Photo Credit: Battery Industry, lastrealindians.com
By LNS Network Organizer Oren Kadosh
Nevada is “ground zero” for U.S. lithium extraction. Last month, LNS helped organize workers and activists on a tour through Nevada to observe proposed lithium mining sites and hear from Tribal, Indigenous, and frontline community members who are fighting back against the accelerating pace of mining that is threatening to turn critical ecosystems and sacred lands into profit-making sacrifice zones. Workers and organizers included representatives from transit rider organizations, UAW auto manufacturing workers, the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), and newly organized Teamster delivery drivers for Amazon.
At Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in the Mojave Desert we heard from community members and advocates about the impacts to water systems and endangered species of proposed lithium mining sites. In Clayton Valley, the only current active lithium production site in the U.S., a representative from the Western Shoshone Defense Project put the accelerating mining encroachment in context of their continuing loss of Tribal lands and habitat. At the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center we visited the Redwood Materials battery recycling plant as well as the massive Tesla Gigafactory that employs 12,000 workers. We finally finished our journey at Peehee Mu’huh, the Thacker Pass lithium mining site.
Although we must immediately transition away from a fossil fueled transportation system, how we transition is as important as the need to transition. A transition that unleashes a corporate mining bonanza across U.S. communities and ecosystems, as it already is entrenched in places like Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia, is one that won’t solve the climate crisis and will only expand extractive, damaging, and unjust power dynamics. As a report by the Climate and Community Institute puts it, we need “More Mobility and Less Mining,” and for that we must learn and organize with the workers and communities who are upstream and downstream of us in this transitioning sector.