IN JANUARY 2021, I traveled to an obscure part of northern Nevada with my friend Will Falk, pitched a tent, and began a protest campaign against a planned open-pit lithium mine.
Thacker Pass — which is known as Peehee Mu’huh in Paiute — would be our home for the next three years as we rallied opposition, filed lawsuits, appealed to politicians and the White House, and even took nonviolent direct action by putting our bodies in front of the bulldozers.
It wasn’t enough. Today, the landscape of Thacker Pass is being turned into a mining district. Backhoes and dump trucks have replaced sage grouse and pronghorn antelope. The roar of diesel engines has replaced the songs of meadowlarks. Seven of us mine opponents are being sued for blocking construction, and two of us also face a $50,000 fine for building a latrine. If any of us return to Thacker Pass — even my Paiute friends for whom this land is sacred — we’ll be arrested.
The irony is that, because Thacker Pass is a lithium mine, and lithium is used in electric car batteries, the mining company, federal government, and big environmental groups all call it “a very environmentally responsible mine.”
On top of this, the workers who are building the mine belong to a union: North America’s Building Trades Union. The lithium which they will begin extracting soon will be shipped to General Motors factories across the United States where more union labor, from the United Auto Workers, will use it in electric car batteries.
This is all an example of how today’s climate movement is attempting to bypass the “jobs versus the environment” debate that has long divided the labor and environmental movements. The answer to this conundrum, they say, is green technology. Joe Biden’s website, for instance, proudly states “When I think about climate change, I think jobs.” Those jobs come from battery factories, electric vehicle plants, transmission line construction, solar and wind power projects, and mines like Thacker Pass. The World Economic Forum expects there to be 24 million of these “green jobs” in the US, 14 percent of all jobs, by 2030. And unions, increasingly concerned about global warming, see this as opportunity to revitalize the country’s middle class.
But this revitalization comes not only at a cost to sacrifice zones like Thacker Pass, but also to people: More than two-thirds of the minerals used in renewable energy and electric vehicles come from mines on Indigenous or peasant lands, often in the Global South.
“We all want better working conditions, but does solidarity end at the US border?”
I grew up in a union family. My mom is a member of SEIU 1199NW, and I remember listening to her stories from the picket lines. Each summer, we’d go to see the great labor musician and storyteller Utah Phillips sing “The union makes us strong.” But I’m also an environmentalist, and this leaves me in an uneasy position when workers looking for good jobs end up working in industries that are destructive to ecosystems and communities and that depend on cheap labor abroad.
BEHIND EACH PIECE of green technology is extraction. A recent International Energy Agency report estimates that reaching “net zero” by 2050 would require six times the amount of minerals used today. Another research paper says this would mean mining as much metal over the next 15 years as was extracted between the dawn of humanity and 2013.
“Mining is unavoidably destructive to the environment and human rights,” says Jamie Kneen, co-founder of MiningWatch Canada and one of the world’s leading watchdogs of the industry. Only some of these impacts can be abated, he says. And even then, “avoiding or mitigating harm costs money — and mining companies are amazingly reluctant to spend it.”
But, according to a community group in the Philippines I spoke with, the problems with mining go much deeper than a lack of money for harm reduction. The group calls themselves the Local Autonomous Network (LAN), and their representative has asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons. (According to Global Witness, at least 281 land defenders were murdered in the Philippines between 2012 and 2022. )
“Mining is part of a system of neocolonialism or domination,” the LAN representative told me. “The United States occupied the Philippines from 1898 until 1946, and America never left.” The legacy of that occupation, they add, includes a “framework of development which is very destructive to our environment and culture.”
Deforestation and cassiterite mining in the Tratarim do Igarapé Preto Indigenous Land, Amazonas State, Brazil. More than two-thirds of the minerals used in renewable energy and electric vehicles come from mines on Indigenous or peasant lands, often in the Global South. Photo by Vinícius Mendonça/Ibama.
Chief among these imposed systems, they say, are exploitative free trade agreements and structural adjustment programs which bankroll extractive industries like mining for consumer products in wealthy countries. The Philippines is one of the world’s leading sources of minerals, especially nickel and copper, and the comprador government (along with multinational corporate partners and institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund) is promoting the construction of more mines there. This, the LAN representative says, is leading to “human rights violations, environmental destruction, displacement, ethnocide, abduction, and killings.”
Stories like these are unfortunately the norm in global mineral supply chains. In Guatemala, Russia, and Indonesia, nickel mining corporations have been implicated in land theft, violence, sexual abuse, and pollution. Indigenous communities protesting lithium mining and corruption in Argentina and Chile have also faced abuse and assault from police.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which supplies most of the cobalt used in electric vehicles, smartphones, and other rechargeable batteries, the situation is even worse. In his 2023 book Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, global slavery researcher Siddharth Kara writes of the brutal working conditions, child labor, slavery, and environmental devastation in the DRC’s cobalt industry. “The depravity and indifference unleashed on the children working [in Congolese cobalt mines] is a direct consequence of a global economic order that preys on the poverty, vulnerability, and devalued humanity of the people who toil at the bottom of global supply chains.”
