The Right to Say No

When mining-affected communities say no to mining, they are frequently ignored, undermined, repressed or attacked. The mining project does not need to reach a certain threshold of impacts for communities to be able to say no to mining. All communities have the right to say no. 

We stand in solidarity with local communities resisting extractivism and uphold their right to decide in respect of all decisions that affect their lands, waters, and futures. This includes autonomy, self-determination, and territorial sovereignty of Indigenous peoples everywhere, and affirm the right of all communities to protect and care for their territories according to their own values and knowledge systems.

Why do communities say no to mining?

Section 1: Impacts of mining

Mining gives rise to ever expanding ecological, economic, cultural and social harm across our living planet. Those most at risk of this harm are Indigenous Peoples across the world, Local Communities in the Global South and also, increasingly, the peripheries of the Global North. 

Environmental impacts

There are various types of mining: surface mining (strip mining, open pit and mountaintop removal), underground mining, placer mining, solution mining, and seabed mining (both shallow and deep).  Each type carries its own propensity for environmental damage, however all impact on water bodies and habitats and pose a high risk to human health. Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities’ way of life and livelihoods are often also put in danger. 

We can also categorise mining according to who is doing the extraction. Corporate mining is the most destructive form, given its massive scale and global power dynamics. There is also community/artisanal mining (ASM), including some Indigenous communities that engage in this practice according to their traditions. Then there is illegal or criminal mining that refers to mining organised by criminal gangs, organisations or networks often exploiting the labour of local community members, while we recognize that other categories of mining may also incur in illegal and criminal behaviour.

Water

All mining uses large volumes of water, which is normally extracted from local water sources. The water is then pumped from the mine back into the water table after being used in mine processes, and therefore containing heavy metals and other contaminants, such as mercury and cyanide. Solution, or in-situ mining – such as lithium mining – is particularly water hungry, and carries high risk of chemical leaching. 

Acid Mine Drainage (AMD) occurs when the rock extracted from the mine contains sulphides which, when exposed to air and water, produces sulphuric acid (or AMD). This strips out heavy metals and other toxins from the rock, such as copper, cadmium, chromium, lead, arsenic and mercury. AMD is a permanent problem, which, once started, continues in perpetuity, poisoning land and water. The UN has labelled acid mine drainage the second biggest problem facing the world after global warming.

Water quality and aquatic life are also at risk from potential tailings failures, or via seepage into groundwater. Tailings never become benign, and the tailings facilities that hold them require perpetual upkeep. The Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration Tailings Management Handbook states: “Unfortunately, humans have no experience in designing facilities to last forever, so responsible tailings management is required for as long as the TSF  [Tailings Storage Facility] exists.” No mining company agrees to nor commits the funds to upkeep their tailings facilities in perpetuity – therefore this expense, and potential catastrophe, are left in the hands of the host state, and at the expense of its people. A recent example of tailings failure catastrophes include the Brumadinho dam failure, in southeastern Brazil, January 2019, which killed 272 people, flattened entire villages and caused widespread environmental devastation.

Mining operations not only contaminate water sources, they also deplete them by drawing heavily on groundwater, dewatering aquifers, and disrupting underground systems. This leads to the drying up of rivers, springs, caves, and aquifers. As a result, local communities face sharp declines in local water tables, threatening their health and undermining water sources of cultural, ecological, and economic significance.

In the case of the Escobal silver mine in the municipality of San Rafael Las Flores, Guatemala, experts have documented the drying up of local springs and an accelerated drop in the water table, likely as a result of constant dewatering at the mine. This underground mine, which contains one of the largest known silver deposits worldwide, only operated for three years until 2017 when the Xinka Indigenous people stopped it through direct and legal action pending an ongoing consultation process as of 2025. 

It has also been documented how lithium mining is depleting South America’s Puna de Atacama region using the destructive evaporation method. As a result, the area’s already scarce water resources are disappearing. These changes are impacting people’s livelihoods and environments in severe ways.

