspective. And so I worked hard to work from materials, from archives in both countries to try to keep a balanced narrative across the two. So, yes, calling out their power differentials and their wealth differentials, but not subordinating the voices. And who was telling the story by sort of using archives in both countries.
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Sandra (Interviewer, New Books Network)
Essentially, the idea that seems to be governing the production of lithium, as you chart out throughout the ages, appears to be that of an impending shortage. And combined with this fear of deficit, you also have the calculations of future that are made. So on one hand you have government and industry wanting to accelerate production since the mineral appears to be depleting. But these estimates of reserves also vary. And again, in the present context, there are considerations of futurity that determine the usage of lithium. And I'm curious to know how you would implicate temporality in the circuit of lithium production. And how do you evaluate the significance of time bound considerations, you know, and relatedly, like what kind of visions, I mean, imaginaries propel visions of future here?
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Dr. Javiera Barandiarán
Well, one of the most fascinating things about lithium is that it has always had a more important future than its present. And so we have always used very little lithium, certainly in absolute terms, because it's the lightest element in the periodic table. And that's what gives it all its special chemical qualities. That's not a very good quality to have when you're being traded on the market, because the volumes until very, very recently were always very small. Right? It traded in pounds, in kilograms, but not in tons like most minerals that were really the money making minerals that traded in tons and sort of big volumes. And so what was really always motivating the market and the demand and the production of lithium were these future imaginaries of it will become very necessary for an electric vehicle future and for a nuclear fusion future. So electric vehicles, of course, the, that's the rage right now. But already in the 50s and 60s there was talk and there was planning of use of lithium in electric vehicle batteries. And there were different waves in which, you know, the lithium mining companies were really betting on the success of electric vehicles and sort of anticipating that there would be a boom in Lithium demand, because of EV demand, of course, that didn't work out as they anticipated. But it's that future anticipation that was driving how they operated and what they were trying to do. And the second big thing that was driving these future expectations of this wonderful lithium, very profitable lithium future was nuclear fusion power. Now, fusion is very different from the widely used nuclear fission with an eye. So what, you know, the nuclear power plants that we have in operation around the world, those are all nuclear fission, where the atom is split in nuclear fusion. This doesn't exist beyond pilot and experimental reactors around the world. But there's a lot of hype, there's a lot of hope and expectation around it. And what it is is essentially the coming together of atoms. And in that process, they generate a lot of power and heat. It's the same function that exists at the center of the sun and what makes the sun work, and it's what is at the base of thermonuclear weapons. So even, you know, already in the 1950s and late 1940s, there was nuclear fusion research happening, and there was this great expectation that nuclear fusion really would provide, you know, the holy grail, clean, infinite, cheap power. I think the question that we really need to reflect as a humanity, as a global humanity, is why do we constantly look for and believe in these holy grails? This idea that there's such a thing as clean, infinite and cheap power is even possible. I think it's pretty clear right now that it's not possible, but it's the kind. Those are the stories and the hopes and the imaginaries of the future that as a global society, we continue to tell ourselves. And so if your goal is, your expectation is that you're going to be able to produce infinite power, of course there's always going to be plenty of, you know, the quantities that you need of everything else is always minuscule because your outcome is going to be gigantuous, too much to meter. And so in that context, there were all these debates in the 60s and 70s about whether there would be enough lithium for the nuclear fusion future. And that's where there were debates amongst USGS geologists and industry geologists where they really disagreed on the best way of measuring how much lithium was in underground reserves and in salt flats. They disagreed also on the terminology to be used. And there was a lot of distrust where the government geologists really didn't trust the industry geologists. And for good reason. We know now, thanks to the archival materials, that the industrial geologists had already done Enormous exploration campaigns. They had studied all these places. They had fairly sophisticated, for the time, assessments of how much lithium there could be and where. And they weren't sharing any of this information with the government geologists. And so the government geologists really just thought that the industry was shooting in the dark and they were doing, you know, the government geologists were doing all their own exploration campaigns without knowing that they were really, you know, often just following in the footsteps of the industry.
