Making, un-making, and re-making deserts through mining and resistance to mining: Contested hydrosocial imaginaries and materialities of lithium in Nevada during the energy transition

Keywords: mining, deserts, lithium, hydrosocial imaginaries, materialities
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 39

Abstract

While Koch (2021) argues that geographers should examine imaginaries, narratives, and connections through space and time that co-constitute the political lives of deserts, Klinger (2017) recognizes that spaces of desert mining take on contested, evolving transnational meanings. Both of these authors inform our study of proposed lithium mining sites in and around Nevada. Incorporating cultural dimensions is significant as well, because as Sanchez-Lopez (2019) asserts lithium becomes a commodity through an “interplay of society-nature production, symbolic means and cultural associations” (1335). We do this through looking at hydrosocial imaginaries that explicitly connect water with society and in so doing drive actions, shape outcomes, and allow collectives of people to recognize common purpose (Boelens 2016; Hommes and Boelens 2017; Berry and Cavazos Cohn forthcoming). Such imaginaries are expressed through and, at moments such as the current energy transition, get embedded within the materialities attached to water, land, technology, and people. We argue that deserts are made, un-made, and re-made, not only as soil and rock are claimed for the mineral lithium and turned into as commodities, but also through the changes mining operations make (or threaten to make) to hydrosocial imaginaries and the material dynamics that attach water to communities. Resistance to mining is also central to this process. Given the extensive focus on mining and society in the Global South (Bridge 2004; Bebbington and Williams 2008; Sosa et al. 2017; Bustos-Gallardo et al 2021), this presentation contributes to addressing the gap in scholarship in the Global North.