Lithium Horizons

It is 6am. You climb out of your bed to make a brew in the dimly lit kitchen. As you crack open the window, a cool morning breeze strolls in and mingles with the steam rising from the kettle’s spout. The climbing white haze veils the sage-coloured peaks in the near distance. This is the same view your great-grandparents had from their house, framed neatly by the landscape windowpane. A century ago, however, the two mountains were bone-china white – and artificial.

Lithium, a metal fundamental to electrical engineering and renewable energy storage, is highly sought after worldwide. To support the green transition, the UK 2025 Critical Minerals Strategy projects a 1100% increase of domestic lithium demand by 2035, a substantial portion of which is to be produced locally in Cornwall.  Six mining companies are currently carrying out explorations and pilot projects in the country’s southernmost county, hoping to revive its long-dormant mining industry.

The principal area for lithium extraction is in “clay country” just north of St Austell in the middle of Cornwall. This 40km2 open pit mining region historically produced kaolin, a form of decomposed granite also known as “china clay”, a soft, powedery white mineral used in porcelain, paper, paint, plastics, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.1 Technological advancements allow lithium-rich mica commonly found in the local granite– previously considered clay mining waste – to be processed into the lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate essential for making lithium-ion batteries. This mining renaissance poses an unprecedented social challenge, in which a long heritage and an uncertain future are inextricably intertwined.

The general decline of mining in Cornwall from the late 19th century concluded with the closure of its last tin mine, South Crofty, in 1998. 200km2 of former industrial sites (with a selective focus on tin and copper mining from 1700-1914) were designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006.  Tourism replaced mining as the key industry in Cornwall. Clay country, however, received no such consideration.

Having peaked in the 1990s, the china clay industry that once employed over 4,000 workers is at roughly one-quarter of its former size, down from over 100 working pits in the 1870s to just five today.2  Great parts of the region have tentatively entered a post-industrial stage, and dormant extractive landscapes have acquired socio-cultural meaning beyond extraction.

In former mining[1] settlements like St Dennis, St Stephen, Stenalees, Nanpean and Foxhole, more than 30,000 occupants have formed a multitude of new relationships with the post-industrial clay landscape.

Fondly referred to as the “Cornish Alps”, the conical white waste heaps carry profound cultural significance despite receiving no statutory protection. In 2014 a former mine – the iconic 1936 Great Treverbyn Tip – was rescued from being flattened after a successful local campaign.

On the edge of the village of St Dennis, the pair of conical waste tips nicknamed Flatty and Pointy have stood for over a century, formed around 1906 as a part of the Trelavour Clay Works, a china clay mined that cloased at the beginning of the Second World War. Vegetation has taken over their surfaces, re-wilding the man-made piles into “natural” mountains. The beloved landmarks have been a lifelong presence in the window frames of 3,000 residents,  even appearing on school crest of the local primary. They are now marked for demolition, making way for lithium extraction.

Rather than being merely an arrangement of matter under our feet, land is both nature and culture; there is no land without the imagined concept of land.3 The legal protection conferred by designations such as “Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty” or “Area of Great Landscape Value” priorities the aesthetic preservation of land in a “picturesque” tradition.4 In “Mineral Safeguarding Areas”, however, where all surface developments that may negatively impact future mining are precluded, extraction is the priority. Designations like this impose an abstract economic value system onto a more-than-three-dimensional space.5

Terra nullius, or “nobody’s land” was a colonial justification for land seizure. To see a land as empty of existing societies and meanings is to legitimise its co-option for economic extraction. The town planning system and the mining industry treats mid-Cornwall as a ‘dynamic landscape’. This implies that, because millions of tonnes of rocks were continuously displaced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the same can be done in the present – after a decades-long gap – without any serious socio-cultural impact. The administrative designation of ‘dynamic landscape’ can therefore be read as analogous to the violent terra nullius. Compared to the areas outside the clay country, a higher number of renewable energy installations including wind turbines, solar farms and, in 2012, a highly controversial incinerator-powerplant have been constructed or proposed within the region. The historical “dynamism” of the clay country has been used to justify these planning decisions despite strong local opposition.

The post-industrial clay country is not a terra nullius but an extensive landscape in active use by many communities, from “skiing”, biking or trail walking down a waste tip (now: mountain) to canoeing in a flooded pit (now: lake). Permitted informal use and trespassing have historically blurred the boundaries between natural and artificial, and refashioned inactive clay mines into community backyards.6 Labelling landscapes like those in clay country ‘industrial’ overlooks the fact that people have been living on, looking at, and playing in the dormant post-industrial space for decades.7

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In her studies of indigenous land rights, Jillian Walliss draws a distinction between the “right to land” and the “right to landscape”.8 The former refers to legal property ownership; the latter speaks of social use value. Applying this concept to Cornwall and to the reopening of mines in the clay country, the limits of a town planning system originally designed to deter ill-conceived developments in cities become apparent.9

Cornwall’s mining resurgence under the green transition should be seen by local authorities and planning offices as a policy opportunity to reconcile a mining past and mining future. It should be an opportunity to foster social confidence through genuine consultation with inhabitants, developing qualitative understandings of a “landscape” (lived in by communities) instead of just “land” (privately owned for economic extraction). If we get this wrong, the balancing act between private development and public good becomes unattainable in this mineral-rich but economically poor region.

The lithium horizon is both literal and metaphorical. Reopening mines means re-industrialising a post-industrial landscape, where the pasts and futures of people, land, and matter are impossible to disentangle. Our unique local question is, therefore, not whether we have the right resources, but if we have the political will. The UK’s robust legal framework, strong civil society and design expertise means that we have a real opportunity to do mining – or re-mining – right. For the past century mineral extraction has been outsourced to the “Global South”: associated with soil contamination, water depletion, indigenous community displacement and human rights violations. A stark example can be seen in the Latin American ‘Lithium Triangle’ between Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, a region hosting over 50% of the world’s lithium reserves. 

But beyond avoiding the obvious ecological horrors, mining master planning needs to be carried out under renewed policy guidance – from new Supplementary Planning Documents to appropriate Section106 Agreements with an understanding that this landscape is  much more than just “industrial”. With the right leadership, the process could be re-imagined as a landscape “re-design” operation. Our ambitions should not only be to generate biodiversity net gain through long-term restoration plans, but also to create immediate social-use benefits and community infrastructure: from new affordable housing to public spaces where people can continue to make meaning with this unique landscape.