Francisco Calafate-Faria3, Klemens Laschefski4, Bruna Viana de Freitas5, Fabiana Soares Leme6, Rômulo Barbosa7 and Aline Weber Sulzbacher8
Abstract This article critically examines how the expansion of ‘green’ extractivist frontiers, under the guise of energy transition, reproduces colonial patterns of territorial dispossession and ecological degradation. Drawing from case studies in Portugal and Brazil, we explore how lithium mining projects, justified by climate goals and the decarbonisation consensus, intensify environmental and social violence in historically marginalised territories. We argue that these regions are rendered ‘peripheries’, not by geography but by relational dynamics within global supply chains, where technocratic narratives of sustainability overshadow local knowledge and ecosocial diversity. The discourse of compensation fails to address irreversible cultural and ecological losses, while the ‘energy transition’ serves more to secure markets and geopolitics than to promote justice. Highlighting the resilience and socio-ecological practices of local communities, we call for diverse cosmovisions that centre life, interdependence, and justice, challenging the dominant paradigms of ‘green development’ and offering pathways for a truly transformative transition.
Abstract This article critically examines how the expansion of ‘green’ extractivist frontiers, under the guise of energy transition, reproduces colonial patterns of territorial dispossession and ecological degradation. Drawing from case studies in Portugal and Brazil, we explore how lithium mining projects, justified by climate goals and the decarbonisation consensus, intensify environmental and social violence in historically marginalised territories. We argue that these regions are rendered ‘peripheries’, not by geography but by relational dynamics within global supply chains, where technocratic narratives of sustainability overshadow local knowledge and ecosocial diversity. The discourse of compensation fails to address irreversible cultural and ecological losses, while the ‘energy transition’ serves more to secure markets and geopolitics than to promote justice. Highlighting the resilience and socio-ecological practices of local communities, we call for diverse cosmovisions that centre life, interdependence, and justice, challenging the dominant paradigms of ‘green development’ and offering pathways for a truly transformative transition.
Resumen Este artículo examina críticamente cómo la expansión de las fronteras extractivistas asociadas a la transición energética reproduce patrones coloniales de despojo territorial y degradación ecológica. A partir de estudios de caso en Portugal y Brasil, exploramos cómo los proyectos de minería de litio, en nombre de los objetivos climáticos y del consenso sobre la descarbonización, intensifican la violencia ambiental y social en territorios históricamente marginados. Sostenemos que estas regiones son convertidas en “periferias” no por su geografía, sino por las dinámicas relacionales que se reproducen dentro de las cadenas globales de suministro, donde las narrativas tecnocráticas de la sostenibilidad eclipsan los saberes locales y la diversidad ecosocial. El discurso de la compensación no logra abordar las pérdidas culturales y ecológicas irreversibles, mientras que la “transición energética” sirve más para asegurar mercados y geopolítica que para promover justicia. Al resaltar la resiliencia y las prácticas socio-ecológicas de las comunidades locales, hacemos un llamado a visiones alternativas centradas en la vida, la interdependencia y la justicia, desafiando los paradigmas dominantes del desarrollo sostenible y ofreciendo caminos hacia una transición verdaderamente transformadora.
Keywords energy transition, just transition, Traditional Communities, critical minerals, green colonialism.
By limiting the debate on global environmental change to the chemical formula CO2, ‘carbon reductionism’ (Moolna 2012) reinforces the economic sectors responsible for the most environmental damage, while justifying the seizure of territories from people who develop ingenious and sustainable forms of land use. In this article, we engage with Traditional Communities resisting lithium mining in Brazil and Portugal. We argue that the expansion of the extractive frontier required by the dominant energy transition model engenders the peripheralisation and devaluation of these communities. Silencing their voices and subordinating their ways of life to a technocratic transition model threatens ecosocial diversity, thereby reducing the capacity of the planet to face climate change.
The push to decarbonise economies has launched a global race for the mineral resources required for new energy systems that can harness intermittent power sources (solar panels, wind turbines, electricity grids, and storage systems). At the centre of the economic drive for this technological change is the replacement of internal combustion engine vehicles by electric vehicles (EVs) (IEA 2022). In this transition model, landscapes shaped by industrial supply chains appear as a solution to a global crisis. Thus, agricultural and forestry monocultures, mega hydroelectric dams, mineral stockpiles, and mass production industries, which only a few decades ago were considered incompatible with sustainability, gain a new aura of eco‑modernity as technological solutions to the climate crisis. As a result, the amount of land needed for mining and energy production is increasing to unprecedented proportions, to the detriment of other types of land use.9
Lithium is one of the ‘critical’ minerals in high demand, as it is a key element for producing EV batteries. In this article, we focus on the struggles of communities facing the advance of lithium extraction in two peripheral regions: the Jequitinhonha Valley, in the northeast of Minas Gerais State, where an estimated 85 per cent of Brazil’s lithium reserves are located (Monteiro 2024); and Barroso, in northern Portugal, where mining company Savannah Resources plc claims the rights to exploit the ‘most significant spodumene lithium deposit in Western Europe’ (Savannah Resources plc n.d.).
In both regions, livelihoods that fall outside of the hegemonic visions of economic productivity are under threat. The thesis we elaborate in this article is that their position as peripheries makes them apt to form the new frontiers of ‘green extractivism’ (Bruna 2023; Andreucci et al. 2023; Dunlap and Riquito 2023). This common condition is determined by the situation of these territories in relation to a common violent process of victimisation, notwithstanding their very different histories, populations, and positions in geopolitical systems. The two contexts support our argument that, rather than an ‘energy transition’, we are observing an expansion of extractive frontiers across vulnerable yet rich territories and ecosystems.
