Supply chains are vectors of inequality. Colonial patterns are entrenched.
As the world races to electrify itself in the name of climate survival, scholar Thea Riofrancos asks a question that cuts to the heart of the green transition: what does it mean to save the planet if the saving itself repeats the oldest patterns of extraction and dispossession? Her new book, arriving at a moment of urgent decarbonization, traces how lithium mining in places like Chile and Nevada drains aquifers, poisons land, and silences the communities who live atop the very resources the world now calls essential. The paradox she illuminates is not incidental — it is structural, and it demands that we ask who, precisely, the green future is being built for.
- The global rush to electrify everything has created a voracious appetite for lithium, and the communities living above it — indigenous peoples, rural workers, the already-marginalized — are paying the price in depleted water, toxic contamination, and erasure from decisions about their own land.
- Multinational corporations have learned to speak the language of sustainability while operating on the same extractive logic that drove colonial resource economies for centuries, using green branding as cover rather than as transformation.
- Governments in mining regions, often structurally weak or autocratic, provide legal permission for extraction while the human and environmental costs are quietly classified as externalities — invisible in the balance sheet, devastating on the ground.
- Riofrancos refuses the comfort of despair or abstraction, traveling from Chile to Nevada to Washington and centering the voices of miners, displaced families, and communities watching their water vanish — insisting these are the people climate rhetoric claims to protect.
- She argues that the path forward requires a genuine reframing: placing human welfare and environmental justice at the center of extractive decisions, giving affected communities real power, and treating hidden costs as moral and political responsibilities rather than accounting footnotes.
Thea Riofrancos's new book arrives at a charged moment — the world is electrifying at speed, and lithium has become the element everything depends on. But the mining of that lithium, she shows, drains aquifers across Chile, generates toxic waste, and proceeds almost entirely without the consent of the indigenous and rural communities whose land holds the resource. The central irony she returns to throughout is precise and damning: we are poisoning the earth to save it, and we are doing so to people who were never asked.
What Riofrancos calls 'Green Dominance' describes how large multinationals have adopted the vocabulary of climate action without altering their underlying logic. They rebrand as sustainable. They speak of planetary responsibility. But the supply chains connecting mines to factories to consumers remain structures of inequality — colonial in pattern, modernized in justification. Governments that permit these operations provide the legal cover; the human costs are externalized, hidden, and borne by those with the least power to resist.
What distinguishes the book is its refusal of abstraction. Riofrancos moves through Chile, Portugal, Nevada, and Washington, D.C., and she brings with her the voices of miners, displaced families, and communities watching their water disappear. Supply chains, she writes, are not neutral logistics — they are architectures of inequality, and where inequality is embedded, conflict follows.
Yet the book does not end in paralysis. Riofrancos asks what a genuinely different green transition might look like — one that centers human welfare and environmental justice, that grants affected communities real decision-making power, and that counts poisoned water and destroyed ecosystems as central costs rather than acceptable losses. These are not utopian questions. They are the questions that any honest reckoning with green capitalism must eventually face.
Thea Riofrancos's new book arrives at a moment when the world is scrambling to electrify everything in sight—cars, grids, homes—in the name of climate survival. But there is a problem baked into this rush, one that Riofrancos lays bare with surgical precision: the materials that power the green transition are themselves extracted from the earth in ways that devastate it and the people who live on top of it.
Take lithium. The element has become central to battery technology, the backbone of any serious decarbonization plan. Yet mining it drains aquifers in places like Chile at a rate that leaves entire regions parched. The process generates its own toxic waste. And crucially, the people whose land holds the lithium—indigenous communities, rural populations, workers—are rarely consulted about whether the extraction should happen at all, let alone how it should be done. This is the central irony Riofrancos keeps returning to: we are poisoning the earth to save the earth, and we are doing it to people who had no say in the matter.
The book examines what Riofrancos calls "Green Dominance"—the way large multinational corporations, armed with capital, data, and legal leverage, use the language of climate action as cover for the same extractive logic that has always driven colonialism. They rebrand themselves as green. They speak the language of sustainability. But their business model remains unchanged: extract resources, externalize costs, maximize profit. The governments that permit these operations, often autocratic or structurally weak, provide the legal permission slip. The supply chains that connect mines to factories to consumers remain vectors of inequality, just as they were in earlier eras of resource extraction.
What makes Riofrancos's work distinctive is that she does not retreat into despair or moral simplicity. She writes with clarity about the actual science and mechanics of extraction—the chemistry, the logistics, the global networks. She travels from Chile to Portugal, from Nevada to Washington, D.C., and she includes the voices of the people most affected: the miners, the displaced, the communities watching their water disappear. These are not abstractions in her telling. They are the people we claim to be helping when we talk about going green.
Her prose is elegant and precise. In one passage, she writes that supply chains are not merely routes for moving materials—they are structures that embed and perpetuate inequality. Where inequality exists, conflict follows. The colonial patterns that shaped resource extraction centuries ago have not been dismantled; they have been adapted, modernized, given new justification. The struggle over who controls the earth's resources and who bears the cost of that control remains unresolved.
Yet Riofrancos does not end in paralysis. Instead, she argues for a fundamental reframing of how we think about extractive industries and green transitions. What if we centered human welfare and environmental justice instead of profit? What if the people affected by extraction had genuine power in deciding whether and how it happens? What if the costs typically hidden away as "externalities"—the poisoned water, the displaced families, the destroyed ecosystems—were treated as central to the calculation, not peripheral to it? These are not naive questions. They are the questions that any honest conversation about green capitalism must eventually confront.
Citas Notables
Supply chains are much more than geographical routes of material flows. They are vectors of inequality. And with inequality comes conflict.— Thea Riofrancos, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism
La Conversación del Hearth Otra perspectiva de la historia
Why does Riofrancos focus so much on lithium when there are other materials needed for the green transition?
Because lithium is the clearest case of the contradiction. It's essential for batteries, which are essential for decarbonization. But mining it in places like Chile creates immediate, visible harm—aquifers drained, communities displaced, no consultation. It's not a future problem; it's happening now.
So the book is saying we can't go green without causing harm?
Not exactly. She's saying we've been going green in a way that reproduces old colonial patterns—extracting from the periphery, concentrating wealth at the center, treating affected people as costs to be absorbed rather than stakeholders with rights.
Does she offer solutions, or is it all critique?
She's optimistic, actually. She argues for reforming supply chains and extractive industries so that human prosperity and environmental justice are front and center, not afterthoughts. It's not a rejection of the green transition; it's a demand that we do it differently.
What does "Green Dominance" mean in her framework?
It's when corporations use green branding as a tool to maintain power and control, not as a genuine commitment to sustainability. They say they're green, but they're operating under the same profit-first logic that's always driven extraction.
Are there real people in this book, or is it all theory?
Real people. She includes testimonies from miners, displaced communities, workers. These aren't case studies—they're voices of people living with the consequences of decisions made elsewhere.