Five Resources for Organizers
New report outlines harms of mining; How "stacking functions" applies to community organizing; and more.
Welcome to Biocentric, a newsletter focused on sustainability, greenwashing, and building a resistance movement to defend the planet. I’m Max Wilbert, co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass and co-author of ‘Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It.’ Biocentric subscriptions are free, but paying for a subscription supports the community organizing work you read about here, and gets you access to behind-the-scenes information and unreleased drafts.
This post contains five parts:
New report outlines how mining harms communities and the planet
“Skill Stacking”
Lithium Nevada Receives $2.26 Billion Loan from the Federal Government
An interview with the Korea IT Times
Excuses for logging old-growth forest in California
New report outlines how mining harms communities and the planet
Today, Protect Thacker Pass is announcing the release of a new comprehensive report, “How Mining Hurts Communities.”
The report focuses on the growth of mining and especially rapidly growing demand for lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and other metals for use in “green technologies.” According to the report, at least 384 new mines for minerals such as graphite, lithium, nickel, and cobalt will need to be built in the next decade to meet projected 2035 demand for batteries.
“Mining may impact your community sooner than you think,” says lead author Elisabeth Robson. “We are on the brink of the biggest expansion of mining in history.”
The report includes information about:
Projected mining industry growth
How mining harms ecosystems
Eight mining and extraction case studies from around the world
The scale of mining globally
The relationship between indigenous communities and the mining industry
Links between extractive industries, violence against women, and other crimes
Analysis of mining law
The relationship between fossil fuel industries and mining
Mining has a long history in the western U.S., and especially in Nevada, known as the “Silver State” for the first major discovery of silver ore in the United States in 1859. Silver and gold were mined to enrich prospectors; copper, lead, and iron to supply the military; and of course oil and gas to fuel the modern economy.
Today, we are seeing a new “green rush” for so-called “critical minerals” to supply industry, including uranium for nuclear power; lithium, copper, nickel, and more for electric vehicle and grid storage batteries, iron and nickel for steel to make wind turbines; silver, cadmium, lead and more to make solar panels; and copper, iron, and nickel to make high voltage grid lines.
“Most people do not understand the impact that mines and the mining industry have on communities, in part because mining usually takes place in rural areas and has the most impact on poor and rural communities,” says Protect Thacker Pass co-founder Max Wilbert, who assisted with the report. “These harms include destruction of land culturally and historically important to communities; violence, especially to women and girls; and pollution that impacts both human and non-human communities who depend on the land, clean water, and clean air.”
Robson says the goal of this report is to educate and empower people to fight the mining industry, and to challenge the idea of “green growth.”
“We’ve put together this report to inform people concerned about mining’s impacts in their communities, around the state of Nevada, and throughout the country and the world,” she said. “We show how mining companies stifle dissent, how the law sides unjustly with corporations, how mining pollutes the land, air, and water, and how mining destroys the ecosystems we all depend on for life.”
You can download the report for:
1) Reading on a computer screen
2) Printing (we recommend printing double sided and stapling along the edge)
Contact us for more information here: https://www.protectthackerpass.org/contact-us/
For ideas for a future without mining and extraction, you can read our Solutions here: https://www.protectthackerpass.org/solutions/
To donate to Protect Thacker Pass and help us educate communities, or contribute to our legal defense fund, click here: https://www.protectthackerpass.org/donations-and-funding/
About Protect Thacker Pass
Protect Thacker Pass is a grassroots community organization that was originally established to oppose the Thacker Pass lithium mine in northern Nevada. It’s mission has since expanded to include opposing the Jindalee lithium mine proposed just north of Thacker Pass and to include advocating for nature over mining more broadly.
“Skill Stacking”
The world needs serious action to halt ecological destruction.
Understanding this is simple, but doing it isn’t. My journey as a radical activist has involved years of dedication, study, practice — and most importantly, determination. One particularly useful concept that I would like to share today is the idea of “stacking functions,” or skill stacking.
