The universe was born small, unimaginably dense and furiously hot. At first, it was all energy contained in a volume of space that exploded in size by a factor of 100 septillion in a fraction of a second. Imagine it as a single cell ballooning to the size of the Milky Way almost instantaneously. Elementary particles like quarks, photons and electrons were smashing into each other with such violence that no other matter could exist. The primordial cosmos was a white-hot smoothie in a blender.

One second after the Big Bang, the expanding universe was 10 billion degrees Kelvin. Quarks and gluons had congealed to make the first protons and neutrons, which collided over the course of a few minutes and stuck in different configurations, forming the nuclei of the first three elements: two gases and one light metal. For the next 100 million years or so, these would be the only elements in the vast, unblemished fabric of space before the first stars ignited like furnaces in the dark to forge all other matter.

Almost 14 billion years later, on the third rocky planet orbiting a young star in a distal arm of a spiral galaxy, intelligent lifeforms would give names to those first three elements. The two gases: hydrogen and helium. The metal: lithium.

This is the story of that metal, a powerful, promising and somehow still mysterious element on which those intelligent lifeforms — still alone in the universe, as far as they know — have pinned their hopes for survival on a planet warmed by their excesses. 

Scientists generally consider it uncool to anthropomorphize, but as a nonscientist, I can say that if lithium were a friend, it would be the sort of friend who is humble and unassuming and yet also seemingly everywhere all at once doing really fabulous and important things. Lithium, in my imagination, is the envy of the other elements.

“I’m such a fan of lithium,” the astronomer Brian Fields told me over the phone recently. “It’s the third simplest element. And yet it’s always got surprises for us.” Fields teaches astronomy and physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He specializes in a field called galactic chemical evolution, which seeks to explain the origin of elements in the universe.

“Lithium has one of the most complex stories,” Fields said. “The oxygen you’re breathing, the carbon in your DNA, the iron in your blood — that came later, out of stars. But lithium comes straight out of the Big Bang.”

Big Bang nucleosynthesis, as it’s called, first produced hydrogen, the simplest, lightest and most abundant element — 75% of the newborn universe by mass. Helium formed next and accounts for most of the remaining mass. Lithium was created last, in minuscule amounts — one lithium atom for every 2 billion hydrogen atoms. Heavy elements, like gold, are generally the universe’s rarest. Lithium is an outlier — the third-lightest element and yet “barely there,” Fields said.

Lithium is unusual among the elements in other ways. It’s the only one we know of where a significant amount is made in all three element-producing processes: the Big Bang itself, within stars and when cosmic rays strike and fragment disparate particles in space. These collisions, called cosmic ray spallation, result in discombobulated atoms reassembling themselves with varying numbers of protons and neutrons, like an intergalactic Mr. Potato Head. (Beryllium, found in emeralds, is also produced this way.)

Because they’re created from swirling clouds of matter in the cosmos, all stars are born with lithium. But the sources of lithium in the universe have, since the late 1980s, presented astronomers with an odd problem. As Fields told me, astronomers studying the abundance of elements after the Big Bang have created complex calculations that account for the expansion of the universe, nuclear reactions and the behavior of subatomic particles like photons and neutrinos. The math pencils out for hydrogen and helium — the measurements match the predictions. Not so with lithium — only a third or less of the expected amount of lithium is observable in the universe. “We call ‘em like we see ‘em in astrophysics,” Fields said, “so we called this the lithium problem.”

So where did it all go? Astronomers have tried to answer this by training their telescopes on the oldest stars. Ann Boesgaard, an astronomy professor emerita at the University of Hawaii and a pioneer in galactic chemical evolution, studies distant stars in the galaxy, some more than 11 billion years old. “Because of the light travel time,” she said, “the farther away you stare, the nearer you are to the beginning of the universe.” Like fossils, the stars should tell the story of how elements built up over time. But the amount of lithium Boesgaard has measured in those stars is still only 60% of the amount astronomers predict was present at the beginning of the universe.

Lithium, Boesgaard explained, is an extremely fragile element with a poorly bound nucleus. When it gets too hot, it is destroyed. Inside stars, convective currents churn their contents into different temperature zones, pulling lithium toward the hotter center. “At 2.5 million degrees Kelvin, it’s curtains for lithium atoms,” she said. At that temperature, lithium undergoes nuclear reactions and is converted into helium. Perhaps the discrepancy between the observed and expected amount of lithium in the universe is because so much of it is getting eaten up inside stars. But how quickly? “We’re looking at the oldest stars and we still can’t find it,” Boesgaard said.

Closer to home, our star seems to support this hypothesis. Katharina Lodders, a cosmochemist at Washington University in St. Louis, analyzes ancient meteorites to understand elemental abundance in our solar system when the sun was born about 4.6 billion years ago. She compares their composition to that of the sun, which accounts for over 99% of the mass of our solar system and therefore should reflect its proportion of elements. The distribution of almost every element in these meteorites matches the sun.

But not lithium. Astronomers studying the sun through spectroscopy find much less than they would expect. The sun’s convection currents must be dragging the lithium atoms deeper into itself and destroying them. “The sun and other stars tell us what they’re made of,” Lodders told me. “You just have to read the messages hidden in the light.”

Act II: Man Meets Lithium, Immediately Tries To Set It On Fire

The story of how humans discovered lithium goes back to the late 18th century and a Brazilian scientist, statesman and poet named José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva who was hopscotching around Europe on a sort of early study abroad program. While touring an iron mine on the Swedish isle of Utö, he picked up some curious rocks in the waste pile and determined they were new minerals. He called them petalite and spodumene.

Nothing much was heard of Silva’s curious discovery until almost 20 years later when Johan August Arfwedson, a promising employee in the laboratory of Jöns Jacob Berzelius, one of the founders of modern chemistry and the man who coined words such as “polymer” and “catalyst,” started analyzing another petalite sample from Utö. Arfwedson used the methods of the times to separate out the mineral’s silica and aluminum, which together accounted for about 97% of its mass. Next, he mixed some of the pulverized rock with barium carbonate and heated it until he obtained a salt. Trying to determine the salt’s base, Arfwedson ruled out potassium, magnesium and then sodium. He repeated his analysis twice before he concluded he’d found “a definite fixed alkali, whose nature had not been previously known.”

Because the element was discovered in a mineral, Arfwedson and Berzelius named it “lithia,” after the Greek word “lithos,” for stone. Arfwedson went on to identify lithium in two other minerals, lepidolite and spodumene, which had it in particularly high concentrations. Arfwedson tried in vain to isolate lithium to create a pure sample of the element, but lithium is highly reactive and readily forms compounds from which it isn’t easily separated. A slender, well-dressed man known for his precision and orderliness, Arfwedson eventually turned away from the inscrutable lithium and all but abandoned chemistry altogether to attend to an iron forge outside Stockholm, where he died in 1841.

Finally, in 1855, two chemists — Robert Bunsen and Augustus Matthiessen — were able to isolate lithium in a quantity large enough to study its properties. They did this by passing an electric current through molten lithium chloride. At last, mankind could look upon the lightest metal in its pure form.

What Bunsen and Matthiessen observed was a silvery-white alkali metal about as dense as pine wood. Pure lithium is soft enough that if you had a lump of it in your kitchen, you could cut it with a knife. You wouldn’t want to, though. Lithium is so reactive with the nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen in air that it would tarnish black before your eyes and may then combust. If you put it in water, it would fizz and may catch fire and explode. For these reasons, lithium is never found in its pure state in nature. It is always in a compound. It constitutes 0.002% of the Earth’s crust, making it slightly more prevalent than lead. 

Even before lithium was isolated and understood, chemists were recommending its compounds for medical use. In 1843, a British surgeon named Alexander Ure was investigating cures for gout and urinary stones. Ure put a large bladder stone in a solution of lithium carbonate he obtained from the mineral lepidolite and watched the stone shrink over five hours. He envisioned treating patients with urinary stones by injecting the solution directly into the bladder. The trouble was, lithium was still in short supply. Ure had to wait until 1859 before he could get enough lithium carbonate to try to treat a 56-year-old man with a large bladder stone. Roughly every other day over several weeks, he injected lithium carbonate into the man’s bladder. The stone didn’t shrink and the patient eventually died — it’s not clear why — but Ure still claimed the experiment was a success because it seemed the stone at least became more brittle.

Meanwhile, many 19th-century doctors subscribed to the popular belief that an excess of uric acid, which constitutes most bladder stones, was responsible for ailments as diverse as heart disease, asthma and tuberculosis. The British doctor Sir Alfred Baring Garrod suggested lithium as a treatment, due to its ability to dissolve uric acid. Toward the end of the century, a doctor in Denmark even tried treating depressed patients with lithium carbonate, thinking that their afflictions were also caused by too much uric acid. By the end of the century, physicians throughout Europe and the U.S. had begun to prescribe lithium, by then widely available, for all manner of ills. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation recently called lithium the “turmeric of the late 1800s.”