In South Australia, BHP’s Olympic Dam copper, gold and uranium mine near Roxby Downs is the fourth largest copper deposit and the largest known single deposit of uranium in the world. The mine sits on the Indigenous lands of the Kokatha, Dieri, and Arabana people and has a licence to use a massive 42 million litres of water per day in what it is a sensitive arid region. The water is extracted from the Great Artesian Basin, the largest groundwater basin in Australia, water that is ancient and a precious source of life for humans, animals and plants in a dry and arid environment. The mine has already impacted the sacred Mound Springs, which are of deep cultural significance to the Arabana people, by reducing flow pressure in the aquifer to the extent that the springs are drying up and disappearing.

Water is essential for life. Without it there can be no ecosystems, biodiversity, no agriculture, and no human survival. From the ground up – from the bacteria and fungi that form healthy soil, to the crops, plants, insects, animals, trees, fish and marine life that are part of an interconnected web of life – nothing can survive without water. See this report for an in-depth analysis of how mining undermines the water cycle. 

Ecosystems and Biodiversity

Mining, particularly surface mining, destroys habitats and leads to massive loss of biodiversity. Mining is a significant driver of deforestation, affecting up to a third of the world’s forest ecosystems. Salva La Selva (Rainforest Rescue) supports forest communities to resist threats such as mining in what are some of the most biodiverse places on earth. 

Underground mining can lead to land subsidence from collapsed underground tunnels (as was the case in Monaghan, Ireland) – destroying habitats and putting communities and key infrastructure at risk.

The push to open up our deep seas to mining threatens to unleash irreversible harm on one of the least understood and most fragile ecosystems on the planet. Despite no commercial operations yet underway, companies have already scoured vast areas of the seabed, laying the groundwork for industrial-scale extraction. If allowed to proceed, this form of mining could decimate deep ocean habitats, release sediment plumes that choke marine life, threaten food security in the Pacific, and disrupt ocean currents that regulate the planet’s climate.

At YLNM, we say no to deep sea mining because it mirrors the same extractivist logic that has devastated land-based ecosystems and frontline communities. The deep ocean is not a sacrifice zone. It is a living, breathing part of Earth’s life-support system. Our members, Deep Sea Mining Campaign and Alliance of Solwara Warriors are pushing back against this assault, defending the deep from an industry willing to gamble with planetary stability for short term gain.

Human health

Effects of mining on health can be experienced by both mine workers and the community around and downstream from the mine. When the water is contaminated in the ways outlined above, humans who drink it, and animals that consume it and are eaten later, absorb toxic elements that can cause serious health problems.

Soils also absorb heavy metals that are then passed on to crops. Populations living near mining projects have been shown to consume excessively high levels of heavy metals and metalloids through their food sources, ‘entailing serious concerns for the population’s health’. 

Mercury, for example, is used to mine gold and other metals and is easily spread through air, water and soil. It poisons fish and accumulates up the food chain. Mercury exposure can cause irreversible brain damage, developmental delays, loss of vision, hearing and coordination, as reported in villages near gold mining in Senegal. Mercury is mainly used in illegal mining – a 2019 study conducted with the Munduruku Indigenous population along the Tapajós River, in the state of Pará, found that all participants of the research were affected by mercury contamination, due to the activities of illegal miners in their territories. Six out of every 10 participants presented mercury levels above safe thresholds, with contamination rates even higher in areas more heavily impacted by mining and panning; in these areas, 9 out of 10 participants showed high levels of contamination. Children were also affected: about 15.8% of them showed issues during neurodevelopment tests. These findings are replicated in similar studies with other communities across Brazil, as reported by Mongabay.

However, mercury is also used in corporate mining; in the year 2000, the world’s largest gold producer – Newmont – was responsible for a mercury spill in the village of Choropampa, northern Peru, which is still impacting the health of villagers 20 years later. 

The use of cyanide is also dangerous to human health. Cyanide has less legal restrictions than mercury and given greater availability is very commonly used in corporate mining.  Several high profile cases show the potential disastrous consequences that can occur if there’s a significant cyanide spill. In Baia Mare, Romania, for example, in the year 2000, a burst dam released 100,000 cubic metres of contaminated waste water into the Someş River, which eventually reached the Tisza River and then the Danube – leading to massive fish kills in Hungary, Serbia and Romania. The spill has been called the worst environmental disaster in Europe since the Chernobyl disaster. 

