Beneath the arid salt pans of the Andes lies more than half of the world’s reserves of lithium: the bright silver metal essential to producing the rechargeable batteries found inside our electronics and used to propel electric vehicles. In this piece created by The World Around, Ernesto Picco introduces Lithium. 

Encompassing parts of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, the so-called Lithium Triangle has become the center of a “white gold” rush, as soaring global demand for EVs and storage technologies spurs international corporations and state entities competing to power the green transition. But while removing polluting combustion engines from the roads in the Global North, these operations are having a profound human and environmental toll on the ground in South America.  Professor Ernesto Picco of the National University of Santiago del Estero, Argentina, has spent months at the frontlines of these vast extraction processes, aiming to understand their unseen ecological and economic consequences through the political tensions stirred in local indigenous communities. Bringing this research to his latest book—“Crónicas del litio: Sudamérica en disputa por el futuro de la energía global” (Lithium Chronicles: South America in dispute for the future of global energy) (Futurock 2022)—Picco is retelling the wide-angle, geopolitical framing of the Lithium Triangle to put the focus on people.