Economies of Exhaustion in the Salar de Atacama
Written by Saba Farheen
This essay follows a discussion provoked by the works of David Maisel, a renowned American photographer and visual artist who explores the aesthetics and environmental impact of radically human-altered landscapes. In his series Desolation Desert, Maisel reveals the massive mining operations in the vast territory of Chile’s Atacama Desert, containing a complex and contradictory series of developments. Atacama is known to be the highest and driest desert on the planet and a sensitive eco-region, which is at present being transformed at an unparalleled pace and scale by extractive industries. Historically, mining operations in the Atacama have taken the form of enormous open pits devoted to the exploitation of copper reserves; Chile being the world’s top producer of copper. In the past 30 years or more, a surge in lithium mining has further imperiled the environment of the Atacama. Its barren landscape is the result of a “historical turning point in the intensity and scale of resource extraction and constitutes the universal epitome of massive socio-ecological plundering that underlies fossil fuel-powered, modern urban life” (Arboleda 2015, 96). Through the lens of aerial and satellite photography, ironically, such landscapes have become an ‘aesthetic’, popularized by photographers like Maisel, Edward Burtynsky, Garth Lenz and more; hinting at the urgent rate of mineral and water exhaustion which may never be regenerated.
Salty Minerals
In the lithium-extraction fields in Atacama, one of the largest of its type in the world, brine rich in lithium is pumped from underneath the salt flats into huge, jewel-like pools, where it is left to evaporate in stages. These brine pools currently contribute to about 40 percent of the world’s lithium demands and require the extraction and evaporation of large volumes of water. The resulting powder substance is transported to industrial plants in Antofagasta, where 130 tons of lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide are produced every day. This is approximately 48,000 tons of lithium a year, enough to produce about 43 billion iPhones (Arboleda 2020). David Maisel recalls in an interview about one of his photographic expeditions, that he could see the industrial port at Antofagasta, the main economic hub in this export-oriented region, where tankers were getting filled up with the extracted lithium and transported to China. He says, “It’s part of a global economy, and it comes back from China in the form of batteries” (Katwala 2019).
The energy supplied by lithium is promoted as a more sustainable alternative to fossil fuels and the industries that extract and refine them. However, an insatiable demand for the copper, lithium and rare-earth metals required to fuel the consumer electronics and electric vehicle industries is leaving indelible scars on our fragile planet. Lithium’s unique properties—it is the lightest of all metals, heat resistant, and can store substantial amounts of energy in batteries for computers, cell phones, and cars—have fueled a global rush to extract it from hard-rock minerals and brines. Lithium batteries are rapidly rising in price as increasing numbers of people switch to electric cars. To put things in perspective, one version of the Tesla automobile runs on a battery with 140 pounds of lithium compounds, equivalent to what is found in about ten thousand cell phones (Katwala 2019).
Sacrificial Hinterlands
In the context of Lithium extraction, the Atacama desert, located 55 km south of San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, can be described as a ‘hinterland’. A variegated non-city space that has been swept under the upheaval of urbanization in the form of a supply zone and sacrifice zone. In the age of planetary urbanization, such hinterlands lie in the center of contemporary urban issues. And yet, as Brenner and Katsikis point out, they remain enigmatic, as a sort of ‘black box’, hiding away its metabolic flows, internal political-economic operations, land-use matrices, property relations, spatiotemporal dynamics and socioecological crises (Brenner and Katsikis 2020, 26). Raw materials and resources are the basis of urban economies and hence the process of resource acquisition is implicit in the process of urbanization; both multiscalar and global. They together build operational landscapes in the hinterlands which, under a market-led economic regime, eventually exhaust themselves, leaving behind huge environmental and social losses; in other words, sacrificial landscapes. The mining operations and lithium extraction occurring in the Atacama salt pans distinctly reflect a process of ‘desert urbanization’, where the burden of capitalist production is unevenly carried by sacrificial landscapes in the global south.
Extractive Economies/ Planetary Urbanization
In The Urban Revolution, Lefebvre defines a form of capitalism that defines itself through the production of space; a system that now produces planetary geography as a commodity or financial asset, using and abusing people and places to accumulate capital (Merrifield 2018, 1604). The metaphor of ‘implosion-explosion’ was used by Lefebvre to demonstrate how the capitalist urbanisation process projects itself across the planetary scale and constantly creates new forms of urban peripheralization (Arboleda 2105, 99 and Brenner 2000). It is an extended urbanisation occurring under neoliberalizing capitalism. Even though peripheral extraction sites do not have the same population densities as metropolitan urban centres, they undergo transformation through the introduction of new infrastructure, capital and migratory flows to serve and support the latter. These transformed hinterlands then become territories that supersede distinctions between city or country (Arboleda 2015, 99).
The Salar de Atacama salt flats, seen in Maisel’s aerial photography, are captivating and haunting in the sense that the Earth’s surface looks more alien than terrestrial. These images counter our collective misapprehension of the desert as a terra incognita; a vast emptiness that is yet to be inscribed by human history. Industrial developments that occur beyond the city limits, radically transform supposedly remote regions into high-intensity extractive economies and engulf them into a planetary fabric of urbanization. The hinterland is not merely a background ghost acreage but an operationalized landscape that supports city-building processes under global capitalist development. As Brenner notes, unlike historically inherited hinterlands, in which various ‘free gifts’ of nature embedded in the land are used to produce direct commodities, operational landscapes undergo complete redesign of their non-urban or rural fabric to engineer the most optimal social, institutional, infrastructural, biological and ecological conditions for accelerated capital accumulation on the world market (Brenner 2016, 123); i.e., the main objective of extractive economies.
