Bolivia's troubled efforts to develop a commercial lithium industry.
Bolivia's lithium accounts for a significant percentage of the world's known reserve. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Mark Goodale traces the development of Bolivia's closely guarded lithium project through the perspectives of a wide array of people and institutions, including workers at the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat; the state lithium company in La Paz; Latin America's 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 Bolivia's lithium, and at megaindustrial scales that far outstrip current production, there won't 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.
Mark Goodale is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Lausanne and author of Reinventing Human Rights and A Revolution in Fragments.
"Extracting the Future offers a penetrating analysis of how plans for global energy transition collide with histories of extractivism, resource colonialism, and local resistance. With ethnographic depth and geopolitical insight, Mark Goodale unravels the contradictions at the heart of our lithium-fueled future to map the tension between the promises of green energy and the realities of mineral dependency. Essential reading for all scholars of energy, environment, and global politics."—Imre Szeman, Futures of the Sun: The Struggle over Renewable Life
"Weaving stories drawn from salt flats, evaporation ponds, engineering spaces, EV showrooms, public meetings, and business headquarters, among others, this book creates a portrait of lithium mining that is far more comprehensive—and narratively captivating—than any other I’ve come across."—Andrea Marston, author of Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia
"In Extracting the Future, Goodale artfully documents the metamorphosis of lithium as it maneuvers through lives, labor, and geopolitical formations to illustrate how this elemental form occupies horizons of energy revolution and climatological redemption."—Cymene Howe, author of Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene
304 pp.6 x 9Illus: 26 b/w illustrations; 3 maps
9780520402799$29.95|£25.00Paper
Oct 2025