Wired reports:

For decades, David Maisel has been photographing places where humans are changing the environment so dramatically that the impact can be seen from the sky. For his latest project, Desolation Desert, the San Francisco-based visual artist spent two weeks in and around South America’s Atacama desert, where humankind’s insatiable demand for copper, lithium and rare-earth metals to fuel the consumer electronics and electric vehicle industries is reshaping the landscape of a fragile ecosystem.

The Atacama, in northern Chile, is one of the driest and least populated places on Earth, but the metals industry is changing the terrain, with access roads creeping across pristine salt flats and the water-intensive extraction process leaving the ground pocked and scarred. Maisel – who still shoots on film – chartered a plane and spent a fortnight in the field documenting some of the biggest copper and lithium mining sites in the region. The work isn’t intended to single out a particular industry, Maisel says – in fact, we are all complicit: these resources enable almost every facet of our lives, from technology to transportation. “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.

The Salar de Atacama salt flats (pictured above) contain more than a quarter of the world’s lithium supplies. 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 mined for millennia. The end result is a silvery powder – lithium carbonate – which can be processed and manufactured into batteries. The extraction process consumes huge amounts of water in a region that gets less than an inch of rainfall a year. “It might appear to be this weirdly beautiful place, but the damage that’s being wrought there is significant,” Maisel says. [Continue reading…]