Human workforce is replaced by machinery, equipment and infrastructure, establishing a monofunctional landscape and systematically degrading the ecology, leaving no trace of human and non-human life. On one hand, technological advances, innovations in artificial intelligence, big data, robotics and sophisticated new machineries have not only allowed mining companies to remotely control their operations but also keep it running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, without the need for human intervention or physical labor (Arboleda 2020). And on the other hand, as a result, local territories and communities are exposed to increasing turbulence, risk and precarity, eventually hollowing out the social and cultural value of such rural regions (Brenner and Katsikis 2020, 28). When these industrial processes physically modify the landscape in a way that passes the threshold of regeneration, replenishment or recovery, ‘exhaustion’ occurs (Babidge et. al. 2019, 742). In Mumford’s words, developments that occur under capitalistic ventures undergo an interplay of ‘up-building’ (vertical, horizontal and subterranean industrial-infrastructural clustering) and ‘un-building’ i.e., the degradation of surrounding landscapes due to exhaustion from supplying cities with fuel, resources, water, food and waste management (Mumford 1961, 446-81).
Ecologies of Power
Within the legal framework, extractive forces manifest in different territorialized forms. Some of the resultant urban forms are transient while others are more permanent (Rizzo and Sordi 2020, 2). Resource extraction is a spatially immobile activity and requires large amounts of fixed capital investments for machinery and infrastructure. Thus, the spatial integration systems required for capital accumulation, especially for transport networks across the continental scale, demand a framework of institutional power. Latin-American countries possess some of the world’s largest mineral and oil reserves, as well as investment-friendly regulatory frameworks. The influence of neoliberal governance frameworks, financial capital and technological developments has fueled huge investments in resource extraction infrastructure across the whole region (Arboleda 2015, 97). Since the late 1990’s, most mining codes underwent reforms in order to liberalize domestic market conditions and attract international investment. There are three main characteristics behind all mining codes, first – the state is the absolute sole owner of natural resources, second – the underground is owned by the state, regardless of any property rights over the surface, and third – mining has been invariably declared as a ‘public interest activity’ (Arboleda 2015, 97-102).
On the counter, leaders of the Peine Indigenous Community among others, have publicly expressed their concerns over the government’s lack of responsibility and on grounds of their territorial, sociocultural and ecological relation with the Salar (Babidge et al. 2019, 747). Ecological threats to the salt pans have become a focus in the regional and national press. Increasing water extraction associated with the growing lithium salt operations in a region that gets less than an inch of rainfall (avg. below 45 mm per year) is an urgent concern, especially in the face of global climate change. The Chilean government does not hold much regulatory power over environmental mitigation or social impacts of water extraction and is also implicit in the ecological exhaustion of the Salar. Saltwater is not regarded as ‘water’ under the Chilean Water Code (1981), therefore lithium companies do not require water rights for brine extraction, and passes under the radar of water basin protection (Babidge et. al. 2019, 746). As Swyngedouw illustrates through the case of water in Guayaquil, Ecuador, the transformation of nature is part of the socio-spatial power relations through which the urbanization process unfolds; privileging some and excluding many (Swyngedouw 1997, 328-329). Planetary urbanization is both an ecological and political-economic process.
Since these extractive economies are developed at colossal scales, the material footprint and environmental impact is also gigantic. It has a deeply scarring effect on local communities, ecosystems, water sources, etc. In some cases, extraction projects trigger protests, revolts and riots from activists and indigenous folk, “making armed private security, militarization and violence the background of these emerging operational landscapes” (Bebbington et al. 2008). There are effects on the micro-economy of a region as well, resulting in increased prices of goods and services. Arboleda reinterprets Lefebvre’s words reflecting the current state of discontentment, revolt and social mobilization behind operationalization of territories in Latin-America and rising commodity prices (Arboleda 2015, 106-107). “…the notion of the planetary designates a convoluted terrain where fences, walls, and militarized borders coexist with sprawling supply chains and complex infrastructures of connectivity” (Arboleda 2020).
Conclusion
Reflecting back on this case of urban and economic crisis, it is clear that geographic unevenness of geological formations lead to some areas becoming territories of extraction while others do not, ultimately generating socio-spatial differences (Arboleda 2015, 105); the Salar de Atacama being one of them. “Uneven development is both the product and the geographical premise of capitalist development” (Smith 2010, 206). The hinterlands of the Capitalocene era are inherently unstable because ecological surpluses are always exhausted sooner or later, rendering these extractive infrastructures obsolete. What then will be the future pathway for these salty territories? Brian Menell, the CEO of TechMet, a company focused on securing metals for the tech industry, says that there is potential for brine-based extraction in Alsace, France, and hard-rock mining in Cornwall, indicating that extractive landscapes like this could become a familiar sight in Europe too. Alternatives based on Sulphur or carbon are decades away and billions of dollars are still being invested into new lithium battery factories and extraction plants (Katwala 2019). Will the violent, profit-driven logics of planetary urbanization continue to degrade, erode and destroy the fabric of social, political and ecological existence in the global North and West too? Or will the looming possibility of such a dystopian event finally urge a form of urbanization that lies within the framework of territorial development + balanced resource management + ecological responsibility? Where rural populations hold design agency in urban transformation and need no longer be ‘salty’ (contemporary figure of speech = bitterness/ anger) against their territorial dispossession.
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Introduction to Urban Economics 