Through knee-deep snow, Marijana Petkovic climbed to a hilltop monastery overlooking Serbia’s Jadar valley — where one of the world’s largest resources groups wants to mine one of Europe’s biggest lithium deposits.
Extraction of a metal vital to the electric vehicle revolution would be a potential economic boon for Serbia and help Europe’s access to a key strategic resource. But Petkovic, one of a group of campaigners against the planned mine, is focused on the threat to the farmland below.
“Twenty-two villages down there would be lost completely,” Petkovic, a school teacher in nearby Gornje Nedeljice, said. “Lithium may make the rest of the world cleaner, and it may help western Europeans to feel good about themselves. Here, it would create a dump and destroy our lives.”