This violence extends beyond the lithium mines, as lithium-ion batteries are primarily used in new vehicles, whose total demand for raw materials is also boosting other kinds of mining sites in Brazil. For example, the decarbonisation strategies associated with ‘green steel’ rely on agrofuels and charcoal from eucalyptus plantations, gigantic photovoltaic farms that power growing iron mines, and so on. This multiple expansion increasingly threatens the livelihoods of Indigenous Peoples and other Traditional Communities10 embedded within the regional sociobiodiversity, transforming their lands into victim territories (Laschefski forthcoming).
As a result, the voices, experiences, and territories opposing this violent process are silenced and dismissed as obstacles to the inevitable development and transition processes. Yet these are the voices capable of articulating other possible worlds, based on diverse ways of life, traditional forms of interconnection between human beings and the environment, and the ecosocial production of space. The Brazilian indigenous philosopher Ailton Krenak classifies the communities sustaining those ways of life as ‘islands’:
There are still islands on the planet that remember what they’re doing here. They are protected by this memory of other world perspectives. These people are the cure for the planet’s fever, and I believe they can positively infect us with a different perception of life. (Krenak 2020: 73)
This article foregrounds voices from such ‘islands’ that may open paths to globally sustainable futures.
First, we discuss the cases. Section 2 presents the Jequitinhonha Valley in Brazil, recently rebranded by the Minas Gerais State Governor as ‘Lithium Valley’ in a move intended to attract investment for lithium extraction in 14 regional municipalities. Section 3 focuses on the region of Barroso in Portugal where plans to exploit a large deposit of lithium threatens the survival of a unique landscape, an agricultural world heritage site constructed over centuries, where these mineral resources are located. Section 4 discusses voices from these two regions struggling to survive these violent processes. In Section 5, we concentrate on the processes of production and reproduction of peripheries involved in expanding the extractive frontiers, before presenting our final reflections in Section 6.
‘Jequitinhonha’ is an expression of indigenous origin that means ‘wide river full of fish’ (Santiago 2006). The Jequitinhonha Valley, named after the 1,000km-long river that runs through the region’s municipalities, is located in the northeastern part of Minas Gerais, occupying 14 per cent of the state’s area. Home to around 950,000 inhabitants, it includes 55 municipalities, divided into three micro-regions: Lower, Middle, and Upper Jequitinhonha (IBGE 2010), as shown in Figure 1.
For over 500 years, the Jequitinhonha territories have experienced exploitation of common goods, transformed into natural resources. The Jequitinhonha Valley has undergone various economic cycles, beginning in the seventeenth century with the search for gold and precious stones (diamonds, tourmaline, topaz, etc.) by the bandeirantes, the raiders and explorers who were the pioneers of Portuguese colonisation. Even today, town names such as Diamantina, Turmalina, Berilo, and others bear witness to these histories of mineral monocultures. Colonial towns in the region still reflect the concentrated wealth of this period, which was largely built on the backs of enslaved Africans.
After phases of economic boom and decline, development programmes initiated in the mid-twentieth century ultimately turned Jequitinhonha into a supplier region for emerging industrial cities. Large enclosures were created to raise cattle for milk and meat production to feed the rapidly growing and urbanising population. Added to this was an energy policy that, as early as the 1970s, promoted the construction of dams (e.g. Irapé) and eucalyptus monocultures that have taken over the uniquely rich ecosystems of the high plateaus, known as chapadas. Since the beginning of this century, the mining of steel, niobium, and other critical metals, including lithium, has expanded in the region (Laschefski forthcoming).
Despite being the source of such valuable products, the region has borne the stigma of ‘Valley of Misery’, especially since the collapse of gemstone mining (Porto-Gonçalves 2021). Modern monocultural land use generates high profits with low labour demand, generating extractive relationships that impoverish the population. This has been a primary driver for many rural communities whose inhabitants are descended from former slaves (Quilombolas) to develop self-sufficiency in close relationship with their local environment. Equally, a wide variety of rural Traditional Communities, including Geraizeiros, Caatingueiros, Vazanteiros and others,11 embedded in different biomes, have been made invisible and silenced whilst using that condition to escape from waves of colonial and neocolonial appropriation.
These erasure processes have contributed to the comprehension of the region as ‘demographically empty’ (Porto-Gonçalves 2021). Foraging and artisanal mining, amongst other low-impact foraging activities (extrativismo in Portuguese), have also been features of many of these communities. Their cultural diversity is reflected in their handicrafts, music, and other forms of artistic expression, which are famous far beyond the region’s borders. Listening to these groups’ voices allows us to perceive the Jequitinhonha Valley as a potentially prosperous region, beyond its mineral resources (Laschefski 2011). The external valuation of its mineral resources and the devaluation of the local cultures and economies position it to become a peripheral supplier of raw materials to extractivist modes of production. The recent rise in lithium demand expands the extractivist frontier to new areas – but for many communities, it is only the latest wave of dispossession and violation of rights.
Lithium exploration in the Jequitinhonha Valley dates to the 1990s, when Companhia Brasileira de Lítio (CBL) set up Mina da Cachoeira, an underground mine located in the municipalities of Araçuaí and Itinga. In 2012, Sigma Lithium began geological studies for the Grota do Cirilo project in the same municipalities. With headquarters in Canada, the company started extraction in Itinga in April 2023 (Chiappini 2023). In May 2023, the Minas Gerais Governor, the Mines and Energy Federal Minister, and Sigma Lithium’s CEO led a ‘bell-ringing ceremony’12 at the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York to attract foreign investors to lithium exploration in the Jequitinhonha Valley (Agência Minas 2023). The ‘Lithium Valley’ regionalisation was created, ringfencing 14 municipalities in the region. This act gave institutional approval to the ‘lithium rush’, and the term ‘Lithium Valley’ became commonly used in the media to refer to the region.