Over time, lithium lost its luster as a panacea. It wasn’t until the middle of the next century that its role in psychiatry would be solidified by an unlikely doctor in another hemisphere.

Act III: A Miracle For Melancholy, If Not For Several Guinea Pigs

As early as the second century, physicians like Soranus of Ephesus prescribed bathing in alkali mineral springs to cure mania and melancholia. We now know that many of these mineral baths contain lithium, which perhaps contributed to their therapeutic effects.

The treatment of “taking the waters” extended into the United States as well. Lithia Springs in Georgia is home to mineral springs that have long been a sacred center of healing for the Cherokee tribes. By the end of the 19th century, Lithia Springs’ Sweetwater Park Hotel was a destination for the likes of Mark Twain, the Vanderbilts and Presidents Cleveland, Taft, McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Seeking to extend its reach, the hotel’s owner began bottling the spring water and shipping it across the country, even to the White House.

The therapeutic benefits of such lithium microdosing are disputed, but the medical value of lithium was unequivocally proven when a doctor in rural Australia made an accidental discovery that would change the world of psychiatry.

John Cade was born in 1912 in a country hospital near Melbourne. His father served as an army medic during World War I and returned from Gallipoli and France with severe PTSD, whereupon he took up a position as a doctor in Victoria’s Department of Mental Hygiene. As Walter A. Brown writes in his book, “Lithium: A Doctor, A Drug, And A Breakthrough,” the young Cade and his two brothers grew up on the grounds of a mental asylum, interacting with patients who had severe mental illness.

Cade studied medicine at the University of Melbourne and specialized in pediatrics and psychiatry. In 1936, he was appointed a medical officer at the same mental hospital where he had grown up. He began conducting research into patient diets, antibody levels and the differences between men and women diagnosed with what is now called schizophrenia.

In 1940, his research was interrupted. Australia had declared war on Germany and Cade joined the Australian Imperial Force, sailing to Malaya in 1941 to defend the British colony from Japanese invasion. In the ensuing battles, the Japanese outmaneuvered the Commonwealth troops and Cade was among 50,000 British and Australian soldiers captured as prisoners of war.

Cade spent the next three and a half years in a prison camp battling malnutrition and poor health. He studied the effects of vitamin deficiency among his fellow prisoners and even conducted autopsies on soldiers with mental illness, noting many of them had physical manifestations of their disorders in their brains. By the time he was liberated, in 1945, Cade was eager to get back to work. “The old brain box is simmering with ideas,” he wrote to his wife on the journey home. In 1946, he took a job as director of the Bundoora Repatriation Mental Hospital, where his research began in earnest.

The first thing Cade wanted to study in the 200 patients at the hospital was the idea that people experiencing manic-depressive illness are producing an abnormal amount of some naturally occurring substance. The best place to look for this substance, he reasoned, was in the patients’ urine. So Cade began collecting samples from his patients, which he stored in jars on the top shelf of his family’s refrigerator. To determine if the urine was toxic, he injected varying amounts of it into the abdomens of guinea pigs that he raised behind his house. Some urine from manic patients, he found, would kill a guinea pig in much smaller quantities than urine from non-manic patients.

Cade thought the components of urine that may be causing his patients’ illnesses were urea and uric acid. He successfully dissolved both using lithium compounds, which he then injected into the guinea pigs. When he did, he noticed the guinea pigs became tranquilized, so much so that he could roll the restive creatures on their backs as they “merely lay there and gazed placidly back at him.”

Scientists looking back on Cade’s research assume that the guinea pigs were manifesting the early symptoms of lithium poisoning. Cade didn’t know. So he decided to conduct therapeutic trials of lithium in his manic-depressive patients. To test the safety and to determine the correct dose, he first administered it to himself. Feeling no ill effects, he started his first manic patient on lithium in the spring of 1948.

Within five days, it was clear that this patient, a man of 51 who had been the most troublesome in his ward, was improving. He was tidier, more settled, less disinhibited and less distractible. Three months later he was able to leave the hospital with instructions to take 300mg of lithium carbonate twice daily. In the next year, Cade treated nine more patients with lithium citrate and lithium carbonate. He published a paper on his study in The Medical Journal of Australia, alerting the world to a promising new treatment for an intractable condition in the surprising form of a simple, ancient element.

“He really did this on his own, in isolation, in a little backwoods Australian hospital,” Brown told me. “He had no grant. He had no research training. But he was curious, and he was a great observer.”

Two years later, Cade’s original patient, who had been in and out of the mental hospital since his initial release, died of lithium poisoning from the doses Cade had prescribed. Perhaps due to this and other reports of patients dying from lithium toxicity, Cade stopped prescribing it; when he became superintendent of a mental hospital in Melbourne, he banned the use of lithium there. But other doctors, including Morgens Schou in Denmark, picked up the torch and continued lithium research, eventually cementing its place among the best and simplest treatments in psychiatry.

Decades later, we now know lithium uniquely treats symptoms of manic depression, or bipolar disorder. It alleviates mania — temporary periods of hyperactivity, euphoria and delusions. Unlike other treatments, it prevents future episodes of mania and perhaps also depressive periods. For unknown reasons, it also dramatically reduces suicide risk. People with bipolar disorder commit suicide at rates 10-30 times the rest of the population. Controlled clinical trials have found that patients taking lithium are 10 times less likely to attempt suicide. No other treatment for bipolar disorder has the same effect.

“Lithium’s ability to fully alleviate the symptoms of a devastating condition makes it one of the best treatments in medicine,” Brown wrote in his book. “Not patentable and inexpensive, lithium has never been marketed and no single company is motivated to promote it. But lithium’s advantages over its patented, profitable, and well-advertised competitors are becoming more apparent.”

In the first two decades of its use in this country, lithium saved the U.S. economy $145 billion in hospitalization costs, according to a 1994 paper published in Science magazine. Research in Texas, Greece, Lithuania and elsewhere has found that naturally occurring lithium in drinking water is associated with lower rates of suicide and violent crime, prompting some scientists to advocate adding it to municipal water supplies, much like fluoride is sometimes added to strengthen teeth.

But still even today, it’s unclear what this silvery-white metal is doing in the brains of people who take it. The mystery lends a certain magic to lithium. Although some patients experience side effects including weight gain, brain fog, brittle hair, increased thirst, poor memory and lethargy, and still others stop taking lithium because they miss the joyful exuberance of their manic states, many people with bipolar disorder can’t imagine life without it. As the writer Jaime Lowe put it in the title of her powerful personal essay in The New York Times Magazine, “I Don’t Believe in God, But I Believe in Lithium.”

Act IV: Batteries That Keep Going And Going And Only Sometimes Burst Into Flame

Thomas Edison died in 1931 with a tin of lithium on his desk. One of the final projects in the great inventor’s life was experimenting with new chemistries in what he called “storage batteries.” The perfect battery — one that was cheap, rechargeable and packed with power — was an elusive quarry.

Batteries go back to 1800. That year, the Italian scientist Alessandro Volta stacked plates of zinc and copper, separated by cloth soaked in brine, and found that he could generate a steady electric current between them. It was the world’s first “battery,” and it’s where we get the term “voltaic cell.”

The first rechargeable batteries were invented decades later. In 1859, the French physicist Gaston Planté devised a rechargeable battery using lead electrodes in sulfuric acid, a basic formula that, with some improvements, is still used to start cars, boats, lawnmowers and other engines.

Edison scorned the idea of using lead. “If Nature had intended to use lead in batteries for powering vehicles,” he insisted, “she would not have made it so heavy.” He tinkered with batteries made of nickel and iron in a solution of potassium hydroxide. He found that his battery’s capacity improved by 10% when he added lithium hydroxide to the electrolyte mix, an encouraging development for a valuable new market: electric vehicles. In 1897, the bestselling car in the U.S. was the electric Columbia Motor Carriage. Back then, electric vehicles were outcompeting their counterparts powered by petrol and steam. New York City even had a short-lived electric taxicab service called the Electrobat.

By 1914, Henry Ford and Edison were dreaming up a low-cost electric vehicle. But Edison struggled to create a battery light enough and energy-dense enough to power a vehicle over long distances. If he had succeeded, it’s possible to imagine an entirely different course for automotive history. Eventually, however, the internal combustion engine won out, ushering in more than a century of fossil-fuel-powered transport with devastating consequences for the planet.

In the years that followed, lithium took on leading roles in various fields. Because it can withstand high temperatures and is water resistant, grease containing lithium salts was adopted for use in aircraft engines; today, it dominates nearly three-quarters of lubricating needs across all industries. It is a valuable material in metallurgy, where it is alloyed with aluminum to make airplane fuselages, bikes and high-speed trains. When blended with magnesium, lithium can create armor plating.

