He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Extracting the Future: Lithium in an Era of Energy Transition, and shared the following:
From page 99:Visit Mark Goodale's website.Minchin had been born on a country estate in County Tipperary, Ireland, before emigrating to New Zealand in 1852 with his family at the age of three. When he was sixteen, he was sent to London for his university studies. After completing a degree at King’s College, London, he worked as an engineering apprentice and was certified as a civil engineer in 1870. During his apprenticeship, he gained valuable experience working on the Tower Subway (a pedestrian passage under the Thames River that closed in 1898) and on different railway projects. In 1873, the young Irish engineer applied to work for the British government, which sent him to Bolivia to conduct engineering and survey work in collaboration with Bolivian colleagues.On page 99 of Extracting the Future I’m recounting the histories of two geographers who played key roles in developing knowledge about the region of the Salar de Uyuni, the largest evaporated lake in the world. Flowing under the massive halite surface of this vast expanse of white is the elusive brine that contains the planet’s largest known reserves of lithium, one of the pillar minerals of the so-called green energy transition. The Page 99 Test works very well in this instance because one of the things I do in the book is to uncover the forgotten (or never known) geographical, social, and economic histories of lithium extraction. I do this biographically, as on page 99, but I also do this by tracing what I describe as “genealogies of extractivist entanglement,” the ways in which countries and regions of the world continue to find themselves enmeshed in global economic webs and the struggle for “critical” resources, even as the underlying resources themselves change over the decades and centuries. As I argue, in this sense, lithium is no different from a long line of other non-renewable resources in Bolivia that have been the object of intense geopolitical and economic desire by powerful empires, countries, and companies: silver, guano, rubber, tin, oil, and natural gas.
Ballivián would go on to become one of the most influential Bolivian academics and scientific administrators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Besides overseeing a number of historic national censuses and later serving as Bolivia’s agriculture minister, he coauthored (with Eduardo Idiáquez) the magisterial Diccionario Geográfico de la República de Bolivia (1890) and became the director of the Geographical Society of La Paz in 1897. During his long career, Ballivián participated in numerous regional and international scientific congresses and was perhaps the most cosmopolitan Bolivian scientist over these decades (he died in 1921).
Minchin’s future trajectory was also luminous in its own way. He did perform engineering work on behalf of various Bolivian agencies, including a study of potential railway networks that took him to the salar region. However, by 1880, he had left government work to focus his expertise on mining. By the 1890s, Minchin had become wealthy as the owner of mines in Oruro and Uncía (which is in the north of Potosí Department). After suffering a stroke, Minchin left Bolivia for good in 1911 and died in 1922 in London. Before leaving Bolivia, he sold all of his mining stakes for the enormous sum of £600,000 (about $75 million today).
The discussion on page 99 illustrates something else: the way in which foreign scientists have long been sent to Bolivia as agents of economic and political power. The Irishman Minchin was contracted by the British government, which had developed deep ties to Bolivia’s mining sector in the nineteenth century, largely at the behest of private mining and railroad syndicates. At the same time, Minchin’s work in Bolivia was done in collaboration with Bolivian counterparts like Ballivián, who were eager to extend their professional networks. This tradition of opening the country to foreign researchers and companies is also something I analyze in detail in the book, a tradition that the now-former Movement to Socialism (MAS) government desperately wanted to overcome by bringing the lithium project under the control of the state. In the end, however, the Bolivian government was never able to escape the tentacles of extractivist entanglement; only the foreign interests changed.
The Page 99 Test: Surrendering to Utopia.
The Page 99 Test: Reinventing Human Rights.
--Marshal Zeringue
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