Since then, the number of requests for mining rights in those areas has increased dramatically.13 An analysis of the data on lithium-mining processes registered with the Brazilian National Mining Agency (Agência Nacional de Mineração, ANM), carried out in February 2024, showed an increase of 562 per cent compared to 2022 (Observatório dos Vales e do Semiárido Mineiro 2024).
These mining processes threaten communities whose land tenure is precarious.
Given that the region is predominantly inhabited by Traditional Communities, the consultation protocols to achieve Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) is required by Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization (Convention 169), ratified by Brazil, as a condition for licensing new mining projects. Those directly affected by lithium mining include the Indigenous Peoples of the Aranã, Pankararu, and Pataxó (IBGE 2022) and at least 11 Quilombola Communities in the municipalities of Araçuaí and Itinga (Ministério do Desenvolvimento Social n.d.).
Sigma Lithium, the self-proclaimed ‘world’s first green lithium’ company, inaugurated the current wave of green extractivism. Yet Sigma uses an open pit mining technology that produces 97 per cent mining waste to exploit narrow strips of pegmatite that are 1.7–2km long, 13–15m wide, and 255m deep. The most significant amount of land is therefore taken up by the gigantic mining waste tips that damage the territory and pollute the population (see Figure 3). In addition to the two existing pits, Sigma plans to exploit seven more using open mining over the next 8–15 years. The result will be neither ecologically nor socially sustainable: a radical transformation of the landscape and the land into sterile material. Meanwhile, communities in the region suffer from the noise and structural impacts of the pegmatite rock explosions and the dust stirred up by the transport of waste, which constantly pollutes the interior of their homes and causes breathing problems.
Residents of two small rural communities neighbouring Sigma’s operations reported that explosions are worse at night, harming their sleep and mental health (Magnani and Binda 2025). The rock explosions also cause cracks in houses, putting people at risk. The cracks have affected the rainwater harvesting cisterns built as part of a federal government programme. When these cisterns became damaged, the company replaced them with plastic cisterns and were responsible for maintaining them, making the community dependent on Sigma for access to water (see Figure 2).
While the communities find themselves subjugated to the company for access to a fundamental right, one of the two lithium-mining companies operating in the region has been granted permits for daily water use that would be sufficient to supply 34,000 families (CPT MG 2024). It is worth noting that the water supply issue in this semi-arid region is of fundamental importance. The 19 companies with claims to extract lithium in the region have not undertaken any studies on the impact of the mining holes on the aquifers used by the local population (GESTA et al. 2025).
The populations living closest to the mines are the most vulnerable. They are further victimised by the mining operations. The damage they suffer is dismissed, and mining companies expect gratitude from the population for supplying basic services that the state should have guaranteed. The companies’ marketing of social management and environmental responsibility involves branded projects that promise and advertise the provision of access to water, paving of roads, renovation of schools and community health centres, job offers, and provision of microcredit for social entrepreneurs and others. In other words, the companies focus on people’s urgent demands, which, in many cases, are made more acute due to the arrival of their activities. However, these services come at a high price: co-optation, silencing dissent, low standards of service, and above all a short expiry date, since there is no socioeconomic planning for the time after closure of the mines.
Similar processes of violent silencing and subjugation of local voices and ways of life are occurring in the very different social and historic context of the Barroso region in Portugal.
Portugal, with an area slightly larger than the Jequitinhonha Valley and the country that established the first European imperial rule over the territory of Brazil from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, also has its internal peripheries. In those territories, ancestral histories of entanglement between harsh environments and sustainable cultures have created unique cultural landscapes. The Barroso region is one such place. Located in the province of Trás-os-Montes (meaning ‘behind the mountains’), it takes about six hours to reach from Lisbon by car.
In a location far removed from urban centres and circuits of national and global communication, Barroso’s cultural landscape has been built ‘as a composite unit over time’ (Capela de Campos 2020: 43). This community system balances natural, cultural, social, and economic values, without conflict between the economy and the environment. Among the characteristic processes of Barrosão communitarianism is the vezes (turns) or vezeiras (turntakers) system (Fontes 1977). Vezes is the rotational grazing practice amongst cattle owners in private marshes and common land. This system takes many forms in different villages, and it mirrors the communitarian approach to tasks needed for collective life. According to Capela de Campos (2020: 43), ‘the so‑called vezes’ are ‘applied both to the construction, maintenance and use of community buildings and spaces, as well as to the distribution of essential agricultural and livestock activities’.
The assessment of Barroso’s cultural landscape as an environmental site created over time by the proximity and shared knowledge between populations and ecologies resulted in it being recognised by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in 2017 as a World Agricultural Heritage Site. FAO emphasises how local populations have developed community social practices and shared and sustainable land use systems in response to the territory’s characteristics – rugged terrain surrounded by four high-altitude mountain systems – and a climate with very low temperatures in winter and very high temperatures in summer. As the local saying goes, Barroso has nine months of winter (inverno) and three of hell (inferno).
One feature of the Barroso system is the importance of the baldios (common land), whose origins date back to the Middle Ages. In Portugal, terreno baldio is often a synonym for wasteland, particularly in urban areas. However, in some parts of rural Portugal, baldios are portions of land managed and used by the local population under neither public nor private ownership. In Barroso, this common land is historically used for grazing, firewood, and foraging, and is managed collectively to prevent fire and other natural and human threats. In the 1930s and 1940s, the baldios system was the victim of an attack by the Estado Novo Regime, which massively reduced its area in the country. In a process called Junta de Colonização Interna (Domestic Colonisation Committee) (Cabral 2023), the dictatorship surveyed the baldios to establish settlement plots. Barroso was the region with the largest area of baldios. Mostly these territories were converted into monocultures of commercial tree species such as pine, as the original project of creating new private property failed. The landscape was profoundly transformed in those years. Still, a few areas of baldios remained or were returned after the 1974 revolution to their current form of communal sovereignty over the land. In the villages of Covas do Barroso and Romainho, this differentiated property form has been an essential element of local resistance to the advance of lithium mining.