Air pollution is another threat for communities and nature. Toxic dust can be blown from dry stack tailings or from blasting. A study found 2.5 particulate matter containing arsenic and mercury on the leaves of trees 60 kilometres from a gold mine at Kittila, in Finland. This toxic dust can cause respiratory diseases and cancers, with children particularly vulnerable. On Sami land, where reindeer forage, dust containing heavy metals such as antimony, copper, cobalt, nickel and chromium was found on moss, having blown from mines in the area. 

Diesel emissions have also been proven to be hazardous for health, with many mines pumping out massive amounts daily from the burning of this fossil fuel. A gold mine in County Tyrone, Ireland, is proposing to burn 4.3 million litres of diesel per annum.

Workers at mines are not only subject to the same contaminants by air, water and food as the local communities, but they are also subject to health and safety concerns at often dangerous workplaces. Frequent incidents include mine collapse, landslides, gas explosions or other machine failures. Workers tend not to be unionised and health and safety practices are often lacking. The Morowali Industrial Park in Sulawesi, Indonesia, has seen the death of many workers on multiple occasions; just after YLNM visited in 2023, 18 workers died and 41 were injured at a smelting facility. The most recent accident just two months ago killed four.

Climate breakdown and flooding

Mining requires a large amount of energy – for heavy machinery, water pumping, ventilation (for underground mining) and other processes. If this energy is fuelled by fossil fuels, the level of emissions seriously questions our ability to limit climate breakdown and may lead to the failure to meet local, regional and global climate agreements. Also, as peatland, grasslands or trees are impacted or completely destroyed, important carbon stores are lost.  

Mining operations have been repeatedly linked to watershed destruction and increased flooding disasters. When mining strips forests and destabilizes soil, water resources dry up, and the risk of floods and siltation downstream rises sharply, as seen in numerous mining-affected communities. This devastation is made even worse as climate change drives more frequent and intense extreme weather events — such as heavy rains and typhoons, which strike these already degraded landscapes, placing poor and marginalized communities at even greater risk of catastrophic floods and landslides.

In the Philippines, rampant mining and deforestation has intensified floods and landslides in Mindanao. In Indonesia, nickel and coal mining have been directly blamed for severe floods in areas like Morowali and Samarinda. Deforestation and unrehabilitated mining pits have left landscapes unable to absorb rainfall, causing rapid runoff and catastrophic flooding after heavy rains. 

In India’s Erai watershed, spatial analysis revealed that mine dumps within river channels were responsible for major floods, while in Mongolia, mining near river systems led to increased sediment and nutrient loading, raising flood risks and degrading water quality.  

Social, cultural and economic impacts

Community tensions

There is a well established ‘guide book’ that mining companies use to impose their projects on communities. These  practices and actions are systematic, with the first step focused on sowing community division. 

‘They mine the community before they mine the land’
– Hal Rhoades, previous coordinator of YLNM. 

This includes paying a small number of community members to be on their side, often in very visible but low-ranking roles such as ‘Community Relations Manager’.  In areas with no prior experience of mining, others may be swayed by promises of jobs and ‘development’, creating tensions with those who view the mine as a threat to their livelihoods and ways of life. These divisions are deepened by the immense pressure communities face as they are forced to confront powerful multinational corporations, and often their own governments, without adequate support, in situations that are emotionally charged, high-stakes, and deeply stressful.

Another common so-called socialisation technique used by mining companies in communities is to spread propaganda, e.g. by doing talks in schools, painting murals, funding community spaces such as sports grounds, and covering the costs of events and parties. This is often done while mining activities are at the early exploration stage, in order to generate a positive perception of the company in the community. The seeds for division are sown, as the project advances and community members start noticing damage to their agricultural lands or waterways, but find they cannot complain for fear of coming up against the co-opted community members.

On the other hand, resisting mining may bring people together and many environmental human rights defenders speak of new friends made, the deepening of existing friendships and very meaningful shared experiences of standing up for what’s important. Collaboration, collective action and solidarity are practices enlivened in grassroots movements and frontline communities when resisting mining.

