Extracting the Future

Bolivias troubled efforts to develop a commercial lithium industry. Bolivias lithium accounts for a significant percentage of the worlds known reserve. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Mark Goodale traces the development of Bolivias closely guarded lithium project through the perspectives of a wide array of people and institutions, including workers at the Salar de Uyuni, the worlds largest salt flat; the state lithium company in La Paz; Latin Americas 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 Bolivias lithium, and at megaindustrial scales that far outstrip current production, there wont 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.