Because it lowers thermal expansion, lithium is a useful ingredient in ovenproof ceramics and in the glass-ceramic surfaces on induction cooktops. It is employed as an absorption material in air conditioners and humidity control systems. The lithium-6 isotope is used in the core of nuclear weapons, its reactivity escalating the power of a thermonuclear explosion. It’s in fireworks too, burning a brilliant red.

After the 1973 oil crisis, however, scientists picked up where Edison left off, exploring lithium’s potential energy. At that time, Exxon began pouring money into developing batteries as an alternative to hydrocarbons. Among the scientists employed in the company’s New Jersey research labs was a British-born American named M. Stanley Whittingham who thought the obvious key to creating powerful, lightweight batteries lay in the lightest metal on the periodic table: lithium.

As Steve LeVine wrote in “The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World,” Whittingham was still a post-doc at Stanford University when he found that he could move lithium atoms from one electrode to another, at room temperature, without much damage to either electrode. It was the first example of a rechargeable lithium-ion battery. In 1977, Whittingham put that technology to use in a thin, coin-sized battery that could fit into a solar-powered watch. When he and his team tried to scale up the batteries’ size, however, they ran into the problem of lithium’s reactivity — his batteries kept igniting in the laboratories in a process called “thermal runaway,” a phenomenon that still starts dangerous fires, forces airplanes into emergency landings and requires postal workers to ask if any lithium batteries are in packages being mailed.

An Oxford scientist named John Goodenough expanded on Whittingham’s work. In 1980, he found that when he paired lithium with cobalt oxide, the resulting battery was safer and had a much higher voltage, enabling it to power larger devices. This chemistry is still used in most lithium-ion batteries today, especially in electronics. By the late 1980s, a Canadian company called Moli Energy was producing lithium-ion batteries with pure lithium metal as the anode, the negatively charged electrode in a battery that releases electrons to be absorbed by the positively charged cathode. Moli’s battery was powerful — but dangerous.

“Everyone knows the holy grail of batteries is lithium metal,” said Venkat Srinivasan, a battery scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. “That’s the best nature has given us. The problem with lithium is it reacts with everything.”

When one of Moli’s batteries caught fire in a Japanese cell phone, Moli recalled them all. The company went into bankruptcy, and lithium-ion battery engineers went back to the drawing board, this time using lithium in the battery’s cathode.

A few years later, Japanese scientist Akira Yoshino propelled the research forward into a safe, powerful, market-ready battery for consumer electronics. Yoshino used Goodenough’s lithium cobalt oxide cathode with an anode of petroleum coke, which is made of graphite crystals, where the lithium ions could nestle safely when discharged. He coated these materials onto paper-thin sheets separated by a layer of electrolyte goop. These sheets were rolled together inside a metal canister to create the first successful mass-produced lithium-ion battery. It was a third smaller and lighter than standard batteries — and even more powerful.

The three lithium-ion battery pioneers — Whittingham, Goodenough and Yoshino — were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 for their work in “making possible a fossil-fuel-free society.”

Small, lightweight lithium-ion batteries made portable technology possible, starting with Sony’s camcorders in 1991. Then came cordless phones, laptops, cell phones and tablets. Lithium-ion batteries have become cheap and reliable enough that we’ve dreamed up other uses for them. Now we find them in power tools, vacuums, electric toothbrushes, headphones and kitchen mixers. An iPhone 15 has about 1 gram of lithium in its battery. An average electric vehicle battery, on the other hand, contains 8 kilograms (almost 18 pounds) of lithium. Just as lithium-ion batteries now dominate global lithium consumption, electric vehicles dominate the battery market.

Battery chemistry has shifted over time. Lithium iron phosphate batteries are cheap, safe and readily used in shorter-range cars, especially in China. In 2000, Mike Thackeray, a chemist from South Africa, patented a lithium battery involving nickel cobalt manganese oxide. That formula powered the Nissan Leaf and became so successful that now half of EVs sold worldwide use it.

Battery innovators aren’t slowing down; lithium-ion battery recipes are always being refined. Engineers are looking for alternatives to cobalt, for example, which is expensive and often mined with child labor in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The lithium-ion battery field is open to constant tinkering. “Nature just doesn’t give you nickel cobalt manganese oxide,” Srinivasan explained. “There’s all this architecture and very careful manipulation that happens in lithium battery work.”

Research continues into cheaper, safer, more energy-dense lithium-ion battery chemistries. In the near term, silicon shows promise as an anode in a cheap, powerful, fast-charging battery. On paper, lithium-air batteries, a lightweight chemistry using pure lithium as an anode and oxygen as a cathode, offer energy densities close to gasoline’s. Many researchers are trying to overcome the safety hurdles of going back to the “holy grail” — pure lithium metal in the anodes of solid-state batteries. Lithium metal tends to form needle-like “dendrites” in batteries, which can short them out and create fire hazards. This may be avoidable, but if they’re ever to reach mass production, they will have to be perfect, every time.

Other non-lithium batteries with materials such as iron, sodium and zinc have benefits for specific applications. But the chemical structure of lithium is unique. No other element is as light and as willing to share an electron, which is what creates energy. New technologies will emerge, but lithium has enamored us with its potential.

Srinivasan imagines a near future in which we have diverse arrays of batteries everywhere. Batteries could harvest electrons from lamps on our desks, for example, from treadmills at our gyms, from intermittent energy sources like the sun and wind and tides. Batteries could emerge that can store grid-scale energy for days, weeks, months or even seasons. Battery evangelists seek batteries with lifespans of 30 or 50 years or longer, batteries that can find ways to repair themselves — batteries, in other words, that are almost like organisms, with lithium as the blood beating within them.

Act V: The Future Is Electric, But Still Massively Complicated

Today, lithium is everywhere. It’s in the watches on our wrists, in the phones in our pockets, the tablets in our bags. It’s in our medicine cabinets, our casserole dishes, even inside our bodies in medical devices like pacemakers and defibrillators. It’s in our kids’ toys, our hedge trimmers, our flashlights. It’s in our bikes, scooters, cars and buses. Without lithium, our constantly connected, mobile lives would be impossible. It’s little wonder people are calling lithium “white gold.”

But like actual gold, and like “black gold” of the fossil-fuel era, the race is on to find new sources and greater quantities of a substance that we depend upon for all that we’ve come to expect and all that is yet to come. Anyone who imagines a future of electric passenger planes, long-duration grid storage and air taxis is conjuring a dream founded on lithium. Where will it all come from, and at what cost?

Before 1988, the U.S. had been the world’s chief producer of lithium for about 30 years, thanks to spodumene blasted out of the Kings Mountain mine in North Carolina. American lithium went around the world. Then Chile began producing it cheaper by pumping brine out of vast underground seas and evaporating it to harvest the lithium salts. Today, Chile and Australia produce most of the world’s lithium. Less than 1% of global lithium now comes from the U.S., all from a single brine operation in Silver Peak, Nevada.

That’s about to change. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates the U.S. has 14 million metric tons of lithium deposits scattered across the country. We’re going to need it — the Biden administration is aiming to halve carbon emissions and is pushing for half of new vehicles to be electric by 2030. Consequently, lithium’s price is climbing. In 2022 alone, the price of it went up 400%. It’s stabilized since, but researchers estimate lithium demand will increase five-fold by 2030.

The U.S. is scrambling to secure an independent lithium supply chain from mine to refinement to battery factories so it doesn’t have to rely on competitors like China. The next decade could see an explosion of lithium production in this country. As of March, in the western U.S., there are 130 lithium mining proposals awaiting approval, with 83 in Nevada alone.

Chief among them is a new mine poised to begin production in the coming years in a clay deposit at Thacker Pass, in northern Nevada, the largest known lithium source in the U.S. The mine is owned by Vancouver-based Lithium Americas and partly funded by a $650 million investment from General Motors, plus a record-setting $2.26 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Now under construction, the mine is not without controversy. It sits on land considered sacred to members of the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe. In 1865, the 1st Nevada Cavalry raided a Paiute campsite there and killed at least 31 people. At that time, white settlers were expanding westward in search of gold. Today, some tribal members worry that their sovereignty is being trampled in the name of unfettered eco-capitalism. Most identified lithium resources in the U.S. are within 35 miles of a Native American reservation.

Environmentalists are warning of other dangers, too. In 2022, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed as endangered a rare flower called Tiehm’s buckwheat that only grows in southwestern Nevada on the site of another proposed lithium mine at Rhyolite Ridge. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is conducting an environmental impact assessment on the project, but the mine is expected to go ahead. Meanwhile, in the vicinity of the Thacker Pass mine, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is monitoring another species that may warrant protection: the Kings River pyrg snail, a species that has only been found in 13 localized springs and is as small as the tip of a ball-point pen.