Specialists — experts in one field — can be very useful in the right situation. But usually it is more helpful to have generalists, people with skills in a wide variety of areas. In other words, you can be more effective as an activist if you can write, organize, and speak effectively than if you could only do one of those skills. And one person who can do all three may be able to do more than three people separately. This is especially important in asymmetric conflicts, aka situations in which we have limited resources and numbers (which includes most activist work).
Stacking functions is a core idea in permaculture. Each element within a permaculture environment, whether it be a homestead, a landscape, a village, a garden, etc., should fill multiple functions or benefits. This is a mirror of nature.
Wetlands, for example, provide habitat for wildlife, filter water, sink moisture into aquifers, assist in wildfire resilience, moderate extreme temperatures, and sequester carbon. They slow down rainfall during storms and thus reduce flooding, and they can provide food — fish, cattails, etc.
All of these benefits provided by wetlands synergize into a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. This is why wetlands are among the most biodiverse and valuable habitats on Earth.
In activism, similar synergies begin to emerge when people who have multiple skills stacked begin to collaborate and cooperate in multifunctional teams. As a basketball fan, this is somewhat similar to the trend in modern hoops where, increasingly, all players can perform the fundamental skills of shoot, pass, defend, and dribble. It's very rare to see players reach the highest levels of the sport with only one dominant skill. If you can't defend, play decent offense, pass, and play within an overall team strategy, it's very difficult to keep you on the court during the chess match that is playoff basketball.
Activists would do well to internalize these lessons. The more that we can develop multiple overlapping skill sets, the more effective we can be in defending the natural world. This video shares my thoughts on this topic:
How to Get Started
Training and skill development are very important for activists. For the past decade, I've been involved in creating training programs which provide a conceptual and theoretical framework for effective organizing and action. In these programs, we set specific learning objectives and encourage self-directed study and practice under the mentorship from more experienced activists. If anyone is interested in these training programs, or wants to discuss campaign organizing with me, please reach out.
Lithium Nevada Receives $2.26 Billion Loan from the Federal Government
Lithium Argentina (Formerly Part of Lithium Americas) Sells 15% Stake to Ganfeng Lithium
In other Thacker Pass news:
15 months ago, Lithium Americas Corporation decided to split into two separate companies. Lithium Americas, which owns the Thacker Pass, Lithium Mine, and other projects in North America, and Lithium International, which owns their mining operations in Argentina.
Corporations exist to protect their owners and shareholders from liability and maximize profits by externalizing, pollution, destruction of communities, exploitation of workers, and so on. The term "limited liability corporation" is only a misnomer in that it describes only one type of corporation. The tendency described by that phrase is present across almost all corporations.
As I wrote at the time:
Why are they doing this? In short: to protect themselves from accountability for their crimes. They are doing this to limit their liability, protect themselves from activists and political inquiries, and access loans from the U.S. Department of Energy.
The lithium brine project at Cauchari-Olaroz, in northwestern Argentina, is 44.8% owned by LAC and 46.7% owned by the Chinese company Ganfeng Lithium.
Two workers died at that site in October [2022] in unknown circumstances, and The Washington Post has made allegations of serious human rights violations.
In summer 2023, mass protests against lithium mining broke out in the indigenous communities of Argentina. There have been since been credible allegations of extreme police misconduct, including sexual assault. More information here:
LAC is trying to offload their China connection in order to bypass Republican opposition and access federal battery money, and distance themselves from the human rights abuses, environmental harms, and now worker deaths in Argentina that mirror what is beginning at Thacker Pass.
Now, Lithium Nevada Corporation, the U.S. subsidiary of Lithium Americas, has been granted a $2.26 billion conditional loan from the Federal Government to develop the Thacker Pass lithium mine. The loan will be offered at a roughly 4.2% interest rate. Looking at my bank, the lowest interest rate loans currently available around roughly 8%, which means this government handout amounts to a direct handout of about $250 million on top of the value of the loan itself.
