Astute ... [Riofrancos] is by far the most clear-eyed of mining’s many recent chronicles ... Critical minerals are important if the future is to be a livable one, but their costs are very real [and] Riofrancos not only illustrates those costs; she suggests they are, at least to some extent, avoidable.
[Riofrancos] manages to steer a navigable path between the Scylla of head-in-the-sand positivity and the Charybdis of blanket negativity ... She also persuasively insists that the mining sector needs top-to-toe re-regulation and reorganization ... If this blueprint today sounds hopelessly ambitious…then that is a measure less of any fault on the part of Thea Riofrancos than of the strength of the forces currently arrayed against progressive change.
A thoughtful, engaging, and politically useful exploration of how to imagine and fight for a different green transition ... Riofrancos also roves widely across the history of the last half century to situate the material fact of extraction within specific political and economic conjunctures ... A riveting firsthand account of the revival of [resource nationalism] in Latin American countries in recent years ... Riofrancos helps sketch a counter-geography to the world-straddling frontiers of today’s green capitalism ... Riofrancos opens welcome vistas for political imagination and action.
