LITHIUM MINING’S NEXT FRONTIER

The Vasquez brothers aren’t used to visitors. Their farm lies in the remote Puna, a vast plateau region high in the Andes Mountains. The terrain, in the Argentine province of Catamarca, is rough and largely empty; fluffy, big-eyed llamas wander a miles-wide plain between mountains. Only sparse shrubs pepper the ground, glowing in yellow-green Technicolor under the close sun. But one day in 2016, a tall man in his 50s, speaking heavily Australian-accented Spanish, pulled up to the Vasquezes’ remote farmhouse. He told them that close by, under the otherworldly surface of the plateau, lay huge amounts of lithium—the white metal essential to making the batteries for electric vehicles and other clean energy technology—and he had a plan to extract it.

Such arrivals are often bad news in the Andean highlands, which stretch across parts of Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru. Over the past 30 years, foreign mining companies have descended on the region to dig up its plentiful deposits of copper, zinc, silver, and lithium, of which 59% of the world’s known reserves are here. But mining it interferes with one of the world’s driest ecosystems: parts of the Puna can go years without rain, and people here rely on a sparse network of rivers and salt lakes, fed by underground water stores built up over thousands of years. Since the