Introduction

While on a visit to Silver Peak, Nevada, home to the world's first brine lithium mine, Philip Comer, president of the lithium pioneer Foote Mineral Com pany, learned of "a change in the political climate" that kicked him into action.1 "The date was September 1973: a new government had come to the fore in Chile," and Comer, along with Foote's men, left the desert of Nevada for the world's driest desert, to negotiate access to the lithium in Chile's Atacama Salt Flat (in Spanish, Salar de Atacama, and in this book, Salar with a capital S for short).Standing on the razor-sharp salt rock, Comer's geologists, salt experts, and engineers drilled a test well to extract the lithium-rich brine stored under ground.The brine flowed so easily-one thousand gallons per minute-it was like pumping from a lake.Comer's geologists knew "that a veritable great lake of lithium lay waiting to be tapped."What attracted Comer to Chile that year was the change in government from Salvador Allende, who had completed the nationalization of nitrate and copper mines, to General Augusto Pinochet.The general took power in a violent coup and restored property and trade laws to attract foreign investment to Chile.Over the next decade, Foote and Chilean officials worked well together, but lithium mining proved harder than Comer would have liked.One reason was that lithium seemed destined to have a better future than its pre sent: Scientists were using it in experimental nuclear fusion reactors and batteries for electric vehicles, which promised to transform, even revolutionize, energy technologies.The other wise antigovernment Pinochet set limits on private industry: He declared lithium as "strategic to the national interest," exploitable only through joint ventures, and capped extraction to safeguard future reserves.Fifty years later, in April 2023, progressive Chilean President Gabriel Boric ratified these same conditions in a new National Lithium Strategy.Global most lithium came from brines under salt flats in the deserts of Nevada and Chile-which pioneered this kind of extraction-and Argentina (figures 0.2 and 0.3).Lithium is nonrenewable, and its mining has tremendous environmental and social impacts.Despite Boric's hope, on a planet exhausted after a century of intense development and extraction, mining today provides a dubious foundation for sustainability or development.Resource nationalism reduces substantive concerns about environmental sustainability to spurious worries about lithium's availability.As the Great