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As a key ingredient of batteries for electric vehicles (EVs), lithium plays a significant role in climate change mitigation, but lithium has considerable impacts on water and society across its life cycle. Upstream extraction methods—including open‐pit mining, brine evaporation, and novel direct lithium extraction (DLE)—and downstream processes present different impacts on both the quantity and quality of water resources, leading to water depletion and contamination. Regarding upstream extraction, it is critical for a comprehensive assessment of lithium's life cycle to include cumulative impacts related not only to freshwater, but also mineralized or saline groundwater, also known as brine. Legal frameworks have obscured social and ecological impacts by treating brine as a mineral rather than water in regulation of lithium extraction through brine evaporation. Analysis of cumulative impacts across the lifespan of lithium reveals not only water impacts in conventional open‐pit mining and brine evaporation, but also significant freshwater needs for DLE technologies, as well as burdens on fenceline communities related to wastewater in processing, chemical contaminants in battery manufacturing, water use for cooling in energy storage, and water quality hazards in recycling. Water analysis in lithium life cycle assessments (LCAs) tends to exclude brine and lack hydrosocial context on the environmental justice implications of water use by life cycle stage. New research directions might benefit from taking a more community‐engaged and cradle‐to‐cradle approach to lithium LCAs, including regionalized impact analysis of freshwater use in DLE, as well as wastewater pollution, cooling water, and recycling hazards from downstream processes. This article is categorized under:Human Water > Human WaterHuman Water > Water GovernanceHuman Water > Water as Imagined and RepresentedScience of Water > Water and Environmental Change [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmentalists, ranchers, and Indigenous nations are increasingly coming together on environmental issues in what have been called "unlikely alliances," offering important insights into the role of collaboration and collective action in environmental governance. We examine two cases of unlikely alliances that formed in response to large rural-to-urban water transfer projects in the western United States, drawing on narrative analysis of interviews and focus groups with diverse participants. We highlight several key insights about unlikely alliances in action, finding that they 1) can take many different forms, often shifting over time; 2) require a delicate balance between alignment and autonomy, particularly when involving sovereign Indigenous nations; 3) can involve divergent understandings and expectations in regard to what it means to ally, with a notable distinction between issue-oriented and relationship-oriented approaches, and 4) are valued by participants even as they grapple with these challenges, particularly in the context of growing political polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of water justice is increasingly invoked by both scholars and activists working to address issues of inequity in water governance. However, water justice means different things to different people, which can present challenges when building alliances among diverse actors. In this paper, we examine these dynamics in the context of unlikely alliances formed among environmental, ranching, and Indigenous actors in response to rural-to-urban water transfer projects in the arid Great Basin region of the western United States. Through more than 60 interviews across two cases in eastern California and eastern Nevada, we find that though these actors aligned in their opposition to projects they viewed as unjust, they had different views of what justice would look like. We discuss their diverse visions of water justice in relation to notions of distributive, procedural, restorative, and transformative justice. While many of these visions overlapped and complemented each other, others were more starkly divided by their orientation towards the current state of water governance, with some seeking to protect it and others seeking to transform it. Building alliances thus required some to strategically focus on the common ground around protecting existing water allocations and systems of accountability, while separately pursuing broader visions of repairing past harms and transforming underlying systems. This research demonstrates that understandings of water justice are diverse and dynamic and that they shape and are shaped by alliance-building. It underscores the methodological value of asking people to articulate not only how they ally against injustices but also what they would consider a just outcome and how they approach collaboration when there are different visions of water justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we address governmentality and the politics of water rights by examining the Nevada Division of Water Resources (the Division)’s governance associated with water indicators and accounting practices. We are specifically interested in the political work of water indicators and accounting practices as they are produced, applied, and contested – work that generates advantages for Nevada’s mining industry. We focus on perennial yield, an important indicator used by the Division, and examine accounting practices in which mining water rights are designated as temporary and nonconsumptive. We examine how these water indicators and accounting practices are deployed in ways that 1) make groundwater legible and apportionable in ways that advantage the mining industry; 2) reduce the visibility of mining access to groundwater; and 3) enhance the resource state’s objectivity and legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The indigenous cultures and communities of North America are studied in many academic disciplines, geography among them. The number of geographers who work in this area is small compared to the figures that emerge from such departments as anthropology, history, or literature, mainly because geography itself is a small discipline. A surprisingly wide range of topics, methods, epistemological stances, and regional emphases are represented in recent geographical literature nonetheless. Our purpose here is to summarize the published books and journal articles written about North American Indian and Inuit geographies during the past ten years, following a brief look at earlier work. We do so to raise awareness of this diverse and somewhat diffuse literature, and to make it more accessible to readers of this journal.

SOVEREIGN SUGAR: Industry and Environment in Hawai'i. By CAROL A. MACLENNAN. 378 pp.; maps, ills., bibliog., index. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2014. $39.00 (cloth), ISHN 9780824839499. Sugar. Whether stirred [...]

We examine ways in which space and time, as well as governance, are embedded in and revealed by hydrosocial imaginaries. As conceptions of space and time are fundamental to the establishment of sociocultural-political relationships, they are central to water governance in providing a framework on which overall hydrosocial relations are constructed. We also recognize the ways in which Tribes continually redraw trajectories of power through engaging and reshaping complex governance networks. Our focus is how tribal governance of water quality connects a core value of the Pyramid Lake Paiutes to two of their hydrosocial imaginaries. Both hydrosocial imaginaries motivate governance practices and actions through which social meaning is constituted for the Pyramid Lake Paiutes and relationships are built with respect to water. We find that water quality governance is an avenue in which the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe move beyond partial and abstracted rights of inclusion by incorporating multidimensional Indigenous systems of obligation that span time and space. Key Words: hydrosocial imaginaries, Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, spatiotemporalities, tribal environmental governance, water quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the practice of first-person accounts in curriculum examinations of race and ethnicity. Refutes the essentialist notion that only members of a particular group can address issues concerning that group. Argues that nonmembers can contribute to a productive examination as long as they have some knowledge of their limitations. (MJP)