Where Capital and Nature Meet

This interview was conducted remotely between Rhode Island and London in July.

ADRIENNE BULLER How is it that you came to study extraction?

THEA RIOFRANCOS I first moved to Ecuador in 2008. Living there in a moment where Pink Tide[1] governments were coming into power across the region, it was immediately obvious that a key point of tension was the governance of extractive sectors. Extractive sectors are what link Latin America to the world system, from the origins of colonial conquest to the present. Or, to put it in the words of the mainstream business press: the region is a “mining powerhouse”. South America in particular is where a lot of the minerals for the global economy come from, with all the social and environmental effects and political-economic complexities that issue from that fact. But it was really under the Pink Tide that different left-wing visions of how to manage extraction, or depart from it entirely, came to the fore of political conversation and conflict. This often created deep divisions among leftists which—while tragic in many cases to witness, because a divided left is a weaker left—was also fascinating from an analytic perspective in terms of the range of ways that you can both critique extraction and use public policies and social movements to transform it. 

Around 2018, I decided to shift focus to extractive sectors’ relationship to the energy transition. The energy transition is, in theory, the process of moving from a fossil fuel-based economy to a renewable energy-based economy to mitigate the worst effects of the climate crisis. But doing so involves the physical build out of all sorts of energetic and material and logistical systems. The environmental contradiction is that all aspects of this build out of infrastructure have environmental impacts. For those who have progressive politics and are interested in the issues of climate and energy, this obviously presents a set of dilemmas with respect to how to mitigate the harms of mitigation itself. And the more one explores this topic, a whole host of other conflicts and issues come to the fore, from geopolitics to supply chain vulnerabilities, to the complexities of social mobilization and social movements around the frontlines of extraction. 

AB Your latest book, 'Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism' focuses largely on lithium, but you also reference several other minerals—copper, cobalt, yttrium—all of which fall within various designations like “critical” or “strategic” or “rare earth”. 

Could you explain the significance of these designations? What do they really mean, where do they come from, and what or whose purposes do they serve?

TR It can be counterintuitive to make the argument that words and language and definitions really matter when we’re talking about the hard materiality of extraction. Why care about these floating signifiers when we’re looking at something as physical as a mine or an ecosystem or a watershed? 

But the political languages we use not only reflect balances of power, they can also create political opportunities. This is particularly clear in the case of extractive sectors. As you just named, there are a lot of different definitional categories. These are often precisely defined somewhere, in, say, the technical compendium of a government report. But in practice they’re also thrown around very loosely, and this is itself both politically pragmatic and very productive for the actors that do it. In other words, the malleability of these terms in their practical usage turns out to be politically important. 

“Critical minerals” are the broadest category, describing, at least in the US government’s definition, those minerals considered essential for economic functioning and/or national security. And—this second clause is important—to be critical they must also be subject to some supply vulnerability, whether geologically or in terms of market availability. It could be that supply is really concentrated, such that a few specific countries “control” the supply. Or it could be that there are disruptions to the supply—for instance, what’s happening right now in the Red Sea with the Houthis’ interventions or in terms of the longer history of the Suez Canal. As you can tell from the definition, there’s a lot of room for interpretation regarding which minerals count as “critical”, and so we tend to get a growing roster, whereby every time a new economic sector or activity gets a certain status in the broader economy, like the energy transition or even AI, then all the minerals necessary for, say, solar panels, or for lithium batteries, or for transmission lines—all of those minerals would make it onto the list. Hence, lithium joined the US critical minerals list in 2018. 

The origins of this terminology are important, and they help explain this conflation of what’s important for national security and what’s important for the broader economy. The designation used to be “strategic and critical minerals”, and the origin of the US even keeping a list like this dates to the lead-up to World War II. During the war itself, the US government intervened directly to ensure supplies of all such minerals relating to military applications. 

So that’s all to say that the very idea of keeping a list of what minerals are “critical” or “strategic” has a bellicose origin, and that applies both in terms of certain economic realms being deemed essential to national security, as well as in a tactical sense: if this is so important, we might use military means to acquire it. Both of those senses adhere in the concept of critical minerals. And even in the contemporary context or when we’re just talking about green technologies, there’s a trace of this origin that is important to acknowledge. 

Rare earths are a subset of critical minerals. They are a set of 17 elements with some chemical similarities to one another. There are two important things to bear in mind here. The first is that lithium is not a rare earth, and the second is that rare earths are not rare. Rather, they were thought to be rare when they were first discovered in the 18th century, and the name stuck. While not rare geologically, there’s a lot of technical difficulty and therefore environmental impact in how you extract and separate them. They have also been in the news recently due to US-China geopolitics concerning their supply, as several are essential both for the energy transition, semiconductor or military technologies.

These definitions matter, and whether they’re called “strategic” materials or minerals, as they are in China, or critical minerals in the US—if a government sees that it’s important to keep such a list, it’s because they want to ensure access, whether domestically or abroad. They might want to securitize the supply chains that produce them. New forms of government support, promotion, financing, and protection tend to ensue. These state interventions are a boon for the private sector because they form a clear signal that the government of whatever place wants to make sure this mineral is extracted, which might mean subsidies for the private sector, might mean tax breaks and other forms of financial backstopping. The language of critical minerals is in this sense performative: it creates new social facts on the ground with real material consequences.