Savannah Lithium Ltd (as it was named at the time) arrived in the year of the FAO World Heritage certification and applied to the Baldios Management Council (Assembleia de Compartes) of Covas do Barroso for authorisation to prospect minerals. The Council (at the time of writing comprising 193 members – the village’s population) has been unanimous in opposing the prospection incursions as soon as they discovered the size of the mining project through the international media (Wise 2020). In 2018, residents of Barroso learned about the interest in their underground resources through a video produced by the Portuguese Mining Development Company (EDM Lítio 2018) and through brochures and banners from the Ministry of Economy, distributed by a former Secretary of State for Energy at a major international mining conference. Several high-ranking Portuguese state officials announced opportunities for global investment in the region without the inhabitants ever having been consulted. From 2018, the Baldios Assembleia de Compartes has prevented Savannah Lithium Ltd from accessing the 2,000 hectares of common land. Together with owners who have resisted overvalued offers made by the British company for their land, they have managed to prevent lithium prospecting in their territory between 2018 and December 2024.
The conflict over lithium mining in Barroso has attracted environmentalists, gender affirmation organisations, anti‑extractivism activists, and researchers interested in the natural and social sciences, biodiversity, cultural diversity, anthropology, geography, architecture, climate justice, and social justice. Various interdisciplinary groups have supported consultation processes, amplified the voices of the local community, and organised social and cultural events that have contributed to the affirmation and self-confidence of the local collective identity.
Recently, the conflict gained national prominence after António Costa, the centre-left prime minister since 2015, was forced to resign in 2024 due to corruption investigations into the attribution of lithium-mining rights in the Barroso region (Lamb 2024). However, the subsequent election did not take up public debate on lithium mining, and the centre-right government that took over continued to open the way to its exploration. In December 2024, the energy minister issued an administrative easement (servidão administrativa) authorising Savannah Resources to access both baldios and private land for lithium prospecting. The decision allowed activities to resume after the seven-year standstill caused by the popular resistance, and a new phase in the fight against Savannah Resources began.
The local population fought back, along with various activist groups that have since joined their struggle. Playing on the term servidão (meaning both ‘servitude’ and ‘easement’), the movement organised a campaign under the title ‘the servitude times are over’ (see Figure 4). The need to self-organise to invigilate territorial boundaries and uphold legal rights has been a constant over the last few years of the struggle against Savannah Resources’ relentless and continuous drive to drill for prospection. Often, the population ‘patrols’ the boundaries of the land that the company has not acquired, and there have been times when they have had to replace the property boundary markers that the company has been shifting.
The large area of the proposed mine – 590 hectares comprising three open pits, two piles of mining waste, a mineral-washing plant, and an evaporation pond or dam, situated 500–1,000m from five residential centres – threatens the balance of landscape and local livelihoods through land consumption, air pollution, and surface and groundwater impacts. The company’s Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) states that the proportion of waste to ore is five to one, with just over 1 per cent of lithium content in the ore. The region is recognised for its distinctive produce such as honey, potatoes, lamb, ham, and Barrosã beef, as well as its landscapes which are sought after for eco‑agro‑tourism. The mining project threatens to disrupt the local cultural landscape that has been constructed over centuries, giving rise to distinctive lifestyles, unique products, and particular economic opportunities. Mining, on a much smaller scale, has been part of the life of this region, but the scale of this lithium mining project has the potential to irreversibly disrupt the local ecology and economy.
According to Savannah Resources’ updated EIA, presented in 2023 as part of the request for expanding its licence, the 590-hectare mine will occupy ‘a small percentage of the World Agricultural Heritage area’ (Savannah Resources plc 2023). It also states that they will only use surface water and that the diverted watercourses will be restored. However, residents and experts are concerned that the pits will destroy underground watercourses that flow into a complex river system. The area is located on a rich and sensitive water system that feeds many vital rivers, flowing into the Tâmega and then the Douro River. In addition to the risks of contamination from the tailings and chemicals used in the mineral-washing plants, aquatic systems that are essential for the life of the population will be physically destroyed.
Water is a crucial part of Covas do Barroso’s ancestral ecosocial landscape, an example of which was shown to one of the authors of this article in 2022: In the centre of the village, next to the community oven, a farmer drags a stone that covers an opening to an underground canal. Now, one neighbour is using the water. A leaf and some twigs signal it. When the shadow on the village cross touches a mark made on the stone, it’s time to turn the tap and irrigate the fields on the other side of the village. Local people have followed this process for hundreds of years. (Author’s fieldnotes, June 2022)
This is just one of many examples of traditional ecosocial practices that have stood the test of time. Water sharing is one of the main reasons for legal and violent disputes between small farmers in northern Portugal. Barroso’s water-sharing system does not avoid all conflicts, but it has certainly tamed them under a set of procedures and rituals of cooperation and respect for nature. The same happens with the pastoral system, the management of common forests, and other seasonal cultural practices associated with cycles of the land.
The Savannah Resources website illustrates how the damage to the landscape will be reversed through a series of landscaping interventions, i.e. pits will be covered and planted at the end of the mine’s life. However, even if all the promises made by the company are fulfilled (and post‑closure commitments are notoriously hard to enforce), there is no reference to how mining will break down the centuries-old relationships between the population and the territory, or how these relationships could be restored after the end of the mining project’s duration.
The voices emerging from the struggles in Barroso and Jequitinhonha are different and speak about very different experiences. Yet, they are both crucial to understanding what is at risk in the current advance of the extractivist frontier.
