I would like to thank NetGalley and the Author for giving me the opportunity to review this ARC.

As the world moves towards a future of hydrocarbon energy alternatives, we find ourselves needing much more key and rare elements to manufacture the components and technologies that will fuel that change. Such products include electric vehicles and solar panels. In way, this book provides a well research and presented view into the societal, political, environmental, and technological hurdles the world faces.

The author's writing style is very clear and easy to understand. It drew me into the story.

It's definitely a challenging conundrum and choice we are facing in the trade off between environmental destruction and climate change fighting.

Tiehm's buckwheat is a plant that is only known to grow in the lithium rich soil of Nevada. In The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives, Ernest Scheyder uses the discovery and protection of this plant as the main story that highlights the tensions, compromises and motivations of extractive industries, environmentalists, Indigenous peoples, political power holders and the movement towards more sustainable energy production.

Scheyder's background prepared him well for this book, previously he had worked as a journalist for Reuters, focused on the oil industry at a time when fracking was gaining a lot of attention. Here, his experience is an asset as he interviews many different figures involved in developing technologies, businessmen, entrepreneurs, protesters, and many others. Scheyder also traveled extensively, having personally visited most of the locations featured in the book. Many of those are United States based, with some international travel.

The central narrative of the book is that we have reached a time of difficult choices. If the United States wants to be able to produce 'green' vehicles and infrastructures, it needs to increase the accessibility of the metals and minerals that make those possible. Unfortunately, the places they are available in the US are in places known for natural beauty, endangered species or needed water supplies. With mining there are always risks, but have we reached the point where they are outweighed by the need?

Scheyder is looking at the larger scope. Some companies are followed from their origins through to the present, detailing their development and difficulties working with the government to secure locations and the permissions to use them. Other sections report the development of the technologies making renewable products possible or the techniques needed to mine. The recurrent theme is a company learns of a location of a natural resource, invests in developing it, seeks to secure the rights to mine it, runs in to an issue and either gives up after loss of value of the company or continues to fight for access. Often China is involved somewhere in the process, either working to fund the companies or serving as competition.

It is a timely and thought provoking book, but repetitive. It asked the question of what is valuable, what grows and is built on the land, or accessing the mineral wealth below? What is the cost of the technologies we use?

Worth a read for those exploring modern mining, contemporary environmentalism, or political decision making. Not recommended for the general reader, though chapter 4, the leaf blower was a highlight that should be read widely.

An interesting overview of the current complex state of mining lithium, copper, cobalt (and maybe other minerals I can't remember) important to making a "green energy" transition. I particularly liked, for lack of a better word, the nuanced chapters discussing the conflicts between mining and environmentalists (which usually boil down to "yes yes we need to mine these metals to help reduce climate change, but do we need to mine them RIGHT HERE?"). It's not like Scheyder provides a solution to the impasse (for how could he) but it's awfully thought-provoking.

Do The Needs Of The Many Outweigh The Desires Of The Few? 20 years ago as I was wrapping up my Computer Science degree requirements at Kennesaw State University just outside of Atlanta, GA, there was a massive debate raging around campus. At the time, the school - new to the "University" title, having had it for less than a decade at this point - was trying to grow from the commuter college it had been since its inception 40 yrs prior into a full fledged research level University... complete with student housing. The problem was that where the University wanted to place some of its first dorms was on the hill directly behind the Science building... where an endangered plant of some form was found, which kicked off rounds and rounds of going back and forth with various Environmental Protection Agency types. To be quite honest, I was never directly involved in any of this, but being on the school's Student Media Advisory Board for a couple of years, I was connected enough to at least the reporting that I heard about at least the high points.

In The War Below, Scheyder looks at just these types of examples, where larger, grander ideas butt up against some much more local concern. Where the larger, grander idea is always "The only way we can see to fight climate change and stop carbon emissions while maintaining the global economy as we currently know it is to produce advanced electronic machines that require certain minerals to function, therefore we must obtain these minerals wherever they may be found." Which admittedly means that for those that are more adamant that human-caused climate change isn't a real thing or is some level of alarmist bullshit... well, you've been warned about a central tenet of this book in this review now.

However, Scheyder doesn't really stay on the climate change debate itself, instead focusing on the more micro battles. "We found a supply of this particular mineral - but as it turns out, this particular plant that only exists in this exact spot also is dependent on this mineral, and therefore some are acting on behalf of the plant to stop us from getting to the mineral." Or "We found a supply of a different mineral - but it happens to be under a location that some Native Americans consider sacred, and they're trying to stop us from destroying their sacred spot." Or "We found a supply of another mineral - but it happens to be in the middle of a town, and nearby residents don't want to sell their land to us." Every chapter is built around these and other variations of the same types of battles, pitting humanity's need for these particular minerals against some more local, more intimate desire.

Scheyder does a remarkably balanced job of talking to both sides and presenting both sides in a way that they will likely consider the reporting on themselves to be pretty close to fair - as he notes within the text a few times, his job isn't really to make a decision for humanity so much as to present the competing interests and allow humanity the chance to choose for itself.

Is our survival - as we currently see it - worth forcing ourselves on someone who is more intimately connected to that spot on Earth than most of us will ever directly be?

This book isn't the call to arms that Siddarth Kara's Cobalt Red, released almost exactly one year earlier and describing the outright horrors and abuses rampant throughout much of the cobalt industry specifically, was. Instead, as noted, it is more of a balanced and even nuanced look at the competing interests surrounding how and even if certain materials can be obtained in certain locations, and how these small, individual battles can impact us all at a global level.

In the case of KSU's Student Housing vs the plant, fwiw, apparently it was resolved in favor of KSU's Student Housing at some point in the last 20 yrs, as now the entire hill that was once a battleground is now a few different student housing complexes. In the cases Scheyder details... well, read the book. Some of them were still ongoing at the time Scheyder had to hand his book off for final editing, but he gives up to that moment details on where they are in such instances.

Very much recommended.

Could not get into this book. I didn't really like the way the story was laid out. Was hard to follow and at times felt all over the place. When writing a book about a sort of specialized topic narrative flow is more important than ever. Otherwise the story can feel like a textbook or an academic article. If that is the goal they should be written as such. But when writing a book which is arguably for public consumption the relay of information needs to be tailor a bit so as to be engaging for people without that specialized knowledge. This book did not do that at all. That doesn't make for a very pleasant reading experience for someone. Didn't finish the book so don't think it would be fair to publish a review somewhere so I'm just putting my feedback here.