The debate around lithium mining divides people in unexpected ways and forces us to examine our priorities. Is it more important to ensure the supply of a material that will help wean us off fossil fuels? Or is it more important to protect biodiversity in an age of mass extinction? Is it cultural genocide, as some say, to put a mine on land sacred to tribes? Or might these mines offer those communities secure, high-paying jobs, tax income and a stake in the profits of an element that has to be mined somewhere? 

Unlike fossil fuels, lithium-ion batteries have the potential to be recycled. Because it is made up of elements, when a battery comes to the end of its life, it can theoretically be disassembled and repurposed. Around the world, companies are cropping up to recycle batteries, saving money and lowering the urgency for new mining.

Innovations in extraction could mitigate the intensive water use of lithium production, too. A startup called Lilac Solutions is pioneering a type of ceramic bead that absorbs lithium out of brine without the conventional need for a vast evaporation pond. The company says its process uses much less water than conventional lithium extraction. The brine is simply pumped from its source, mixed with the beads, and then returned. Lilac soon hopes to start extracting lithium from Utah’s Great Salt Lake.

Could there be unforeseen downstream effects of our rapacious appetite for lithium? Some scientists worry that the more we extract lithium from minerals and underground brines, the more it disperses into our drinking and irrigation water. More lithium in drinking water may lead to fewer suicides and less violent crime, but at a certain level, a medicine becomes a poison. Globally, there are still no recommendations on a safe amount of it in drinking water; a study of almost 200 pregnant women in Argentina found that drinking water with elevated lithium levels may impair thyroid function and is associated with smaller newborns. Even less is known about the impact of lithium in agriculture, although a paper published this year noted that lithium may inhibit plant growth and decrease soil nutrients.

There are technological concerns around lithium, too. Just as our full-scale embrace of the internal combustion engine facilitated our addiction to fossil fuels, the buildup of lithium battery technologies could inhibit the growth of competing chemistries. Lithium-ion batteries have a significant head start in research, financing and manufacturing at places like Tesla’s Gigafactory in Nevada. Some argue that the government should be subsidizing other battery technologies — hydrogen fuel cells, for example — so that competition remains robust and we don’t paint ourselves into a corner with lithium.

We’ve only been aware of lithium for a little over 200 years and yet it’s had a profound impact on the human story. As this simple, lightweight, reactive metal increasingly powers our lives, do we run the risk of despoiling the very planet we’re trying to protect?

Long before cell phones and climate anxiety and the Tesla Model Y, long before dinosaurs and the first creatures that climbed out of the ocean to walk on land, long before the Earth formed from swirling masses of cosmic matter heavy enough to coalesce, back, way back, to the infant universe, to the dawn of matter itself, there were just three types of atoms — three elements in the blank canvas of space. One of them was lithium. It was light, fragile and extremely reactive, its one outer electron tenuously held in place.

Everything we have done with lithium, all its wondrous applications in energy, industry and psychiatry, somehow hinges on this basic structure, a sort of magic around which we’re increasingly engineering our future. Lightness is usually associated with abundance on the periodic table — almost 99% of the mass of the universe is just the lightest two elements. Lithium, however, is the third lightest element and still mysteriously scarce. “It’s peculiar,” Fields, the astronomer, told me. “It’s special. There’s very little of it, but it has this pivotal role in the universe.”

The post The Secret, Magical Life Of Lithium appeared first on NOEMA.

Theo’s six-year-old brother Julian was interested in the bookmarks, which Theo was happy to sell him for $1 per unit.

“Hang on,” I shouted from the other room. “You’re not going to sell them for actual money.” (State intervention, I know.)

Reluctantly, Theo agreed. After some thought, he implemented a new scheme whereby his brother could print his own money with a marker and paper. Each bill would become legal tender once Julian had written “I CAN WRITE” three times on a piece of paper. Misspellings rendered the money void.

“It has to have some value,” Theo explained. “Otherwise, you could just print millions of dollars.”

Julian grumbled but soon redeemed his new wealth for a bookmark. Theo deposited the money in his pocket, and thus the fort’s commerce commenced.

What Is Money, Anyway?

The history of money is replete with equally imaginative mandates and whimsical logic, as Jacob Goldstein writes in his engaging book, “Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing.” Before money, people relied on bartering — an inconvenient system because it requires a “double coincidence of wants.” If I have wheat and you have meat, for us to make a deal I have to want your meat at the same time you want my wheat. Highly inefficient.

Many cultures developed ritual ways to exchange items of value — in marriage, for example, or to pay penance for killing someone, or in sacrifices. Items used for these exchanges varied from cowry shells to cattle, sperm whale teeth and long-tusked pigs. These commodities helped fulfill two central functions of money:

1. They served as a unit of account (offering a standardized way to measure worth).
2. They acted as a store of value (things you can accumulate now and use later).

Due to the flaws of the barter system, these goods didn’t serve the third function of money, which is:

3. To act as a medium of exchange (a neutral resource that can easily be transferred for goods).

Money that served all three of these functions wasn’t created until around 600 B.C.E. when Lydia, a kingdom in modern-day Turkey, created what many historians consider the first coins: lumps of blended gold and silver stamped with a lion. The idea spread to Greece, where people started exchanging their goods for coins in public spaces called agoras. Money soon created alternatives to traditional labor systems. Now, instead of working on a wealthy landowner’s farm for a year in return for food, lodging and clothes, a person could be paid for short-term work. This gave people the freedom to leave a bad job, but also the insecurity of finding employment when they needed it.

Aristotle, for one, wasn’t convinced. He worried that Greeks were losing something important in their pursuit of coins. Suddenly, a person’s wealth wasn’t determined by their labor and ideas but also by their cunning.

One summer, the philosopher Thales (who coined the phrase: “Know thyself”) predicted Greece would have a good crop of olives. Before they ripened, he rented all the presses on the islands and then grew rich when, come harvest, everyone went to him to press their olives. Today we might call this good business sense. Aristotle called it “unnatural.”

He wasn’t alone in his distrust of commerce. In mythology, Hermes is both the god of merchants and of thieves. Meanwhile, the Bible tells the story of Jesus overturning the tables of moneychangers and merchants in a Jerusalem temple. In the early days, as is true today, commerce implied exploitation — of natural resources and of other people. (The Incans, on the other hand, built an entire civilization with no money at all, just a complex system of tributes and structured specialization of work.)

Nevertheless, the concept of money spread. In 995, paper money was introduced in Sichuan, China, when a merchant in Chengdu gave people fancy receipts in exchange for their iron coins. Paper bills spared people the physical burden of their wealth, which helped facilitate trade over longer distances.

As it evolved, money became increasingly symbolic. Early paper money acted as an IOU and could always be exchanged for metallic coins of various values. In the late 13th century, however, the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan invented paper money that was not backed by anything. It was money because the emperor said it was money. People agreed. In the intervening centuries, money has conjured more fantastic leaps of faith with the invention of the stock market, centralized banking and, recently, cryptocurrencies.

Today, there is about $2.34 trillion of physical U.S. currency in circulation, and as much as half of it is held abroad. That accounts for just 10% of the country’s gross domestic product (the total monetary value of all the goods and services produced). Total U.S. bank deposits are around $17 trillion. Meanwhile, total wealth in this country, including nonmonetary assets, is around $149 trillion, more than 63 times the total available cash. The gaps between these numbers are like dark matter in the universe — we don’t have a way to empirically account for it, and yet without it our understanding of the universe, or the economy, would collapse.

For most people in the developed world, money is lines of data on a bank’s computer. Money is abstract, absurd. It’s a belief system, a language, a social contract. Money is trust. But the rules aren’t fixed in stone.

“Here’s a thing that always happens with money,” Goldstein wrote. “Whatever money is at a given moment comes to seem like the natural form money should take, and everything else seems like irresponsible craziness.”

The Problem, As One German Saw It

More than a century ago, a wild-eyed, vegetarian, free love-promoting German entrepreneur and self-taught economist named Silvio Gesell proposed a radical reformation of the monetary system as we know it. He wanted to make money that decays over time. Our present money, he explained, is an insufficient means of exchange. A man with a pocketful of money does not possess equivalent wealth as a man with a sack of produce, even if the market agrees the produce is worth the money.

“Only money that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron, evaporates like ether,” Gesell wrote in his seminal work, “The Natural Economic Order,” published in 1915, “is capable of standing the test as an instrument for the exchange of potatoes, newspapers, iron and ether.”