Democratic deficit

Indigenous Peoples, on paper, have a right to self-determination in decisions that affect them via the ILO 169, the provision for Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) in the United Nations Declaration of Rights for Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and international jurisprudence. However, in practice, this is often only a box ticking exercise, not real meaningful participative decision making that respects Indigenous Peoples’ self-determination, laws and sovereignty. Similarly, the Aarhus Convention, giving the public access to information and the right to participate in decision making regarding environmental matters, is often not complied with. 

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas recognises the reliance on land for life and identity of local communities, and also highlights the necessity of participation in decision making around land use and land governance, as well as collective rights for rural communities. Therefore it is vitally important that the ‘no’ of communities affected by mining be respected. Yet in reality, communities’ right to say no is rarely honoured. Nor is there a clear path to justice, if this right is violated. Rather, communities who say no often face repression and violence.

Militarisation, violence and criminalisation of defenders

Environmental human rights defenders (EHRDs) opposing mining projects have increasingly faced criminalization, harassment, violence and even death. Between 2012 and 2023, more than 2,100 land and environmental defenders were killed, according to Global Witness, with mining being the deadliest industry to resist:

“While establishing a direct relationship between the murder of a defender and specific corporate interests remains difficult, Global Witness identified mining as the biggest industry driver by far, with 25 defenders killed after opposing mining operations in 2023. Other industries include fishing (5), logging (5), agribusiness (4), roads and infrastructure (4) and hydropower (2).”

In 2024 the trend continued: Frontline Defenders documented the killings of 324 human rights defenders in 32 countries – 20.4% of these were land rights defenders. 

Latin America is consistently the most dangerous region in which to be a land defender; 23 of the 25 mining-related killings globally in 2023 happened in Latin America. Colombia is the deadliest, followed by Brazil, Mexico and Honduras. Asia has also featured strongly; 40% of all mining-related killings between 2012 and 2023 occurred in this region. 

The Philippines in particular has often featured in the top most dangerous countries to be a land defender. Our member Kalikasan People’s Network and Global Witness have reported on how the militarisation of mining is threatening Indigenous Peoples in the Philippines. Since 2012, the Philippines has been ranked as the deadliest country in Asia for people protecting land and the environment, with mining linked to a third of all killings documented by Global Witness. 

Defenders are also being criminalised on an ever-increasing scale. Terrorism charges for organising or even just participating in protests are often used to demand long sentences and extortionate fines. Many other charges are thrown at defenders. See again the report from Frontline Defenders for details of cases of judicial harassment and criminalisation of people resisting mining projects, like the recent case of 11 peasants from southeast Antioquia, Colombia, who were at risk of a jail sentence for their resistance against a South African Corporation. Even if the cases do not result in a conviction, they are designed to exhaust resources and people’s spirit, and dissuade further resistance. 

Women

Women are typically the most heavily impacted by the effects of extractivism. Mining hits the home first – in terms of water and food supply to feed the family, and also in terms of crop failure and animal death. Due to the gendered nature of care work, women are the first to see the effects of this. At the Los Filos gold mine in Guerrero, México, the community of Carrizalillo lives roughly 400 meters from the cyanide heap leach pad where a community health study carried out from 2012 to 2014 identified a marked increase in premature births and birth deformations, in addition to other prevalent illnesses. 

Mining projects are often accompanied by an increase in gender-based violence. Tensions and pressures within affected communities can cause breakdowns in families and social cohesion, contributing to higher rates of domestic violence and other forms of abuse. There is also the influx of predominantly male, transient workers into mining districts that frequently leads to a rise in human trafficking and the sexual exploitation of women.  Women are also frequently subjected to harassment, intimidation, and physical violence by mine security guards, particularly when they protest or resist mining activities.

Yet it is women who have long been – and continue to be – at the forefront of resistance rising up, despite the ongoing oppressions of patriarchy. See our YLNM position paper on Gender, Patriarchy and Extractivism for a deeper analysis on this intersection.

Impacts on local livelihoods 

Mining tends to target rural areas where Indigenous and Local Communities have been sustaining themselves with livelihoods that also sustain the land – such as farming, fishing, eco-tourism, and craft-making. However, mining is incompatible with these livelihoods. 