In the Jequitinhonha Valley, an environmental crisis has been experienced by communities and territories since the origins of the modern-colonial endeavour. The plundering of common goods has been implicated in the destruction of ways of life and ancestral practices and has imposed submission to a hegemonic expropriating model, posed as inevitable. This feature of the primitive accumulation of capital, which has forced the separation between work and the conditions for reproducing life, has also created spaces of contradiction. Workers’ dependence on local elites does not prevent resistance and the survival of diverse ways of life. This permanence has been achieved through the production of life anchored in sociobiodiversity – environments where biological diversity is inseparable from the presence of people and where traditional and collectively managed uses of land reflect an ecological praxis. These communities usually maintain country–city relations, in which the circulation of products is based on networks of sociability that involve mutual aid and the perspective of use value, even if this is mediated, in certain situations, by money.
At public hearings and other occasions when communities in the Jequitinhonha Valley have taken a stand against lithium mining, voices from the communities echoed phrases such as ‘The valley is Jequitinhonha’s, not lithium’s’; ‘Neither hunger nor lithium, Jequitinhonha Valley is the Valley of Art’; and ‘Mining kills’ (see Figure 5). In July 2024, during a public hearing held in the Minas Gerais Legislative Assembly (ALMG), a Quilombola leader from the community of Córrego Narciso stressed that the communities are not against the development of the region but instead demand to be involved in the decisions:
We require an energy transition that respects Indigenous and Traditional Communities. We want an energy transition that brings development, education, and jobs to our people. It’s not just about taking electric cars to rich countries, no. Given the numerous struggles against the region’s supposed ‘salvation’ cycles, such as the gemstone boom, dams, and eucalyptus monocultures, which threaten local ways of life, the communities affected have outlined their own development visions. These are mainly based on techniques for ‘living with drought’ (convivência com a seca), which were initiated at the beginning of the millennium in many communities by Articulação Semiárido Brasileiro (ASA Brasil), an umbrella organisation comprising 3,000 civil society groups (ASA n.d.). They aim to optimise existing land use systems with simple water management and agroecology methods to improve living standards.
However, these are at odds with the hunger for land for industrial use, which now includes lithium mining. It is therefore not surprising that in many places there are retomadas (land reclaiming), or land occupations, in former community territories. A particularly impressive example was an initiative by the agricultural workers’ union (Sindicato dos Trabalhadores Rurais, STR) in Rio Pardo de Minas, a municipality close to the Jequitinhonha Valley, which called for a ‘agroextractivist reconversion’ (reconversão agroextrativista), which even led to a debate on rural sustainable development in the Minas Gerais State Legislative Assembly in 2004 (Laschefski forthcoming).
The techniques mentioned above were so popular in Sigma Lithium’s area of operation that some elements, such as the barraginhas (tiny dams to capture rainwater), were incorporated into the company’s social programmes. This kind of initiative primarily serves to attract support from the rural population for mining activities. In light of such ‘benefits’, conflicts often arise within communities, dividing them into groups in favour of and against lithium mining. This divisionism is particularly challenging in families where one or more members work for the company, yet the family as a whole suffers from the negative effects. Thus, the abstract ‘sustainability’ discourse of ‘the energy transition’ contrasts with the concrete sustainability practices regarding agricultural land use adapted to local natural conditions. This obscures the fundamental territorial conflict between powerful economic actors and marginalised smallholders that have shaped the region since the beginning of colonisation.
In Barroso, we can see very similar tactics of dividing the community. As is common in northern Portugal, properties are partitioned between many heirs, resulting in many property boundaries and different uses within the community. The first stage of the mining takeover in Barroso has been to induce landowners to sell, putting them into an antagonistic position in relation to their neighbours, who are often their own siblings.
Furthermore, seven years of active resistance has exposed the residents of an otherwise quiet region to continued stress. This political activity has taken its toll on those at the front line of the struggle. As one local farmer said in a national TV reportage, ‘We were forced to become activists – we didn’t want to’ (interview with local farmer, Carneiro et al. 2025). Another farmer said in a podcast interview: ‘We feel tired and not very hopeful, but we will keep fighting even if it is breaking our health’ (Fumaça 2024). The only way to keep fighting for all this time, always with a sense of being on the weaker side of a power imbalance, is by articulating a strong collective sense of justice against a common enemy. As another person interviewed for the TV report stated, ‘This is like a war for us now, it’s just the same thing’ (interview with local farmer, Carneiro et al. 2025).
The confluence of voices mobilised around the population of Barroso has been built over the years through local leadership and the bridges created with movements from various backgrounds. Slogans such as ‘Verde é o Barroso’ (‘It is Barroso that is green’), ‘Não à mina, sim à vida’ (‘No to the mine, yes to life’), ‘Minas não’ (‘No to mines’), and ‘Água é vida’ (‘Water is life’), can be seen in the centre of the village of Covas do Barroso, on various posters and paintings. The posters are displayed on the fence of the local football pitch and next to the community bread oven (a regular feature of the villages in this region). The images are only a few metres from the office that Savannah Resources set up to attend to the local public once a week (now closed for several years, but still with a sign on the door). See Figures 6 and 7.
What the people of Barroso and Jequitinhonha Valley are going through is not just a necessary sacrifice at the supply end of energy transition. Their testimony and struggles show the front end of an expansion of energy consumption, materialised in the forced consumption of their territories of land and labour. In that sense, their voices are crucial in decarbonisation and climate change mitigation debates.
According to the compelling thesis of environmental historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, humanity has never transitioned between energy sources but rather has accumulated and redistributed them in the global division of labour (Fressoz 2024). Rather than transitioning, new energy technologies create the conditions for old technologies to expand, increasing demand for unsustainable extraction and production. Fressoz (2025) uses the expression ‘energy symbioses’ to name this entanglement and mutual reinforcement of energy technologies. This process is at work in the expansion of ‘green extractivism’, propelled by the current process of electrification of energy systems and expansion of new solar and wind technologies. This can be viewed in the replacement of internal combustion engine vehicles with EV, which is the main condition for the economic viability of the mining projects discussed here. Apart from the high consumption of land demanded by battery production, the new electric cars demand iron, aluminium, and plastics, a demand that expands mining operations as a whole, petrochemical industries, coal-powered smelting, and landscape ‘eucalyptisation’ for charcoal production.
