At the end of March, the Fort McDermitt Paiute Shoshone tribal council voted to cancel a preliminary agreement with the resource company Lithium Nevada to explore installing an open-pit mine near the reservation. Thacker Pass, near the Oregon border, is home to the largest deposit of lithium in the United States. Supporters of the mine say it could produce up to 66,000 tons per year of lithium carbonate, a component in rechargeable batteries, which car and truck manufacturers can use to build millions of solar-powered and electric cars over the next five decades, buttressing an essential component of President Biden’s plan to reverse the progress of climate change. And yet it poses plenty of its own risks: according to the EPA, waste tailings from the mine could leave traces of uranium, mercury, and arsenic in the local watershed, where they’d linger for the next three centuries. Regardless of whether a private, for-profit entity like Nevada Lithium is acting with the best of intentions, any attempt to dig lithium out of the ground is likely to make a mess.