White Mining’s Green Dream: Entropy and the mirage of sustainability in Northern Chile

Abstract

This article critically examines the "green dream" of lithium mining in northern Chile, framing extraction as indispensable for addressing the climate crisis while obscuring its irreversible ecological, social, and epistemic consequences. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler's concept of Entropocene, we introduce the notion of entropic omissions to analyze how extractivist logics not only conceal damage, but degrade the conditions for perceiving, imagining, and responding to it. Based on ethnographic research in the Atacama Desert, we show how these omissions are embedded in both technical reasoning and institutional frameworks—shaping what is made visible, actionable, and imaginable. Through the cases of a mining engineer and a state agency, we trace how entropy is named yet neutralized, acknowledged yet unthought. We situate these findings within broader debates on entropy, extractivism, and sustainability, offering a critique of degrowth perspectives. While degrowth challenges economic expansion and resource overuse, it overlooks the deeper systemic and colonial dimensions of extractive reasoning. We argue that responses to the climate crisis must go beyond emissions reduction to confront the omissions that sustain extractive futures. Emphasizing the urgency of reclaiming critical capacities, this article calls for awaken alternative ways of dreaming beyond the green extractivist horizon.