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Sandra (Interviewer, New Books Network)
Yeah. Like you have. Like you have discussed so far, you know, concerns of future technologies and hopes of harnessing lithium for nuclear fusion. These have significantly shaped the life of the mineral as well.
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Dr. Javiera Barandiarán
And.
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Sandra (Interviewer, New Books Network)
I want to know, like, in what ways do mining memories shape our conception of lithium as a natural resource?
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Dr. Javiera Barandiarán
Yeah. Thanks. So I borrowed the term mining memories from Rebecca Wheeler. She used it to describe the ways in which rural communities here in the United States remember mining that has closed down or that has been winding down. And I use the term because I'd been working, as you know, from a prior concept called sociotechnical imaginaries, that really puts the emphasis, and as analysts help us identify the ways in which science and technology are put at the center of these hopeful imaginaries for better futures, the ways in which we script onto science and technology things like nuclear fusion power, for example, or electric vehicles, the solution to all kinds of other issues. But too often in the scholarship, science and technology is divorced, and the results of science and technology are divorced from the mineral inputs that are. That go into the process. And I learned this lesson a little bit the hard way when I was first getting started with this research. And I submitted an article for publication to different journals. And the mining journals would come back to me and say, no, no, this is really about energy. It doesn't go here. And the energy journals or the environmental journals would tell me, no, this is all about mining. It doesn't go here. And I thought it was important to tell the story of lithium mining without divorcing energy and mineral scholarships and methodological approaches. And so that's what the mining memories concept allows me to do, to bridge the entire material base from the underground to the scientific and technological outputs, the infrastructural outputs of these processes, and likewise to bridge the past and present and future. We know from so many scholars who study memories of political violence that memory is a political resource. It's something that it's not stable, it's not fixed, it's continuously being created and recreated, and it is mobilized for political gains and for political Purposes and also for cultural purposes. And so bringing it in to think about why it is it that minerals specifically have become the depositories of these aspirations for better futures. And how does that then connect with more sociotechnical imaginaries of science and technology and energy in particular, being the things that will take us to the future, and so wanting to make that temporal link between those different aspects of the entire chain of what it takes to produce energy, because I think we live in a world right now where we can no longer silo those two things.
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Sandra (Interviewer, New Books Network)
Yeah. You also mentioned that, you know, the physical characteristic of lithium as being, you know, ontological fluidity as being its key physical characteristic. How do you think that this affects, this affects, you know, your, your argument so far.
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Dr. Javiera Barandiarán
Yeah, well, it's. Was quite convenient, in a sense, that lithium is so ontologically fluid. And by that I mean that it's, it really is a slippery thing. Lithium has a certain kind of rebelliousness and it refuses to be industrialized or commodified in any easy direct or linear way. And so it, you know, for example, the nuclear. In the hands of the nuclear scientists and the nuclear engineers who are these champions of the nuclear fusion future, there was always going to be plenty of lithium because lithium could be sourced cheaply from the ocean. And they said, you know, no need to worry about future supplies. The ocean will provide all the lithium we need. At the very same time, at the very same conference, when it came time to thinking about lithium for other uses for the current market, there was too little of it, and it could only be sourced from hard rock deposits and from, at that time, very new salt flat deposits and the other. So the government geologists, the USGS geologists, they were constantly worried that there would be shortages of lithium in the future. And so that's an example of its ontological fluidity. Another example, you know, the USGS geologists, they were very concerned that the industry was using what they called the methods of the oil industry, because in the brines, lithium is found in what are essentially underground liquid deposits. Underground liquids are notoriously difficult to count and map. And so because of that, it's very difficult to actually estimate how big a deposit is and how much lithium is there and how much lithium can be profitably extracted. And the same is true for the oil industry, because it depends on things like how easy it is to pump. You know, is it very thick and viscous or does it flow very easily? Is the ground, you know, kind of very permeable, or does it have to be, you know, fractured or other things done to it so that it will release the liquids that are held inside it. And so it's very difficult to estimate exactly how much is there and how much will be profitably extracted. And that. That's what I mean by its ontological fluidity. It always created this space for speculation, uncertainty, manipulation of the information, secrecy, and so many other things that different groups use to try to advance their goals at different points in time.