In fact, as Artiga-Purcell (2024) argues, we see an entanglement of various extractivisms, which feed each other. They use carbon, social, and economic justifications to reduce the relative value of the territories of life and labour they destroy. In this sense, these mining processes produce various levels of damage that extend across supply chains and feed distorted visions of green transitions elsewhere through their processes of destruction and accumulation of value (Arboleda 2020). Each lithium mine that manages to enter production is not only destroying the territories where it is located; it makes possible the intensification of all of the other destructive processes that feed the new material-and land-intensive energy production, storage, and mobility technologies. It is entangled in planetary processes of change that are intensifying the current multiple crises by destroying alternatives to the single model of the plantation–mine–mass consumption complex.
As much as critical theories of extractivism have provided crucial theoretical elements that we build upon in this text, we cannot understand the processes at stake at the current extractive frontier if we do not see beyond the methodological nationalism that marks these theories. Although Portugal colonised Brazil and exploited its mineral resources from the sixteenth century, it is a relatively poor European country. According to classic world-systems theory (Wallerstein 1976), Portugal would be a semi‑peripheral state – it occupies a peripheral position vis‑à‑vis the central countries and a central one in relation to the peripheral countries (Santos 1985).
Yet this definition of periphery in a world system of nation-states, which in many accounts also considers Brazil a semi-periphery, is not the one we work with in this article. Our notion of periphery refuses the methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Schiller 2003) that takes for granted the nation as a unit of analysis to propose that territories are constituted as peripheries in relational dynamics imposed by global supply chains, but which operate on different scales. Canclini (2014) pointed out that globalisation depends on the global expansion and naturalisation of the nation-state as a perceived unit of common identity and political interest. However, in extractivist processes, territories are victimised through their submission to transnational circuits of material supply and exploitation (Murrey and Mollett 2023; Arboleda 2020).
For the violence over territories to be justified, they first need to be hollowed out, in violent physical and symbolic processes that take different forms in different parts of the planet. In Latin America, the race for critical minerals represents a new phase in a long history of colonisation. The hegemonic view of the region’s natural wealth as exuberant and inexhaustible has justified the pillage, violence, and expropriation of US bodies and territories upon which the colonial economy was based (Machado Aráoz 2023). A few centuries after the beginning of the violent European settlement, the commodities boom in the early 2000s represented an expansion of extractive frontiers, of which Latin American governments of all political orientations took advantage. Svampa (2019: 65) named the process of global alignment around a productivist vision of development based on the large-scale export of raw materials as the ‘commodities consensus’. Bringel and Svampa (2023: 28) point out that this has now been followed by the ‘decarbonisation consensus’, justifying a supposed need to deepen the exploitation of existing victim territories to mitigate climate change.
China’s rapid industrialisation boosted the commodities boom between 2000 and 2014 and raised concerns among European governments and the US government on the prices of and access to these primary products. Between 2000 and 2021, the Chinese government invested US$57bn in projects exploiting minerals critical to the energy transition worldwide (Walsh et al. 2025). Motivated by competition with China for dominance of the ‘green technology’ supply chains, from 2018 onwards, the EU governments and US government began to revisit the concepts of critical or strategic minerals that date back to the Second World War (Riofrancos 2023).
Alliances between governments and mining companies in the EU and US started to be formed around policies and practices of onshoring the extraction and processing operations of critical minerals, despite the well-known links between mining, human rights violations, social conflicts, and environmental degradation (Global Witness 2024) that have in the past influenced the offshoring practices of these companies from the global North to the global South (Riofrancos 2023). In such a context, onshoring the current expansion of the energy frontier is associated with reinforcing state security and moving towards a green transition – what Riofrancos calls the security–sustainability nexus (ibid.).
Whether in the global North or the global South, territories are victimised by violent processes of emptying and extraction, based on the justification that they contain resources critical for security and the sustainability of national social welfare. Yet geology is not always destiny (Riofrancos 2023); it is more the relative power deprivation of territories than the calculation of their resources that clears the ground for extractivist victimisation. As in crimes against people, crimes against territories of life and labour are facilitated by vulnerability more than by other factors. Thus, requests for critical minerals extraction coincide, in several cases, with delimitations of territories historically occupied and utilised by indigenous, traditional, or rural communities and environmental conservation units in so-called global peripheral areas.
Discursive strategies that devalue the richness of the sociobiodiversity of these regions are commonly used or reinforced by actors who defend the advancement of extractive development projects. This is the case in the labelling of the Jequitinhonha region as a ‘Valley of Misery’ that would need to be redeemed through development projects to stimulate industrialisation and urbanisation. This label originates in economic data that characterises the decline after the aforementioned several economic cycles, measured in negative economic growth rates, rising formal unemployment and, finally, the impoverishment of local elites. A large part of the rural population has never been integrated into this industrial– capitalist system; therefore, they are invisible to statistics on the region’s economy.
However, the quality of life of these residents often exceeds that of wage labourers in industries, commercial farms, and eucalyptus plantations or even lithium-mining enterprises. Given the short period of economic boom until the lithium deposits are exhausted in about 15 years, there is a risk that Araçuaí, Itinga, Coronel Murta, Salinas, and other cities in the region will once again be overtaken by decline, as the devastated landscapes become unsuitable to previous land uses. For the people displaced from their land by these activities, the most likely destiny is urban precarity in the produced ‘peripheries’ of the boom-and-bust towns in the Jequitinhonha Valley.
