In this thought-in-progress piece, PhD Candidate, Juan Felipe Hernandez Gomez, traces the ecological violence embedded in lithium extraction across two desert sites: Rhyolite Ridge in Nevada and the Salar de Llamara in northern Chile. In the face of the threatened extinction of Tiehm’s buckwheat and the precarity of brine-dependent microbial life, Hernandez Gomez asks what kind of green future is being built when decarbonization depends on new forms of sacrifice.