Europe as a reemerging mining frontier? Contested lithium futures in the German Ore Mountains

In recent years, apparent supply crises and geopolitical pressures around the globe have injected new demands for the extraction, processing and recycling of mineral resources. Particularly in countries of the Global North, the temporal pressure to combat climate change and to ensure energy security became increasingly entangled with political calls for securing ‘critical minerals’ like lithium domestically. The paper explores how particular tropes of ‘mining for climate’ build upon the infrastructures and residues of prior extractive operations in the German Ore Mountains. Based on ethnographic research within a transdisciplinary remining project, we identify material and discursive elements linking conventional with ‘green’ forms of extractivism(s). In the context of new mining legislations such as the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA), local struggles around corporate and state-led attempts of speeding up permitting procedures and of reusing extractive infrastructures point to specific lithium crystallizations where alternative forms of future-making take shape.