Extraction has not started in Barroso; however, in the example of Borralha, not far from Covas do Barroso, the consequences of the boom-and-bust cycles that characterise extractive economies are visible to everyone. The Borralha mines produced wolfram in various periods between 1903 and 1987, bringing intermittent prosperity and employment to an impoverished population. During the Second World War and then during the Korean wars, Borralha boomed as tungsten was in high demand from military industries. As the village museum emphasises, Borralha was one of the first towns in the country outside urban centres to have electric lighting, and experienced decades of economic prosperity despite the high mortality rate in mining work. Today, it is a place of abandonment, where the ruins and the mining museum and visitors’ centre stand out. A couple from nearby Covas do Barroso explained:
Before the arrival of mining in Borralha, people were poor, but those who were there could make a living from farming. Once the fields were abandoned for people to work in the mines, there was nothing to do when the mines closed.14
Echoing Frank (1966), this type of development policy, especially within the context of mining, mainly leads to the reproduction of the condition of periphery through precarious, intermittent, and dependent growth. These histories of extractivist promises of prosperity offer communities affected by the arrival of mining operations a glimpse into futures that are not calculated in the projections of mining companies and state licensing authorities.
The EIA that mining companies are required to submit in order to complete the environmental licensing process, both in Brazil and Portugal, is an instrument used to disqualify the affected communities and regions, presenting them as ‘poor’ or ‘deprived’, devoid of relevant economic viability. Consequently, the extractive enterprise claims to offer economic redemption, an indispensable opportunity whose urgency and inevitability are self-evident (Barbosa 2024). The history and cultural heritage of communities, municipalities, and regions are sometimes described in these assessments, as well as some of their social and economic dynamics that will be affected by the projects, mainly to show how they will benefit from the arrival of the alleged extractive prosperity. What is never mentioned is the effect of the territories’ transformation by mining on the relationships between the local population and the ecosystems in which they are embedded. The social and economic practices of the people in these territories are conceptualised as separate from the environment; water systems and fauna are treated as devoid of implications for human life; therefore, the possibility of intensive mining causing irreversible cultural and socioeconomic damage is not even considered.
The two contexts we have presented show that the dynamics surrounding the advance of the ‘green’ extractivism frontier tend to reproduce mechanisms similar to those of colonial occupation, in the sense that they disqualify local populations and knowledge, creating a kind of terra nullius, where destruction is more easily justified and accepted. This happens through a series of processes of silencing local voices, devaluing the richness of the territory, and making the relationship between culture and landscape invisible. The ways in which this occurs, such as overvaluing the prosperity brought by the project, have already been described in literature as a form of ‘social warfare’ (Dunlap and Riquito 2023) that creates divisions among the population. In the case of the current wave of green extractivism, this takes place through the articulation of a socio-technical imaginary of carbon neutrality (Canelas and Carvalho 2023; Carvalho, Riquito and Ferreira 2022).
The externalisation of socio-ecological costs leads to territorial claims that give rise to numerous conflicts with the local population, especially with Indigenous Peoples and Traditional Communities. In this sense, the logic behind this ‘decarbonised’ development model is no different from that of the urbanisation and industrialisation strategies that were globally considered unsustainable in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century and led to the emergence of today’s steel–energy–mining supply chains, including the associated urbanised centres. A sign that not only landscapes but also minds are being monoculturalised is the fact that the sociobiodiversity of entire regions is being reduced to the goods or commodities produced in them, as shown, for example, by the rebranding of the Jequitinhonha Valley as ‘Lithium Valley’. This corroborates the ideas of Vandana Shiva (1993) and of Quilombola philosopher ‘Nego Bispo’ (Bispo dos Santos 2015).
Discussions about climate change, decarbonisation, and the energy transition have narrowed the environmental debate to the the focus away from a socio-ecological transformation of urban– industrial–capitalist societies, which dominated discussions before the UN Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. In this way, lithium companies and the metallurgical, energy, and mining sectors have managed to overcome their image as villains and position themselves as protagonists in the fight against climate change. However, this ‘green’ CO2-neutral industrial complex in regions such as the Jequitinhonha Valley and Barroso is causing local disruptions to their ecologies, particularly their water cycles. These consequences are felt in these territories as geological forces akin to climate change.
Under the aegis of ‘compensation and mitigation of impacts’, all that is destroyed is considered repairable or offset-able. Environmental impacts are assessed, and mitigation measures proposed, yet the environment is invariably presented as separate from the social, cultural, and economic dimensions. There is a strong reason for this separation. The reintegration of mining waste piles into the landscape and the re-establishment of vegetation, fauna, and water systems can be promised, budgeted, and projected, but ancestral and traditional relationships with the land are more difficult to re-establish. As Porto-Gonçalves (1998) observed, separating human beings from what modern science has conventionally named ‘nature’ is an effective way of subordinating both to capital.
Thus, the so-called ‘energy transition’ has turned out to be a process in which large mining corporations, in the name of decarbonisation through electrification, intensify the extraction of critical minerals and expand the frontiers of environmental destruction through physical and symbolic violence. In this context, the two regions discussed in this article are configured as ‘silenced peripheries’ to be ‘developed’. From this perspective, local livelihoods adapted to local environmental conditions are perceived as obstacles to the ‘energy transition’. As the two case studies show, when this mindset is transferred into spatial practice, these areas ultimately become ‘victim territories’ of climate change policies.
The neocolonial character of the old urban–industrial–capitalist development model is now rebranded as ‘climate-neutral’. Fifty years ago, the discourse was very different: at that time, it was still said that the sum of environmental problems caused by industrialisation and monoculturisation of entire landscapes would lead to biodiversity loss, soil erosion, air and water pollution, resource depletion, and ultimately, climate collapse. Today, however, socio-ecological metabolic breakdown manifests not only in the territorial alienation of urban society but also in the technocratic character of the debate on climate change. In this context, sustainability refers only to maintaining markets through the invention of ‘clean’ goods for the global minority of affluent consumers.