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Sandra (Interviewer, New Books Network)
You know, one important thing that you point out is how. I mean, you don't present the story of lithium mining as a standalone thing. You explain to us how it, you know, it evolves. It evolved from the history of nitrate and copper mining in Chile, and it proceeds from that story. And I was wondering, where has this story now come to? What is its present status? And as you evaluate it, yeah.
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Dr. Javiera Barandiarán
Its present status continues to be very volatile. There's one phrase from Chile that you hear a lot. If you go to Chile and you start asking people about lithium or you turn on the news, you will hear this phrase. Sooner or later, lithium won't be like nitrate or copper. And that single phrase is probably the one line that most motivated my argument in the book, because it illustrates lithium's ontological fluidity, because it's really not clear what role it's playing compared to nitrate or copper. It also illustrates the importance of mining memories, where the historic nitrate trade in Chile before 1930 really relied on nitrate exports for its national wealth growth and economy. Between the 1930s and a few years ago or right now, it has relied on copper exports. And so what could it mean to say that lithium won't be like nitrate or copper? Nitrate and copper have been so much to the Chilean nation and economy. They have been a source of jobs, a source of income, of tax income. They have paid for nearly everything we see in Chile, and yet they are remembered as a source of frustrated development. There's this constant feeling that Chile hasn't profited, as it should have, from these natural resources. And so what does it mean again to say lithium won't be like nitrate or copper? There's many ways of remembering nitrogen and copper as extremely positive resources and experiences that integrated Chile into the global economy and therefore into a global politics and into a global political body. And so, yeah, I think that phrase also brings us to the current period. To go back to your question about what's happening with lithium now in Chile. 2022. In 2023, lithium income surpassed copper income as the main source of money into the public purse, into the national Government in Chile from export royalties. That's huge. That won't necessarily last. It's probably already changed. The price of copper has gone up, the price of lithium has gone down. The price of lithium has been sort of notoriously volatile. But at the same time, we also have now possible expansion of lithium mining. We're seeing an expansion of lithium mining in many places using new direct extraction lithium methods, which. That's the topic for an entire new podcast episode, because it's very complicated, but it's also full of a lot of speculation and hype and false claims, honestly. But we're also seeing lithium expanding in more traditional kinds of mines. So certainly hard rocks or pegmatite and spodumene deposits, and to somewhat lesser extent, brine deposits that may still be extracted using the traditional evaporation ponds, which are very cheap in some ways, but it sort of takes a long time. They're slow to operate, and they're actually quite hard to get right. But that imaginary of that hopeful imaginary where lithium is going to usher in a new round of development and wealth and innovation, I think is still the dominant one, not just in Chile, but in Argentina, Bolivia. Here in the United States, you know, California has its lithium valley. The state of Nevada has its lithium loop. So we're seeing territories all over the world rebranding themselves to try to capture some of this lithium wealth, whether that will happen, whether it will be durable. You know, I personally am pretty skeptical about that, but who knows?
- [45:23]
Sandra (Interviewer, New Books Network)
Finally, do you intend to continue to work on this project?
- [45:30]
Dr. Javiera Barandiarán
And.
- [45:32]
Sandra (Interviewer, New Books Network)
Also, what are the other things that, you know that are on top of your radar right now with regard to this current project? Are there any.
- [45:41]
Dr. Javiera Barandiarán
Yeah, so, yeah.
- [45:43]
Sandra (Interviewer, New Books Network)
That you would like to look into?