Meanwhile, Lithium Argentina has sold a 15% stake in Proyecto Pastos Grandes S.A. (“PGCo”), the Company’s indirect wholly-owned Argentinian subsidiary holding the Pastos Grandes project (“Pastos Grandes” or “Project”) in Salta, Argentina to Ganfeng Lithium, the China-based largest lithium company in the world.
This type of corporate deal is not unique. Corporations are often splitting, merging, and changing their corporate structure to access subsidies and navigate political uncertainties in different areas of the world. This is one major reason why corporations engage in transnational operations: the legal gray areas and jurisdictional differences allow corporations to hack the system.
Interview with the Korea IT Times
Last month, I was interviewed by Dr. Layne Hartsell, a member of the board at Korea IT Times and is a research professor at the Asia Institute, Tokyo/Berlin. His work is on energy, economy, and environment.
The global scramble for lithium, dubbed the "White Gold Rush," is unfolding much like its historical predecessors: rife with land grabs, human rights abuses, and ecological devastation. While the demand for batteries fuels this rush, communities on the frontline face a stark reality – "We don't eat batteries," they say, "Batteries take the water, and life is gone."
The story echoes across continents, resonating with the historical exploitation of silver mines in Spain and Bolivia. Spain was famous for its prodigious output of silver during ancient times, particularly from southern Spain at Rio Tinto in the west and at Cartagena in the east. Spain became Rome’s greatest silver-producing region.
Later around the time of the end of Venice and the European expansion into the New World, Potosi in Bolivia became the central location of silver mining and was referred to as “man-eating mines” echoing the Roman saying damnatio et metalla.
Ecologically, today, we can see the results of pollution of the atmosphere of the Northern Hemisphere recorded in the levels of heavy metals impurities in Greenland ice, and lithium extraction is likely to be similar. In the U.S., professor Steven H. Emmerman, a hydrologist, raises critical concerns about the "reckless creativity" of companies like Lithium Americas (LAC) in places such as Nevada at Thacker Pass where the company is beginning operations for extraction. Emmerman is concerned of either “catastrophic failure (as with the Mount Polley disaster in British Columbia) or gradual leakage of pollution into the water table for thousands of years.” It is the same with another associated project in Argentina at Coachari Oloroz, though in an article by Mark Robison in the Reno Gazette-Journal, LAC representative Tim Crowley states that “he is unaware if the company has had problems with protesters in other countries.”
The human cost is equally alarming. In Latin America, indigenous communities living near lithium deposits are displaced and their water sources threatened. Their plea is poignant: "We are like rocks on the road, kicked away. "Corporate CEO Elon Musk, when challenged about being involved in the 2020 overthrow of the democratically-elected government in Bolivia where the president was one of the only native Americans to serve in the Western Hemisphere, Musk wrote on Twitter “we will coup whomever we want.” When the public backlash occurred, he said that he was joking and that Tesla gets its lithium from Australia, which has a similar history and ecological destruction today from lithium. Such comments expose the general, dangerous disregard for communities and democracies in the world today.
Within the challenges of today, Max Wilbert’s message is that we must move beyond "bright green lies" and embrace responsible, sustainable practices that prioritize the well-being of people and the planet. It's time to break the cycle of exploitation and ensure a future where communities thrive and nature is protected.
The Excuses for Logging Old-Growth Forests
If anyone is still reading, I'm glad you stuck with me this long. The final piece of this post is a video that I made last month about old growth logging in California. In areas where forest fires burn, government agencies are often using aggressive post-fire logging to target and clearcut old-growth trees which would otherwise have been protected. For more information, check out this earlier post:
Many grassroots environmental organizations are working to oppose post-fire logging and aggressive forest thinning. One example is Tahoe Forests Matter. They need our support!
California is going BIG on post-fire logging. Keeping an eye on the Sequoia Forestkeeper suit just filed. Something like 13,000 acres of post-fire “treatment” proposed.