Culture and identity are often deeply connected to traditional livelihoods. When these are threatened or lost due to mining, communities not only lose their means of making a living, but also risk losing the underpinnings of their culture and accompanying spiritual practices. These, in turn, are interwoven and interdependent with the health of local ecosystems sustained through generations of territorial management and stewardship. 

‘Jobs’ debunked, Food Sovereignty instead

One of the main carrots dangled to entice local communities to accept a mine is the promise of jobs and economic growth. This is especially enticing if it is an area neglected by the state, experiencing poverty and outward migration. However, this promise rarely materialises. The number of jobs touted in the propaganda, if not fabricated, often refer to the labour required for the construction stage, which typically lasts only a couple of years. After this stage, only a small percentage of the jobs are needed, and these are specialised jobs which are normally filled by workers from outside the area, if not the country. 

It may be true that indirect jobs are created or supported in the servicing of the project (restaurants, hotels, drivers etc.) However, this is a temporary economy, and when the mine closes the services are no longer required, often leaving ghost towns in their wake. The jobs on offer are also not relevant to context-based livelihoods or may jeopardize those livelihoods, displacing people from their traditional practices into the salary system, making them dependent on cash to buy food instead of growing their own food locally. With agriculture, hunting, fishing, and horticultural practices gone, locally grown or harvested food is lost. This takes with it the traditional knowledge associated with Indigenous and local food systems, and threatens the intergenerational transmission of knowledge, and with that the cultural “acervo” (heritage) is lost forever.  

“Our heritage as food producers is critical to the future of humanity. But this heritage and our capacities to produce healthy, good and abundant food are being threatened and undermined.”

– Declaration of the Forum for Food Sovereignty, Nyéléni 2007

When a mine displaces a farming community, reduces and contaminates surrounding water sources, pollutes the air and has an impact on the health and ability of communities to grow food, this will affect the food sovereignty of a whole region. Read more in UnderMining Agriculture (The Gaia Foundation).

YLNM supports the “Food Sovereignty” movement, led by La Via Campesina, the world’s largest peasant movement, which recognises the critical importance of small-scale food producers, and their right to determine their own agriculture and food systems. Food Sovereignty is about ensuring local collective control and rights over land and water, so that peoples and communities may continue to produce food for themselves and for us all to eat. Food sovereignty systems work with nature, appreciating that healthy ecosystems are essential in supporting the health of animals, fish, pollinators, crop diversity and farmers.

Cultural Heritage Destroyed

An insidious practice of the global mining industry is the deliberate destruction of sites of cultural heritage, or sites that are sacred to Indigenous Peoples and other populations. There are many examples of this – one that has gained significant attention post-destruction was that of the Juukan Gorge in Western Australia. Rio Tinto blasted the oldest sacred site in the western Pilbara region and the only inland site in Australia to show signs of continual human occupation through the last Ice Age. The site had shown 46,000 years of continual occupation and provided a 4,000-year-old genetic link to present-day traditional owners. It was destroyed for the expansion of an iron ore mine.

In the Philippines, Canadian TVI took the top of Mt. Canatuan, the sacred place and altar of the Suanon indigenous people, for an open pit gold and silver mine. This mine was given permission without Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) of the affected communities. Going south to the Pacific, BHP are responsible for ‘the largest and longest environmental disaster in Papua New Guinea’s history’, one that they have not been held fully accountable for. The Ok Tedi Mine’s unchecked dumping of mine tailings directly into the Fly River System has submerged areas of great spiritual importance to local communities.

In Latin America, Glencore destroyed much of the Bruno stream to which the Wayúu people, particularly women, have spiritual links, by extracting coal from the vast open pit Cerrejón mine situated on indigenous territory in La Guajira, Colombia. In the state of San Luis Potosí, Mexico, the most sacred site to the Wixárika people is threatened by mining. Wirikuta is considered the Centre of the Universe; it is not only the birthplace of Wixaritari culture, it also contains all the natural elements that sustain it. As María Concepción Bautista, president of the commons for the Tuapurie-Santa Catarina and Cuexcomatitlán communities, states plainly: “It is an extermination of what is sacred.”