Gesell was born in 1862 in what is now Belgium, the seventh of nine children. He dropped out of high school because his parents couldn’t afford it, got a job with the postal service and then, at 20, went to Spain to work in a business house. Four years later, he emigrated to Argentina, where he set up a company importing medical equipment and a plant to produce cardboard boxes.

Argentina was booming in the 1880s. Using capital loaned from Europe, the country invested in railroads and other infrastructure aimed at opening its resources to international trade. The dividends on those projects were slow in coming, however, and the country struggled to service its debt. Meanwhile, inflation was devaluing the currency and the real wages of workers were declining. In 1890, Argentina defaulted on nearly £48 million of national debt, most of which was underwritten by a British merchant bank. Argentina’s GDP dropped 11% in a year and the country fell into a deep recession and political upheaval.

In 1898, the Argentine government embarked on a deflationary policy to try to treat its economic ills. As a result, unemployment rose and uncertainty made people hoard their money. The economy ground to a halt. There was plenty of money to go around, Gesell realized. The problem was, it wasn’t going around. He argued that the properties of money — its durability and hoardability — impede its circulation: “When confidence exists, there is money in the market; when confidence is wanting, money withdraws.”

Those who live by their labor suffer from this imbalance. If I go to the market to sell a bushel of cucumbers when the cost of food is falling, a shopper may not buy them, preferring to buy them next week at a lower price. My cucumbers will not last the week, so I am forced to drop my price. A deflationary spiral may ensue.

The French economist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon put it this way: “Money, you imagine, is the key that opens the gates of the market. That is not true — money is the bolt that bars them.”

The faults of money go further, Gesell wrote. When small businesses take out loans from banks, they must pay the banks interest on those loans, which means they must raise prices or cut wages. Thus, interest is a private gain at a public cost. In practice, those with money grow richer and those without grow poorer. Our economy is full of examples of this, where those with money make more ($100,000 minimum investments in high-yield hedge funds, for example) and those without pay higher costs (like high-interest predatory lending).

“The merchant, the workman, the stockbroker have the same aim, namely to exploit the state of the market, that is, the public at large,” Gesell wrote. “Perhaps the sole difference between usury and commerce is that the professional usurer directs his exploitation more against specific persons.”

Gesell believed that the most-rewarded impulse in our present economy is to give as little as possible and to receive as much as possible, in every transaction. In doing so, he thought, we grow materially, morally and socially poorer. “The exploitation of our neighbor’s need, mutual plundering conducted with all the wiles of salesmanship, is the foundation of our economic life,” he lamented.

To correct these economic and social ills, Gesell recommended we change the nature of money so it better reflects the goods for which it is exchanged. “We must make money worse as a commodity if we wish to make it better as a medium of exchange,” he wrote.

To achieve this, he invented a form of expiring money called Freigeld, or Free Money. (Free because it would be freed from hoarding and interest.) The theory worked like this: A $100 bill of Freigeld would have 52 dated boxes on the back, where the holder must affix a 10-cent stamp every week for the bill to still be worth $100. If you kept the bill for an entire year, you would have to affix 52 stamps to the back of it — at a cost of $5.20 — for the bill to still be worth $100. Thus, the bill would depreciate 5.2% annually at the expense of its holder(s). (The value of and rate at which to apply the stamps could be fine-tuned if necessary.)

This system would work the opposite way ours does today, where money held over time increases in value as it gathers interest. In Gesell’s system, the stamps would be an individual cost and the revenue they created would be a public gain, reducing the amount of additional taxes a government would need to collect and enabling it to support those unable to work.

Money could be deposited in a bank, whereby it would retain its value because the bank would be responsible for the stamps. To avoid paying for the stamps, the bank would be incentivized to loan the money, passing on the holding expense to others. In Gesell’s vision, banks would loan so freely that their interest rates would eventually fall to zero, and they would collect only a small risk premium and an administration fee.

With the use of this stamp scrip currency, the full productive power of the economy would be unleashed. Capital would be accessible to everyone. A Currency Office, meanwhile, would maintain price stability by monitoring the amount of money in circulation. If prices go up, the office would destroy money. When prices fall, it would print more.

In this economy, money would circulate with all the velocity of a game of hot potato. There would be no more “unearned income” of money lenders getting rich on interest. Instead, an individual’s economic success would be tied directly to the quality of their work and the strength of their ideas. Gesell imagined this would create a Darwinian natural selection in the economy: “Free competition would favor the efficient and lead to their increased propagation.”

This new “natural economic order” would be accompanied by a reformation of land ownership — Free Land — whereby land was no longer privately owned. Current landowners would be compensated by the government in land bonds over 20 years. Then they would pay rent to the government, which, Gesell imagined, would be used for government expenses and to create annuities for mothers to help women achieve economic independence from men and be free to leave a relationship if they wanted.

Gesell’s ideas salvaged the spirit of private, competitive entrepreneurialism from what he considered the systemic defects of capitalism. Gesell could be described as an anti-Marxian socialist. He was committed to social justice but also agreed with Adam Smith that self-interest was the natural foundation of any economy.

While Marx advocated for the political supremacy of the dispossessed through organization, Gesell argued that we need only remove economic obstacles to realize our true productive capacity. The pie can be grown and more justly shared through systemic changes, he maintained, not redistributed through revolution. “We shall leave to our heirs no perpetually welling source of income,” he wrote, “but is it not provision enough to bequeath economic conditions that will secure them the full proceeds of their labor?”

Although many dismissed Gesell as an anarchistic heretic, his ideas were embraced by major economists of the day. In his book “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,” John Maynard Keynes devoted five pages to Gesell, calling him a “strange and unduly neglected prophet.” He argued the idea behind a stamp scrip was sound. “I believe that the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell than from that of Marx,” Keynes wrote.

In 1900, Gesell retired and took up farming in Switzerland, where he published pamphlets, books and a magazine on monetary reform. In 1911 he moved to Eden, a single-tax, vegetarian commune outside Berlin, where he criticized monogamy and advocated free love. In 1919, when pacifist poets and playwrights launched the Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich, they offered Gesell the position of finance minister. Gesell drew up plans for land reform, basic income and Freigeld. The republic lasted all of a week before being overthrown by the Communist Party and then the German army, who detained Gesell and charged him with treason.

He gave an impassioned defense. “I do not attack capital with force, with strikes and paralization of business and plant, with sabotage,” he told the tribunal. “I attack it with the only weapon which is inherent with the proletariat — work. By recommending to the masses untrammeled, relentless work, I lay low the idol of interest.”

Gesell was acquitted and returned to writing. He died of pneumonia in 1930, in Eden, at the age of 67.

And Then It Actually Happened

That very year, the owner of a dormant coal mine near the Bavarian town of Schwanenkirchen tried in vain to get a loan from a bank to begin mining again. Stymied by the representatives of traditional finance, he went to the Wära Exchange Association, a group that was created to put Gesell’s ideas into practice. The group agreed to give the mine owner 50,000 Wära, a depreciating currency equivalent to 50,000 Reichsmarks.

The mine owner then gathered the unemployed miners and asked if they would go back to work, not for legal tender, but for this new currency. They agreed that any money was better than no money. The mine owner purchased food, clothing and household goods from warehouses that were already using the Wära currency. The miners, now back digging coal, used their wages to buy these goods from the mine owner. Soon, other businesses in town wanted to use the currency to benefit from the sudden influx of cash. Because the currency depreciated at 1% per month, everyone was eager to part with it and it circulated rapidly throughout the economy. Soon, in whole districts, the Wära currency replaced the Reichsmark, which alarmed the bigger banks and the government. Finally, the Reichsbank ended the experiment by banning the currency.

Two years later, in the Austrian town of Wörgl, Gesell’s ideas came to life again. In 1932, Wörgl’s mayor, a socialist locomotive engineer, desperately wanted to get his constituents back to work. A supporter of Gesell’s ideas, he devised a plan where Austrian schillings would be replaced with Work Certificates that depreciated at 1% per month.

The mayor hired townspeople, paid in Work Certificates, to improve roads, install streetlights and build a concrete bridge. Work Certificates circulated rapidly from merchants to tenants, to landlords, to saving accounts. People paid their taxes early to avoid paying for stamps. In one year, the Work Certificates traded hands 463 times, creating goods and services worth almost 15 million schillings. By contrast, the ordinary schilling was exchanged only 21 times.

The experiment was called the Miracle of Wörgl. Vienna newspapers took notice. The government of France expressed interest. Two hundred mayors in Austria devised similar programs in their communities. Again, however, the financial authorities grew uneasy, arguing that these local stamp scrips undermined the currency-issuing power of the national bank. By the fall of 1933, the Austrian Supreme Court had prohibited their circulation.

