A Charged Topic

One of the features of mining is that it occurs mostly in places so remote from our increasingly urban landscapes as to be almost ­unimaginable. Massive operations blast and dig through ­bedrock the world over, from the mountainous, steaming jungles of New Guinea and the briny flats of South America to the frozen reaches of eastern Siberia. Out of sight, out of mind — and often beyond the reach of regulators.

In Pitfall: The Race to Mine the World’s Most Vulnerable Places, Christopher Pollon takes us to these uncommon places and argues that while humans need metals, we are “sleepwalking into the future,” failing to consider how the social and environmental costs of extraction are accelerating as we stoke our metal-dependent green-energy ambitions. The global South, in particular, is under pressure from a combination of poverty, corrupt leadership, China’s desire to control...