Section 2: Mining in a capitalist economy 

Extractivism reflects and sustains an economic and developmental model based on the unsustainable and unjust exploitation of People and Nature. It is driven by out-of-control production and consumption, a global addiction to economic growth (GDP), and a logic of abusing human rights and pillaging the life sustaining systems on which the wellbeing of all life on Earth depends.

Being asked to accept these extractive industries within this unjust, ecocidal economic system is like being asked to fill a sieve with water – a sieve with an ever-expanding rim. An impossible task reliant on the creation of ever more sacrifice zones to the benefit of an elite few. 

Unjust weight of extractivism 

The Global South 

As the work of Eduardo Galeano highlights, extractivism is the modern face of colonialism, with capitalism as its engine. It follows the same system of exploitation and injustice. Jason Hickel’s work, such as ‘The Divide’ and ‘Global Inequality’, clearly shows that, despite the aid rhetoric, the Global North is a net extractor of resources and wealth from the Global South.   This appropriation amounted to $242 trillion over the period from 1990 to 2015, a sum large enough to eradicate extreme poverty 70 times over. 

The peripheries of the core

With the new rush for minerals in the name of the ‘green transition’ (but at the service of the same old capitalist logic), sacrifice zones are expanding worldwide, including within the Global North itself. Industry and government try to tell us this is a balancing of the scales. However, when mining does ‘come home’, it does not settle justly. It doesn’t happen at the centres of capital but is again pushed to the margins.

For example, in Europe, it is the peripheries which are being readied for sacrifice – the Balkans, Iberia, Fennoscandia and Ireland. A quarter of the island of Ireland is already concessioned to mining companies, compared to 0.8% of England. These peripheries are social as well as geographical – the Sami in Fennoscandia bear the brunt of their mining boom.

In Australia, one of the Global North’s richest resource producing countries, the biggest expansions of mining and processing projects for so-called transition minerals and “critical minerals” are in the more arid regions of Western and South Australia – largely on Indigenous lands subject to the limitations of Native Title law. Whereas projects in more populated states sometimes encroach on non-Indigenous towns or farming communities and may attract opposition due to concerns about risk and impacts, new mining projects in the arid regions tend to be dismissed as “out of sight, out of mind”. Many of these are being pushed forward aggressively with the help of large federal government grants, with scant regard for environmental, water and social impacts, or for the protection of culturally significant sites. 

As another settler colonial state, the situation in Canada mirrors Australia in many ways, with new laws being promoted and approved that fast-track mining permitting processes. These laws are being justified in the “national interest”, but they undermine processes put in place to ensure consent from First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples who bear the brunt of domestic Canadian mining projects. In the United States, Tribal Nations from Nevada to Dakota are seeing the land they were pushed onto now being invaded for mining. 

Mining in a capitalist economy feeds into militarism

The minerals being mined from peripheries act as raw materials for the capitalist/imperialist war machine, that in turn cements their control over our highly extractivist global economy. This is central to the discussion on mining in a capitalist economy – as war is a crucial component of monopoly capitalism. 

Local communities and Indigenous Peoples suffering from impacts of mining are victims twofold when the metals made from mining are used in the war machine that attacks them. YLNM will soon be releasing a position paper on mining and militarism which will expand on this theme.

Section 3: Green capitalism

Transition for who and for what?

How the capitalist economy demands ever more gobbling up of the natural world to turn into sellable stuff is not new. But what is new is its green superhero cloak. Using words like ‘critical’ to describe what they’re extracting deliberately implies that these minerals and metals are critical for our survival, but the reality is a different story. 

The demand projections for so-called critical minerals are astounding. Global demand for lithium is projected to increase by 500% by 2050. The EU alone will demand 60 times more lithium by then. Similar astronomical projections exist for other ‘critical minerals’ like nickel, cobalt, and rare earth metals. Taking copper – another green-painted metal, demand is projected to rise to 36.6 million tonnes annually, yet supply (if it’s all extracted) is forecast at 30.1 million tonnes per year – so there isn’t even enough in the ground to satisfy this eternally increasing demand. 