Gesellian experiments happened in the U.S. and Canada too, inspired by the Great Depression. In 1932, in Hawarden, Iowa, a limited amount of stamp scrip was put into circulation to pay for public works. The same year, a similar program was deployed in Anaheim, California. In 1933, Oregon attempted to print $80 million in stamp scrip, but the U.S. Treasury stopped it. The government of Premier William “Bible Bill” Aberhart in Alberta, Canada, introduced depreciating “prosperity certificates” (which people quickly renamed “velocity dollars”) in 1936.

That decade in the U.S., 37 cities, eight counties and some business groups attempted to issue almost 100 different types of stamp scrip. All these experiments were local, small in scope and short-lived. In 1933, the economist Irving Fisher, who called himself “a humble student of Silvio Gesell,” tried to persuade President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to adopt a national stamp scrip, and even convinced an Alabama senator to introduce a bill that would have issued up to $1 billion in depreciating currency. It never came to a vote. Roosevelt, who was preparing to take the country off the gold standard, worried that any further economic innovations would be too destabilizing.

Other Gesell evangelists included Frank Lloyd Wright and the poet Ezra Pound, the son of an assayer at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. As a child, Pound visited his father at work; in a basement vault, he saw sweating, shirtless men with giant shovels scooping millions of dollars’ worth of silver coins into counting machines “like it was litter.” Later he wrote that it was unnatural when a financier made money out of nothing by harvesting interest on a loan. The poet believed our current economic order disincentivizes actual work and creation while incentivizing market manipulation and shrewd, sometimes dishonest, schemes of profit. To Pound, the concept of money was so pervasive and unexamined that money had become an end in itself, not the vehicle it was intended to be.

In 1935, he wrote an essay, “What is Money For?” in which he promoted Gesell’s expiring money with ardent emphasis. “The AIM of a sane and decent economic system,” Pound wrote, “is to fix things so that decent people can eat, have clothes and houses up to the limit of available goods.”

Pound called Gesell’s idea “vegetable money” and argued it was a necessary equalizing force so that one person doesn’t have money wealth that accumulates in a bank while others have potato wealth that rots in their root cellar. In Pound’s view, the wealth of a nation ought to not be measured in its amount of money but by the flourishing of its creative and productive arts. “When the total nation hasn’t or cannot obtain enough food for its people, that nation is poor,” he wrote. “When enough food exists and people cannot get it by honest labor, the state is rotten.”

To Pound, money that is organic, subject to birth and decay, that flows freely between people and facilitates generosity, is more likely to bind a society together rather than isolate us. An expiring money would enrich the whole, not the select few. Usury — which we can take to mean unfettered capitalism — was responsible for the death of culture in the post-Reformation age.

Pound eventually moved to Italy and embraced the fascism of Benito Mussolini, advocating for a strong state to enforce these ideas. In doing so, he ceded his artistic idealism to autocratic fiat. Pound was strident in his economic convictions but also a realist on human nature. “Set up a perfect and just money system and in three days rascals, the bastards with mercantilist and monopolist mentality, will start thinking up some wheeze to cheat the people,” he wrote.

What It Means Today

Gesell’s idea for depreciating money “runs counter to anything we’ve ever learned about the desirable properties of money,” David Andolfatto, a former senior vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the chair of the economics department at the University of Miami, told me recently. “Why on Earth would you ever want money to have that property?”

But during the economic downturn that followed the Covid pandemic, Andolfatto recognized the potential value of an expiring money in times of crisis. The relief checks that the government sent out to U.S. households didn’t immediately have their desired effect of stimulating the economy because many people saved the money rather than spend it. This is the paradox of thrift, Andolfatto explained. What’s good for the individual is bad for the whole.

“Well, what if we gave them the money with a time fuse?” Andolfatto remembers wondering. “You’re giving them the money and saying look, if you don’t spend it in a period of time, it’s going to evaporate.”

In a paper he wrote for the Fed in 2020, Andolfatto called this concept “hot money credits.” He pointed out that when the economy goes into a funk, there is a “coordination failure” where people stop spending and others stop earning. Withholding money in times of fear creates a self-fulfilling prophecy by further stifling the economy. So, could Gesell’s idea of expiring money be the cure?

“The desirability depends on the diagnosis,” Andolfatto told me. “It’s like a doctor administering a drug to a healthy person and a sick person. You administer the drug, and it has some side effects. If the person is healthy, you’re not going to make them any better. You might make them even worse. If they’re sick, it might make them better.”

The problem, Andolfatto said, is that issuing pandemic checks with an expiration date would hurt those with little savings. People with money in the bank would use their expiring money just like normal money. People with no savings, on the other hand, might find that expiring money forced them to spend and did little to stabilize their financial situations.

Since he wrote the paper, Andolfatto went on, the U.S. economy recovered remarkably well under policies that didn’t include Gesell’s radical reforms. “I admit to being intrigued by the idea,” Andolfatto said. “You can do it on a local level. I wonder, as a practical matter, if one can do it on a large scale.”

Keynes believed Gesell’s expiring money amounted to “half a theory” — it failed, Keynes argued, to account for people’s preference for liquid assets, of which money is just one example. “Money as a medium of exchange has to also be a store of value,” Willem Buiter, a former global chief economist at Citigroup, told me. In a Gesellian economy, he continued, the affluent would simply store their wealth in another form — gold bars, perhaps, or boats — which could be converted into money when they wanted to transact.

Buiter doesn’t believe Gesellian money can really address serious social inequality, but he did note times when it was advantageous for a central bank to drop interest rates below zero, like when inflation and market interest rates are low and should go lower to maintain full employment and utilization of resources. Positive or negative interest rates could easily be applied to digital money in a cashless economy, for which Buiter and others have advocated. But it’s hard to imagine how a government today could practically implement a Gesellian tax on hard currency. “You’d have to be able to go out and confiscate money if it’s not stamped,” Buiter said. “It would be rather brutal.”

In 1938, the psychologist Abraham Maslow — who later became famous for his “hierarchy of needs,” which ranked human necessities from the physiological (air, water, food) to the transcendent — spent six weeks with the Siksika (Blackfoot) people in southern Alberta. He discovered a community where wealth was not measured in money or in property. “The wealthiest man in their eyes is one who has almost nothing,” he wrote, “because he has given it all away.”

For most of us today, money is assurance. We live in a culture in which the pursuit of security is paramount. Save money, we are told — for a health crisis, for our kids to go to college, for retirement. But is it possible to have any guarantee, through money or anything else, of our safety in life?

In her new book “The Age of Insecurity,” the activist Astra Taylor writes: “Today, many of the ways we try to make ourselves and our societies more secure — money, property, possessions, police, the military — have paradoxical effects, undermining the very security we seek and accelerating the harm done to the economy, the climate and people’s lives, including our own.”

The negative consequences of the unimpeded accumulation of wealth are plain for all to see. Human rights abuses, corruption and the devastation of the planet have all been justified in its pursuit. It’s possible to imagine many reincarnations of money that serve different values. Putting a price on carbon emissions is one way to offset the environmental damage incurred by economic growth. A universal basic income and free higher education would help redistribute and equalize financial and social capital.

There are more radical questions being asked: What if the money you accumulated in life died with you? What if actuaries determined the amount of money people need to live a comfortable life, and earnings were capped there? What would a world look like in which the ardor of one’s work — not just luck and geography and privilege — determined a person’s wealth?

In “The Man Who Quit Money,” Mark Sundeen writes about a man in Utah who deposited his life savings in a phone booth, opting out of the institution altogether. It’s an age-old tradition among the pious and iconoclasts the world over — becoming a recluse in order to attune oneself with rhythms beyond social conventions. Many of the most charismatic people are animated by passions that don’t earn them money but add a richness to their lives that money can’t buy. When we find those things that sustain us — art, hobbies, service — the worth of those activities transcends money to fulfill us on a deeper, spiritual level.

Money may be a language, a way to translate value in terms we all understand, but money is not the sum of what we have to say. The more money one has, the less meaning work has to that person. At the same time, life’s most meaningful work, like raising children or cooking a meal for others, often goes unpaid. And yet this is the substance of life, the stuff that determines who we are and how we will be remembered.

Gesell believed that capitalism had beaten communism, but he recognized the flaws of our current economic order. “The choice lies between progress or ruin,” he wrote. “We must push on through the slough of capitalism to the firm ground beyond.”

Is his idea of an expiring currency any more absurd than the status quo we inherited? Perhaps his greatest contribution is to remind us that the rules of money can be reinvented, as indeed they always have. Money is a construct of our collective imagination, subject to our complacency, yes, but also to our inquiry, values and highest ambitions. Gesell argued for an engaged, probing curiosity of our economic institutions so that we may reimagine them to better serve the societies we want to create. “The economic order under which men thrive,” he wrote, “is the most natural economic order.” To that end, ours may still be a work in progress.

The post What If Money Expired? appeared first on NOEMA.

