Wired UK - 11.2019

This is the hidden impact of technology.

For decades, David Maisel has photo-

graphed places where humans are changing

the environment so dramatically, the

impact can be seen from the sky. In his

latest project, Desolation Desert, the

San Francisco-based visual artist spent

two weeks in a plane over the Atacama

desert, where our insatiable demand for

copper, lithium and rare-earth metals

• to fuel the consumer electronics

and electric vehicle industries – is

reshaping a fragile ecosystem. The

Atacama, in northern Chile, is one of

the driest and least populated places on

Earth, but water-intensive extraction

is scarring pristine salt flats. Maisel

• who still shoots on film – documented

some of the biggest mining sites. The

work isn’t intended to single out an

industry, Maisel says – in fact, we

are all complicit: these resources

enable almost every facet of our lives.

“These new photographs show how the

supposedly remote Atacama desert is

becoming part of a planetary fabric of

urbanisation, and at what cost,” he says.

Photography: David Maisel

The Salar de Atacama salt flats contain more than a quarter of the

world’s lithium. At this lithium-extraction field north of the town of

San Pedro de Atacama, one of the largest of its type in the world, brine

rich in lithium is pumped from underneath the salt flats into huge,

jewel-like pools, where it is left to evaporate in stages, in the way

that salt has been produced for millennia. The end result is a silvery

powder – lithium carbonate – that can be manufactured into batteries.

The process consumes huge amounts of water in a region that gets less

than 2.5cm of rainfall a year. “It might appear to be this weirdly

beautiful place, but the damage being wrought is significant,” Maisel says.

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