Abstract

BONELLI, Cristóbal  and  PAVEZ, Andrés. Green Sleepwalking: Mining, Entropy, and the Limits of Sustainability in Northern Chile. Antipod. Rev. Antropol. Arqueol. [online]. 2025, n.60, pp.247-272.  Epub Aug 12, 2025. ISSN 1900-5407.  https://doi.org/10.7440/antipoda60.2025.10.

In a global context defined by climate urgency, the energy transition is presented as an unavoidable solution to the ecological crisis. This article critically examines that promise, revealing how it reproduces industrial logics and epistemic colonialities that constrain the imagination of alternatives. We ask how, in situated ways, political and epistemic forms of automation that accompany green energy transitions are configured and resisted. We propose the concept of green sleepwalking to describe a collective automatism that, under the rhetoric of sustainability, deepens extractive dynamics and erodes the capacity to envision divergent futures. Methodologically, the article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2024 in the Atacama Salt Flat, involving extended field visits and participation in institutional forums for lithium governance. We also examine the energy enclave of Tocopilla-historically vital to copper mining-in order to situate lithium within a deeper, long-standing extractive ecology. We propose the notion of entropic omissions to capture how dominant energy transition narratives obscure irreversible losses-material, ecological, and psychosocial-embedded in current production regimes. We argue that green sleepwalking works precisely by erasing these entropic pasts, detaching materials like lithium from their historical and emotional contexts to align them with global discourses of climate urgency. This article contributes a conceptual and empirical critique from the South, engaging with the work of Bernard Stiegler to conceptualize the Entropocene as an era of accelerating entropy-one that erodes individuation and suppresses dissent. In response, we propose a decolonial negantropy as a way to reignite collective thinking beyond the logic of linear progress.

Keywords : Entropocene; green sleepwalking; lithium; negantropy; sustainability..

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