Once outside, it was the stillness I noticed first. The traffic had evaporated and the shunting locomotives in the railyard at the foot of the valley slumbered like hulking beasts. Overhead, Orion was mid-stride, railing against the darkness. I’d rub my eyes and watch whitetail deer amble the sidewalks, and once, I heard a great horned owl. Sometimes, most thrilling of all, I could just make out the faint whisper of Rattlesnake Creek through the quivering limbs of cottonwood and ponderosa and Norway maple. 

As the crow flies, our house is a quarter mile from the creek, far enough for the hammering of humanity to drown its sound during the daytime. But in the middle of the night, quiet enough to take your breath, there it was: a swishing, hushing murmur of a story being told, a promise of continuity. On those nights I would stand on the porch, the dog at my feet, and both of us would listen. 

It was more than half a lifetime ago now that I first encountered Rattlesnake Creek. I drove out of town and up the valley to a trailhead with two college friends. We hiked to a collapsed cabin, whose age and history we could not determine, and I took their photograph in the snow with my old Nikon. 

I had come to Missoula for college, an idealistic 19-year-old with unruly hair, jewelry and Birkenstocks, fresh off a gap year teaching English in Laos and backpacking around Southeast Asia. It was my first time in Montana. 

You can’t choose where you come from, the geographical contours that shape your personality, and this is as true for a river as it is for a person. My parents found each other in New Delhi in the 1970s, as likely a place as any for a woman from South Dakota to fall in love with an Englishman, and for a decade they hopscotched around Asia, hippies searching for meaning. For a time, they lived in Laos, where my father would curl his body into the shape of an egg and float down the Nam Khan River, a tributary of the Mekong. With his head underwater, he said, he could hear the pebbles tumbling over each other. It sounded like singing. 

In the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, they had a daughter; two years later, by then back in the States, they had me. But when I was nine, we returned to India to the town where my sister had been born. There was an international school where my parents worked and my sister and I studied. The town had changed, of course, as had my parents, but we were a family, aloft on a current together. 

The move was formative to my sense of self. In Denver, I was a freckled boy obsessed with fishing. In India, I was a white foreigner, a spectacle. When we returned to Colorado three years later, I was an American who had lived in India. Indiana? people would ask. 

By adolescence, I understood myself as a person apart. In India, it had felt easier to fit in among students from all around the world. At 16, I went back, finishing high school as a boarding student at the same school. But returning to a place does not turn back time. I was still awkward, still looking for myself, dislocated. After graduating, I went to live with my parents in Laos, in a bamboo house. I couldn’t say where home was. 

By the time I arrived in Montana, a third of my life had been spent overseas. Internationalism seeped into my college essays and was how I introduced myself. Half-British, half-American, grew up in India. I had even picked up a British accent along the way, its origins a mystery even to me. 

I was in the middle of what psychologists call my “reminiscence bump,” the tendency to remember more from late adolescence and early adulthood than any other time. The reasons for this are debated, but some argue this is when our brains develop “narrative perspective,” the ability to tell ourselves who we are. 

Who was I? I was, as young people can be, melodramatic, self-absorbed, inflated with potential, all the doors of life’s long corridor as yet unopened. I would bike up Rattlesnake Creek with my guitar and a hunk of bread to sit on a boulder in the sun, enamored by the idea of myself. 

My life, as I saw it, was a voyage; I had come to this little mountain town to learn, and then to embark. Life was happening elsewhere. Subconsciously, I felt superior to Missoula and the seams of my self-confidence were too tight to foster much self-reflection. I wanted to live like someone was writing a book about me. Though I blush at that vanity now, we must be kind to our previous selves. There is little point for a meandering river to turn on its tumultuous past. 

How do you measure a river? By its length and breadth and volume? Its temperature and the creatures that make within it a home? By its generative value to humans for irrigation, sustenance, electricity or recreation? By its beauty? Its history? 

Rattlesnake Creek on the map is a minor bronchial tributary that flows 26 miles into the Clark Fork and then the Columbia and then into the heaving breast of the Pacific. On this scale, it is tiny, short and insignificant — which is what classifies it as a creek, but also makes it, to my mind, somewhat comprehensible. 

Rattlesnake Creek begins in the titrated snowmelt from nameless cirque lakes at the southern edge of the Flathead Indian Reservation. It drops a vertical mile southward through timbered draws and into an old glacial valley, through a wilderness area, then a recreation area, then residential neighborhoods.

The stretch I can occasionally hear from our porch is the creek’s final mile. Here it rolls through a wooded park and under a pigeon-infested underpass, above which Amazon Prime semis whiz along Interstate 90. It sweeps under the graffitied piers of a railroad built by mostly Chinese laborers, on which trains now ferry coal bound for China, past homeless camps and the urban grime of road gravel and mashed litter and plastic bottles of cheap vodka, where adolescent cottonwoods finger their roots between the river rocks, grasping for purchase. On it goes, under what used to be a 24-hour restaurant called Finnegans that straddled the creek and fed college students breakfast after the bars had closed, and finally into the Clark Fork River just across from the University of Montana campus, where I went to college. Here it carves an arc of cold, clear water into a deep pool where anglers cast their lines like questions into the current. 

Since time immemorial, the Missoula Valley has been part of the ancestral homeland of the Séliš and Ql̓ispé peoples, and there used to be a major camp here that the Séliš called Nɫʔaycčstm, or Place of the Small Bull Trout. They would fish with hook and line or traps. In spring, they dug sp̓eƛ̓m, bitterroot, on the valley floor that is now mostly paved over, and also on the bald, blond slopes of Nmq̓͏ʷe, the elephantine mountain above our house, where they still bloom bubble-gum pink in June. 

Rattlesnake Creek is what’s called an “underfit” stream, which means it is too small to have carved the valley in which it flows. For that we can thank the glaciers plowing a furrow through mountains lifted here millions of years before. 

Andrew Wilcox, a hydrologist at the University of Montana, said Rattlesnake Creek would have first formed around 15,000-18,000 years ago at the last draining of Glacial Lake Missoula, a 3,000-square-mile lake that covered Missoula and much of the surrounding area. Wilcox likes to ride up the Rattlesnake on his mountain bike. There aren’t many places, he told me, where you can see such a wide gradient of river forms in a single ride. The lower Rattlesnake is alluvial, full of sediment, with gravel bars, deep pools and erodible banks. As you cycle up into the wilderness, it becomes a classic bedrock stream. Here the rocks are bigger, with flutes and crenellations created by the flow of water. 

The creek is a vehicle, dismantling and ferrying the mountains to the sea, grain by grain. Several years ago, when spring snowmelt turned the creek into a hungry, petulant torrent, Wilcox watched as it steadily gouged out a bank in the park near our home. I remember seeing it too, concerned that the river was devouring the trail where my sons were learning to bike. Wilcox said that erosion event was the consequence of a footbridge, 100 yards downstream, that was anchored to the banks with cement. 

“A flood moving down a creek has energy that it is exerting against the banks and the bed,” he said. “The energy is not created or destroyed, it’s just transferring form. When you harden parts of the bank, it’s going to transfer energy somewhere else.” 

The more you try to shore up your world, the more you transfer destruction elsewhere. Two hundred years ago, Rattlesnake Creek would jump its banks in high water, free to writhe across the valley floor. Today, city planners have dug and diverted and wrestled it into a single, predictable channel. But each spring, it bucks and gnashes like a wild horse. 

The creek was the source of Missoula’s drinking water from the beginning. In the late 1860s, a young man in a plug hat named “One-Eyed Riley” drove a cart and donkey through town, selling buckets of creek water to Missoula’s first households. By 1871, two of the town’s founders, Christopher Higgins and Frances Worden, dug a ditch a few miles up the creek and diverted the water to a reservoir to be piped into town on a gravity feed.  

The railroad reached Missoula in 1883, bringing more people to the valley. Demand for irrigation and drinking water grew. In 1902, the town built a dam on the creek three miles from its mouth. The creek remained Missoula’s primary water source until 1983 when it was the suspected source of an epidemic of giardia. After that, Missoula turned to an underground aquifer. Three years ago, the town demolished the dam and Rattlesnake Creek became a freestone stream again for the first time in around 120 years. 

Beginning in 1872, homesteaders staked out land along Rattlesnake Creek, built cabins and tilled the soil with horses. They hunted and trapped, picked huckleberries, fished in the creek, felled trees and cut cord after cord of firewood. They dug mines and made moonshine. Eventually, they built a schoolhouse in a meadow near the creek. They shoveled snow together and shared meat. It was a hard life. Kids died of scarlet fever and diphtheria. There were accidents with axes and gunfights between neighbors. There was adultery and murder, flood and fire. There was a whole world in this narrow valley and something that probably felt a lot like freedom. 