Yet what is dangerous is the deliberate confounding of the projected demand and what is actually needed to tackle the climate crisis in a just and equitable way. To start with, only a small percentage of critical minerals are destined for renewable technologies for society’s energy needs. Only 7% of nickel is currently used for batteries. Other destinations for these so-called critical minerals are war, aerospace, the construction industry and consumerism of products such as private cars, cell phones, as well as other electronic and metal goods. 

In 2017 the US Department of Defence used 750,000 tonnes of minerals on arms, and this is before the genocide in Gaza and the renewed intensification of military aggression by imperial powers in recent years. We also have the creeping privatisation of the space race – to bring billionaires and their friends on a trip to space, to litter the moon with tiny sculptures, or for mining the moon and asteroids. 

A large percentage of the lithium currently being mined is being used for the seemingly ‘green’ Electric Vehicles (EVs) market – along with nickel and cobalt. However, EVs are not the climate solution they are claimed to be. The private car model was flawed from the start – leading to a decimation of our public transport systems, deadly air pollution and badly designed urban centres. We need free, reliable, accessible and well-designed public transport to replace the wasteful model of the private car, not industrial policies that lock us into reliance upon its expansion. In October 2023 YLNM, along with Rainforest Rescue, visited the Indonesian island of Sulawesi as part of a solidarity visit to communities resisting the extraction of nickel. What we saw and heard belied the rhetoric and instead showed how dirty ‘green’ can be. Read our emblematic case study, developed with our member the Sulawesi Alliance.

Lithium, cobalt and nickel are also used for the manufactured mass consumption of electronic consumer items, – such as smartphones and laptops, for which there is demand far beyond any reasonable need, – due to profit-maximising capitalist strategies such as planned obsolescence and manipulative advertising. Indeed, tech giants like Amazon deliberately dump millions of new products every year to maintain market space for more needless production and consumption.

Another illustrative example of the deliberate wasting of these supposedly critical minerals is that of the disposable vape. Each throwaway vape houses a lithium battery – 2 million of which are discarded weekly in the UK alone. Communities in the deadly ‘lithium triangle’ – stretching across Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, are having mining imposed on them for the green transition when really much of it ends up in landfills or littering the streets.

Finally, we need to ask: what is the energy being used for for which we are told we need to dig up more and more minerals and metals for renewable energy technologies? Is it to meet the needs of people – heating homes, running hospitals and schools, fueling public transport, etc? Or is energy demand vulnerable to the same criticisms as mineral demand? In Ireland, data centres overtake electricity use of all urban homes combined. 

In sum: we stand in solidarity with communities that say no to mining

The expanded extractive plans we’re seeing globally have been brewing for many decades. But in recent years, with the rise of concern for the climate crisis, industry actors and governments have cloaked their intentions under the guise of benevolent public servitude, claiming more extraction is the key to a climate safe future. 

This misleading claim ignores the fact that the climate crisis is intrinsically linked to the other crises we are facing – social, economic, ecological – which are all further exacerbated by increased extractivism. We cannot mine our way out of the climate crisis. 

Communities have a right to know the realities of mining before the companies are granted any permissions, and to understand the system in which it is steeped. And communities have a right to say no to mining. We support those communities in their search for information and understanding, and in their needs for networking and learning from others. 

We also support communities already affected by the reality of mining, who have come to the conclusion that there is no way to make mining better, who are suffering its consequences and looking for or working on post-extractive alternatives. 

Section 4: a world beyond extractivism

We believe that Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities who are at the frontlines of resistance hold the key to a post-extractive future and must lead the way. YLNM exists to bring this future into reality through solidarity and collective action.

We advocate for approaches that are ecologically and socially just – that value diverse ways of life; that protect the land, air and waters we all rely on. These approaches will take us beyond the inherently violent and harmful practice of extraction as if the Earth has no limits. 

We promote locally-rooted, globally reaching and systemic alternatives to mining and extractivism. We do this by weaving together a world beyond extractivism for current and future generations.

Read more ‘Yes to Life’ stories in our research paper ‘Beyond Extractivism: Initiatives from the Yes to Life No to Mining global solidarity network’.