BBCRaquel Celina Rodriguez watches her step as she walks across the Vega de Tilopozo in Chile’s Atacama salt flats.
It’s a wetland, known for its groundwater springs, but the plain is now dry and cracked with holes she explains were once pools.
“Before, the Vega was all green,” she says. “You couldn’t see the animals through the grass. Now everything is dry.” She gestures to some grazing llamas.
For generations, her family raised sheep here. As the climate changed, and rain stopped falling, less grass made that much harder.
But it worsened when “they” started taking the water, she explains.
Ben Derico/BBC“They” are lithium companies. Beneath the salt flats of the Atacama Desert lie the world’s largest reserves of lithium, a soft, silvery-white metal that is an essential component of the batteries that power electric cars,…