The inequalities at play in these industries are staggering. According to new research published in the journal Nature Communications, 99 percent of mining labor is in the Global South, but wages there are 87 to 95 percent lower than what workers doing the same job are paid in the Global North. One of the researchers, Jason Hickel, says this is the “result of imperialist dynamics in the world economy” that funnel cheap resources from poor countries to rich ones. (The vast majority of mined metals are used in wealthy nations.)
“The West can never have an ethical relationship with the Global South if all they want is our resources.”
The question of how to change this injustice is challenging, because the imperialist dynamics Hickel refers to are profitable — and powerful corporations will act to protect their wealth. That’s certainly the case at car companies using lithium from places like Thacker Pass and cobalt from the DRC. I spoke to one employee of a major US automaker who told me that, after she spoke to her co-workers about human rights and environmental issues in her company’s supply chain, she “hit a legal wall.” The message from management amounted to Stop asking questions and don’t make trouble, and she backed down. “I have to have a job,” she told me.
The scale of systemic barriers is sometimes stunning. In Panama, the government banned new mines in 2023 as a result of mass mobilizations. But earlier this year, a corporate investor filed a lawsuit claiming the decision violates the Panama-Canada free trade agreement by infringing on a foreign corporation’s right to mine. If the investor wins, the Panamanian government may be forced to pay billions. In a similar case in 2019, arbitrators at the World Bank ordered Pakistan to pay an Australian mining company $11 billion after the country refused to permit a copper-gold mine. Facing a fine equivalent to a quarter of its entire government budget, Pakistan was forced to back down and issue the permits.
All of this points to the need for systemic change. “The West can never have an ethical relationship with the Global South if all they want is our resources,” the LAN representative tells me. “But there is no one type of action that will solve this. Boycotts, strikes, education, that is all great. But we need to act more deeply and collectively.”
Denzel Caldwell, a community organizer and economist with the Tennessee-based Highlander Center, a century-old school for social justice and labor organizers whose alumni include Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and Rosa Parks, agrees. “We need to reshape the relationship between the Global South and the Global North entirely,” Caldwell says. “This is why labor forces need to adopt a decolonial lens. We all want better working conditions, but does solidarity end at the US border?”
THE NEED FOR collective action that reshapes the relationship between the Global North and Global South has been discussed among community organizers for decades. The late civil rights activists Grace Lee and James Boggs wrote in 1974 that “the revolution to be made in the United States will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more things” — possessions which, they write, “this country has acquired at the expense of [the Global South].”
In Boggs’ view, moving away from consumerism requires “re-imagining ourselves… beyond capitalist categories.” In other words, rather than just imagining fairer wealth distribution and “greener” products like electric cars, they envision a society working towards non-monetary goals entirely.
These alternatives are increasingly common around the world. In Bhutan, the constitution adopted in 2008 directs the government to minimize income inequality, protect the environment, and prioritize “Gross National Happiness” rather than Gross National Product. In Europe, the degrowth movement is calling for a planned democratic contraction in the use of energy and raw materials, sacrificing economic growth for justice and sustainability while trying to maintain good standards of living. And in South America, a concept called “Buen Vivir,” which is rooted in Indigenous traditions and prioritizes harmony between humans and nature, is gaining ground.
“Real change will require the type of solidarity we haven’t seen yet”
Caldwell says building these alternatives is crucial. His work focuses on the solidarity economy, which he describes as “an umbrella term for institutions and practices that are grounded in mutualism, cooperation, democracy, pluralism and building a world beyond racial capitalism.” As examples, he lists worker-owned cooperatives; time banks — a bartering system where people exchange services for hourly time credits, rather than money; participatory budgeting — a democratic process in which community members decide how public funds are spent; and community land trusts that function as responsible stewards of land use on behalf of place-based communities. But none of these, he says, would “be possible to scale up under global capitalism.”
How to get there from here continues to present a challenge. “This new ‘green’ industrial growth is going to create massive environmental chaos and displace millions of Indigenous people,” says Chandan Kumar, national coordinator for an Indian coalition of labor groups called The Working People’s Charter. “But we don’t have an alternative framework yet. We are still stuck on basic questions like minimum wage. We have workers here in the Volkswagen, General Motors, and Mercedes supply chains making clutches or gears, and their salary is $100 a month. They don’t have enough food to eat.”
Kumar thinks that real change will require the type of solidarity we haven’t seen yet , but he sees signs this might not be far off. Under the leadership of Shawn Fain, for example, the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America — one of the largest and most diverse unions in North America — has recently been willing to take on political minefields like calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Kumar believes this means labor organizers may soon be willing to go further on other issues, too. “They [unions in the Global North] need to be more proactive,” he says.
Caldwell agrees. “Labor radicalism is a long tradition that’s been buried,” he says. “A hundred years ago, workers weren’t afraid to combat the state, and there was a stronger sense of internationalism. We need to remember that history. It’s important for people not only to change their working conditions, but also fundamentally question the industry itself.”
Kumar finds the tension between the harms of so-called “green” industries and workers’ rights challenging. “I’m lost and confused,” he tells me. “We’re in a sandwich-like situation here.”
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