- [45:45]
Dr. Javiera Barandiarán
Yeah, I'm continuing to work on lithium. I mentioned the direct lithium extraction technologies. I'm looking into that. Shifting my focus from the Salar de Tacama, which is the oldest brine lithium mine in Chile, the most well established. It's really enormous. It's actually two different mines on one single deposit. Shifting my focus to look at the Maricunga salt flat, which is new. So there hasn't been a functioning lithium mine there yet, but there's been efforts to develop it for 40 or 50 years, and those efforts now are looking more serious and perhaps more likely to actually happen, but we'll see what happens. So I'm following that and trying to use that research to ask questions about inequities, global asymmetries, when it comes to innovation and industrial innovation and. And to what extent and how can countries like Chile really benefit economically from having that local knowledge about local ecologies and things like that? Because in theory, those are really necessary to make lithium brine mining work. But we haven't really seen too much benefit coming from that sort of local advantage, we might say. So that's one set of articles, that's more of an article project that I'm working on and then the next set of articles. I've been working for a few years on glaciers and glacier imaginaries in Chile with colleagues there. And glaciers are so interesting because Chile has a growing number of glaciers because as climate change melts them, they fragment. And so we actually have more. We now have 26,000 glaciers. A few years ago we had 24,000 glaciers in Chile, according to a national inventory of glaciers. So Chile has, you know, 80% of South America's glaciers as a country, ecologically, our water, our landscapes, you know, when we think about the forms of life that will continue to be viable and possible, it's really important to be looking at those long term water sources. And glaciers are an important part of that, as you know, also in India and the importance of the Himalayan glaciers there. So I've been looking at that for a while. We have a really cool book coming out that's called A Social Inventory of Glaciers where we've collected testimonies and writings by people from all walks of life, from archaeologists to tourists to school children, to activists who are writing about what a specific glacier means to them and the connections between that glacier and perhaps their livelihoods or where they live or a community. And it's illustrated by an artist. And so that's a very public facing book. Building on that and building on these rights of nature work, I'm thinking through, through how to what does it mean when we create high altitude mountain parks, for example, where glaciers are located, and we open those places up for tourism. How do we do tourism in a more responsible way? And so we offer people that opportunity to get to know a place to connect with nature. A lot of people say you need to know something in order to love it and protect it. I want to interrogate that common sense sort of wisdom to really understand what's behind it, because I don't think it captures the full story, I don't think it's actually true, but it rings true to so many of us who do enjoy going out into the mountains and into nature. And so it's a question, it's a project that's looking at how do we think about both rights of nature and rights to nature as intimately linked to each other.
- [50:00]
Sandra (Interviewer, New Books Network)
This is something, I mean, this is all quite exciting. And good luck for your future endeavors, the projects, especially the ones facing public. It sounds wonderful. Looking forward to reading it. I have one more question, and I should probably asked it like long time back, but how do you differ from, you know, the kind of Anthropocene histories that we see today, planetary history and all those kind of kinds of literature? How do you take from it and how do you like, differ from it?
- [50:37]
Dr. Javiera Barandiarán
Oh, that's a big question. I think what was really useful for me was thinking of lithium as a, as an interscalar vehicle. And I'm taking that term from Gabrielle Hecht, who's a historian of mining and of Africa and of nuclear power. And what, what she means by that is following, latching onto something and following it through multiple, different overlapping scales. Right. So from the local to the global and back again, again as a professor in a global studies department, this is one of the, one of the challenges that we're constantly reflecting on and teaching our students how to deal with. I think there's a risk those planetary histories can be very useful for giving us a broad frame and a broader context, but they don't capture, of course, the complexities of lived experience. And they tend to be a little bit flat footed if they address global inequalities and injustices at all. It tends to be in very broad terms. And that can be useful sometimes. But that can also help muddy the waters and sort of help reify and oversimplify things like opposition to mining, I think. So it's really important to be working together. I see the academy as a big collaborative enterprise where collectively we're covering these different scales and these different places of the world and hopefully reading each other and in dialogue with each other to help create together a constantly moving, dynamic global puzzle. But yeah, I would encourage you to look at that article intrascalar vehicle to think through the ways in which one can find a very empirical and material point of contact to then weave it through and tell a much broader global and local story.
- [53:05]
Sandra (Interviewer, New Books Network)
Thank you so much, Dr. Javier, this was a great session. It was wonderful listening to you and thank you for.
- [53:12]
Dr. Javiera Barandiarán
Thank you, Sandra. It was a real pleasure and I wish you best of luck on your research.