The loss of ancestral relationships with the land, community solidarity bonds, and cosmovisions that consider people, animals, and rivers as part of an intricate and inseparable system will not be supported by plans to compensate for environmental impact. These ecosocial relationships are exactly what is needed to build a world resilient to climate collapse. They have been central elements of the life history of communities in both the northeast of Minas Gerais, Brazil, and in Barroso, northern Portugal, before they became buzzwords in mainstream political and corporate discourses. Over the centuries, Indigenous Peoples, Quilombolas, peasants, and other Traditional Communities have survived many extermination attempts and built social and economic strategies that adapt to local conditions, strategies that have allowed them to reconcile life, work, and the protection of biodiversity, ‘subordinating economic objectives to the criteria of human dignity, social justice and ecology’ (Escobar 2018: 148). Community sociability, inter-family and inter-community solidarity networks, the recognition and the protection of the diversity of animal and plant life, waters, fields, and mountains, and the incorporation of non-material values as expressions of wellbeing are the foundations of sustainable society–nature relations.
Returning to Ailton Krenak (2020: 36), there is something in the perspective of the peoples sustaining those ways of living that could open a crack in the ‘world of knowledge’. Understanding the continuity of life as inextricably linked to the movements of nature escapes the dominant concept of development and, in a slightly broader perception, provides inputs for other understandings of justice, including the possibility of greater balance in political experience. Recovering the centrality of the environmental sustainability of social practices as the foundation of the energy transition presupposes recognising and valuing diverse ways of life that develop in symbiosis with their environments as crucial contributors to the continuity of life on the planet. It is in the complexity of these interrelationships – and not the reductionism of decarbonisation – that the paths to another kind of transition may emerge.
1 This issue of the IDS Bulletin was supported in part by a Ford Foundation grant entitled ‘Learning at the Intersections of Just Transitions: Spaces for Engagement, Voices from the Margins and Cross-Sectoral Alliances in Resource-Rich Countries of the Global South’. The British Academy also provided earlier support for the project ‘Making Space for Dialogue on Just Transitions in Africa’s Oil and Gas Producing Regions’ (2022) which helped to lay the foundation for much of this work. The opinions expressed are the authors’ own and do not reflect the views of the funders.
2 This article is based on research conducted with the support of the British Academy’s ODA Challenge-Oriented Research Grants 2024 Programme, supported under the UK Government’s International Science Partnerships Fund, award IOCRG\100442, the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais (Minas Gerais State Research Support Foundation) (FAPEMIG, Process APQ-05068-24) and the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) (CNPq No. 09/2023 - Research Productivity Grants - PQ, Process 16503/2023-1).
3 Francisco Calafate-Faria, Lecturer, London South Bank University, UK.
4 Klemens Laschefski, Professor (full), Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil.
5 Bruna Viana de Freitas, Co-Coordinator, Network of Defenders of Critical Ecosystems and Livelihoods, Brazil.
6 Fabiana Soares Leme, Co-Coordinator, Network of Defenders of Critical Ecosystems and Livelihoods, Brazil.
7 Rômulo Barbosa, Lecturer, State University of Montes Claros (Unimontes), Brazil.
8 Aline Weber Sulzbacher, Lecturer, Federal University of Vale do Jequitinhonha e Mucuri (UFVJM), Brazil.
9 Mining the materials needed to construct an EV may take more than four times as much land as the materials in an equivalent internal combustion engine. This is mainly due to the need for cobalt, nickel, lithium, and other materials in EV batteries, which are being mined with technologies that produce very low ore-to-soil ratios, producing high quantities of soil with zero or negative economic value (IEA 2021).
10 In Brazil, Traditional Peoples and communities are ‘culturally distinct groups that recognize themselves as such. They have their own social organization, occupy and use territories and natural resources as a condition for their cultural, social, religious, ancestral and economic reproduction. They employ knowledge, innovations and practices generated and transmitted from generation to generation. [...] Traditional Peoples and communities conserve biodiversity thanks to their relationship with nature. They are increasingly promoting rational economic practices through production systems based on socio-bioeconomics’ (Ministério do Meio Ambiente e da Mudança do Clima n.d.). There are currently 28 groups that fall into this category, present in all six biomes that form part of Brazil, including Indigenous Peoples and Quilombola Communities – the latter being communities formed by descendants of formerly enslaved people with African heritage (ibid.). Brazilian Traditional Communities fall under what the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention of the International Labour Organization (Convention 169) classifies as Tribal Peoples (ILO 1989).
11 These are the self-identifications of three of the 28 ‘Traditional Peoples’ recognised by the Brazilian government. Geraizeiros herd cattle in unfenced savannah lands on the chapada plateaus, while practising small-scale agriculture on the valley floors. Caatingueiros herd cattle and goats and plant cassava and other subsistence crops in the dry scrub forest known as Caatinga. Vazanteiros migrate seasonally to the banks of the São Francisco river to plant crops in the rich alluvial soil exposed by the ebb (vazante) of the water levels in the dry season (Shankland et al. 2016).
12 A bell-ringing ceremony is a publicity event offered to Nasdaq-listed companies, with live television broadcasts.
13 A mining right request indicates an applicant’s intention to research and commercialise metallic substances in a given region in the future.
14 Author interview with citizens from Covas do Barroso, 2022.
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© 2025 The Authors. IDS Bulletin © Institute of Development Studies | DOI: 10.19088/1968-2025.136 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited and any modifications or adaptations are indicated.
The IDS Bulletin is published by Institute of Development Studies, Library Road, Brighton, BN1 9RE, UK. This article is part of IDS Bulletin Vol. 56 No. 2 November 2025 ‘Struggles for Justice in the Energy Transition: Voices from the Front Lines’; the Introduction is also recommended reading.