Description
This paper examines how the global green transition reproduces extractive imperialism through new forms of environmental destruction and epistemic violence, exemplified by lithium mining in Argentina’s Salar del Hombre Muerto. Promoted as essential for sustainable development, the expansion of lithium extraction is producing severe ecological degradation, draining scarce water resources and eradicating entire ecosystems that have sustained local livelihoods for centuries. Building on notions of ecological imperialism and ecologically unequal exchange, as well as fieldwork conducted in Argentina, the paper explores how old extractive patterns persist within ostensibly “new” resource frontiers. This continuity demonstrates how environmental sacrifice remains inextricably tied to economic, political, and social control, linking local realities to global power structures
These dynamics are shaped by Argentina’s long-standing denial of Indigenous presence and national narratives of homogeneity, which have been sustained through state policy and development discourse and continue to erase Indigenous identity. This erasure conceals the social and ecological costs of extraction and narrows the horizon of political and economic possibility, presenting extractive-led growth as both natural and necessary. Consequently, state and corporate actors at home and abroad mobilise the language of progress and sustainability to legitimise environmental destruction and the expansion of resource frontiers.
At the same time, Indigenous and local communities in the Puna actively contest these dynamics through anti-extractivist organising and the articulation of alternative relationships to land, water, and livelihood. Linking these struggles to broader histories of coloniality, the paper shows how the green transition renews old imperial logics while generating spaces for decolonial resistance and reimagination of life.
