This research proposes a topical discussion in relation to the climate crisis and the urgent need to change the Anthropocene paradigm. It proposes an analysis of sustainable development considering the official discourse of changing lifestyles on a global scale and the implications of it on the widening of the boundaries of extractivism of lithium in South America. The work is organized in three stages: firstly, a theoretical discussion on development models, extractivism and political ecology; secondly, an analysis of the global and regional economic dynamics of the ecological transition in relation to the lithium triangle; thirdly, an analysis of case studies in Chile. The analysis focuses on the case study of the Atacama Salar Basin in the Atacama Desert in Chile. This is one of the main territories reconfigured by the global economic dynamics of the energy transition. The territorial reading is focused on a field work that is structured through the gaze of political ecology and the analysis of transregional interdependencies and structural differences, those of a profound spatial injustice that the global ecological discourse puts in place in this indigenous territory at the borders of the capitalist paradigm. In this scenario, the territorialities that interact and configure a confrontation between actors are identified as a process of environmental degradation. The purpose of the research is to consider solutions to the current territorial conflict and to propose them as alternatives to the development of the region.