They were people like Gillette Van Buren, who moved out here from the Midwest in 1892. He married a woman named Katherine and they raised nine children in a small cabin on the creek with a fireplace but no cookstove. He baked bread and sewed dresses for his daughters and in the summer, he tended a garden of strawberries, potatoes, peas, corn, beets, cucumbers, tomatoes and carrots that he protected from the deer with handmade fenceposts and irrigated with creek water via a ditch he cut into the earth. He lived like this for 11 years before one day, in the dead of winter in 1903, he killed himself. He was 51 years old.

By 1910, 154 people lived in the higher reaches of Rattlesnake Creek. A century later, their stories are all but erased. They left behind the footprints of their cabins and the depressions of their latrines, some lilac bushes, if you know where to look, and a few feral apple trees that today feed the bears. On weekends now, people park their Subarus at the trailhead and walk their dogs past the ghosts. 

Rattlesnake Creek was the site of my first kiss, atop a rock at a bend in the stream, one spring afternoon my freshman year of college. She was my first love, and I had much to learn. A year and a half later I broke up with her in a drawn-out, self-centered way. I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted. I was constantly trying to peer around the corner to get a glimpse of who I would become. 

Later, I made a habit of backpacking into the wilderness area alone. I’d go up for a weekend, intending to ponder the direction of my life, but instead, I’d get too absorbed with the quotidian chores to think about the abstract. I’d go to sleep not with feelings of ruggedness and adventure, as I had imagined, but with loneliness and longing. 

By happenstance, I had a class the last semester of my senior year with a girl from Montana who I had admired throughout college. Our second date was up the Rattlesnake. We cycled to the trailhead on a Sunday in February, past the house in which we would eventually live, where our second son would be born. At the trailhead, we left our bikes and walked along the creek. The trail had occasional hills, the leftover moraines of ancient glaciers. We shared a thermos of chai. The trail was icy, so we held hands to keep each other upright, but mostly just to hold them. 

After graduation, our lives diverged — she left to do human rights work in Guatemala, and I went to Asia to be a journalist — but we made our way back to each other. Seven years ago, we found a house here in the Rattlesnake Valley, between the mountain and the creek. 

By now, the creek is a backdrop we scarcely pause to notice. It is constantly flowing through our days. We cross it every time we go to the library or the post office. We picnic on its banks; we watch our boys play battleship with driftwood. I take their photographs with my old film camera, feeling equal measures of love and pride and luck.

I have lived in proximity of Rattlesnake Creek for almost a third of my life now, although I feel like a different person than I was when I first stepped into it. I now see my life less as a voyage and more as a camp. I used to miss the tremor of travel, the feeling you get when you don’t want to arrive — because it’s the getting there, the anticipation of the approach, that is the most exciting. But looking at these old photographs of my wife and our two boys at the water’s edge in the fresh warmth of spring, I can see that I arrived some years ago, that all I want is here beside this creek, and it is more than I ever expected.

Biologically speaking, our bodies are as dynamic as a creek. At a cellular level, we are construction sites, constantly renovating, overhauling, patching, mending, sorting and shedding. We lose maybe 100 hairs in 24 hours. The cells of our digestive tract are replenished every few days. Every few weeks, our body manufactures fresh skin. Over four months, we refurbish our fleet of red blood cells. In six months, we have new fingernails. In a decade, a new skeleton; in 15 years, new muscles. 

The brain — once considered a fixed quantity — can add neurons and the connections between them are constantly in flux. Our memories aren’t sacrosanct, either; every act of remembering erodes other memories. Even our DNA denatures over time. Among the few biological components that endure from birth to death is a small cluster of transparent proteins in the lens of our eye. As in a car on a long road trip, the scenery changes and so does our understanding of it. But the window remains. 

You know the famous line about rivers and change: “No man ever steps into the same river twice. For it’s not the same river and it’s not the same man.” The words are credited to Heraclitus, but they’re a crude approximation of what he wrote. Heraclitus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived in the late 6th century B.C.E. A melancholic thinker ridiculed by his successors, Heraclitus wrote a single papyrus roll of ideas that was burned in the great fire of the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. 

From the fragments of Heraclitus’ ideas that trickled down through his disciples, it seems what he actually said about rivers was something more like this: “Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and ever different waters flow down.” Modern philosophers interpret this to mean that some things, like a river, can only stay the same if they constantly change. If new water didn’t flow down a creek bed, it would be a lake, or a pond. 

The same could be said for people. If we are not moving, shifting, evolving — are we really living? 

Another idea credited to Heraclitus is the “unity of opposites.” Sleep can only be defined by wakefulness, just as health is meaningless without sickness. “The same thing in us is living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old,” he wrote.

Heraclitus has been called the philosopher of flux. He found his peace with change and shows us that opposites don’t have to contradict. A sunset, for example, is simultaneously a sunrise when viewed from another point on Earth. When I look through the diary I kept from my college years, I cringe at the bombast and conceit in its pages. In some cases, I now believe the opposite of what I wrote. Heraclitus consoles me with the idea that in time and space, most things can be true.  

Jonathan Moreno, a philosopher and historian who teaches bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said the study of human identity goes back at least to the 18th-century Scottish philosopher, David Hume, who searched in vain for an inherent idea of selfhood. If we are not born with a sense of self, then how do we acquire it? This question captivated one of the founders of modern psychology, William James, who explained the inner workings of the mind by comparing them to water — the stream of consciousness. 

“We talk to ourselves, preconsciously or unconsciously, all the time, making sense of what we’re going through,” Moreno told me. “We do have an impulse to create this autobiography, this narrative, so that when we say ‘I,’ in normal conversation, we feel like it’s continuous. We like to think we know who we are, but do we really?” 

Moreno is 70 now and said he often thinks about how he relates to his younger self. He doesn’t feel he has changed much in the last 20 years — which he said he doesn’t remember distinctly, certainly not like his teenage years. He faced this reality recently when he met an old friend for lunch. 

“The stuff we talk about is almost 50 years old,” Moreno said. “There is a weird way in which you travel back when you’re relating with someone who has not been part of your life in a great way for decades. You’re confronted again with your young self.”

I asked him if he ever feels anguish in the realization that almost nothing, biologically or psychologically, endures — that our lives slip by like water under a bridge. “You could see it as anguish,” he said. “Or you could see it as freeing. We’re not trapped. We can come to see ourselves differently. To some degree, we can be who we want to be.”

He went on: “We’re not discrete. We’re part of the ecology. We are attached to the stuff around us and it to us.” 

Years ago I tried to find that bend in the river where I had my first kiss, but it had disappeared. Perhaps a bank eroded and shifted the course of the creek. The rock may have moved. Things are always moving. Perhaps that place, as I knew it, exists only in the neural pathways of my brain. 

“This is the kind of conversation that leads people to some notion of pantheism, that everything is alive,” Moreno says. “We are far more engaged with everything — and it with us — than we tend to think. We all do come from the same stardust, ultimately.” 

Even great works of literature, it’s been said, are just a reorganization of the dictionary. Setting aside our own cellular upheaval, is the difference between the creek and me and all other matter just the arbitrary shuffling of a finite quantity of atoms from the dawn of time? 

After we adopted our puppy (her name is Agatha), someone told me blue heelers have long lifespans. I did the math and realized, if all goes well, she may still be alive when our boys are grown and leaving the house. Dogs are useful that way. Just like you can measure a river’s length with some string and a map, dogs offer narrative scale by allowing us to comprehend our own lives against their shorter ones. They expose once again how fleeting this life and its chapters are, that our existence is an ephemeral, tumbling stream.

An eddy of my life’s voyage landed me in this town at the feet of the mountains, an eddy that has by now become an ecosystem all its own. Life is a thousand decisions, the permutations of which could have carried me almost anywhere. There are other places. There are other creeks. But this place is now mine, and this is the water I know best. Familiarity is the bedrock of belonging. 

It’s difficult to describe the sound of water, the sound I sometimes can hear from our porch on the stillest nights. The creek murmurs, hisses and shushes, it gurgles and seethes. Some hear voices in it. It is the amniotic din of a train station. It is a tearing of paper. However you describe it, the sound of a creek is a concert of friction between water and stone, the ever-flowing against the immutable. The sound of water is the tension of opposites. 

Each night, when my wife and I put our boys to bed, we turn on a white noise machine that sounds like water. Sleep researchers say the sound of a stream is calming because it is non-threatening. It’s whispering to our subconscious: “Don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t worry.” Perhaps it is calming because it represents the ever-present duality within which we all must carve our lives. 

When our sons grow and leave to become the iterations of whoever they’re going to be, my hope is that they find their own water, somewhere, to guide them, to reflect back to them what is good and right and important, what lasts and what fades. I can only hope that they find some comfort in the multiplicity of all things, even themselves.

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