This story was produced with support from the Rainforest Journalism Fund in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.
In September, 2020, Elon Musk and a Tesla executive named Drew Baglino put on matching T-shirts and took the stage in a California parking lot. To mark what the company called Battery Day, Tesla had gathered an audience of shareholders, who were social distancing by sitting separately in gleaming electric cars. Some of the company’s new batteries, Musk and Baglino announced, contained far more nickel than previous models; as a result, they could travel farther, and at far less cost, on a single charge. “Increasing nickel is a goal of ours and, really, everybody’s in the battery industry,” Baglino said. The metal would accelerate the transition away from dirty combustion engines, the largest source of carbon emissions in the United States. “I actually spoke with the C.E.O.s of the biggest mining companies in the world and said, ‘Please make more nickel,’ ” Musk said. Throughout the presentation, attendees applauded by laying on their horns.
Around half the world’s nickel is mined in Indonesia, where Chinese mining companies operate with relatively little oversight. But one of the next largest producers is tiny New Caledonia, a French overseas territory in the Pacific which is less than a hundredth of the size of Indonesia. “I have never seen nickel deposits like we have in New Caledonia,” Miguel Ate, a geologist from the territory’s Indigenous Kanak community, told me. “My island is four hundred kilometres long by sixty kilometres wide. It’s all nickel.” Ate, who works for a mining company, was exaggerating—but not by much. About a third of the soil on the country’s main island, Grand Terre, contains the metal, giving New Caledonia, according to some recent estimates, more than a quarter of the world’s nickel resources.
In 2021, Tesla struck a five-year deal to buy up to a third of the nickel from Goro, one of New Caledonia’s largest mines. The New York Times touted the move as “a path to begin sidestepping China” and, in the best-case scenario, an opportunity to improve weak environmental and labor standards in the mining industry. At a time when the U.S. is penalizing electric automakers that buy Chinese nickel from Indonesia, and also negotiating a trade agreement with the E.U. which could extend generous subsidies to nickel from New Caledonia, the territory could play a crucial role in the green-energy transition.
In the fall of 2023, I flew to New Caledonia in search of a different prize—a glimpse of the territory’s remarkable plants, many of which are found nowhere else on the planet. Grand Terre, which rises from the Pacific about eight hundred miles east of Australia, is shaped like a baguette. Much of the island is dry scrubland called maquis in French, but its mountains are cloaked in rain forest—except where nickel mines have rubbed them bare. When I drove out of Nouméa, the capital city, I felt like I was spinning a color wheel: I saw iron-rich red soils, dense green trees, and tempting blue waters, apparently full of sharks. The rain forest, which was teeming with towering tree ferns and conifers with scalelike leaves, looked almost prehistoric. “You wonder, Where are the dinosaurs?” one botanist told me. “They should be threshing through the trees.”
The ecological richness of New Caledonia is one of the lasting mysteries of natural history. High concentrations of nickel are usually toxic to plants, but here evolution took an unusual path. In the course of tens of millions of years, the island’s infertile soils came to nurture a flora unlike any other in the world. In 1976, a paper in Science introduced a new term, “hyper-accumulator,” to describe a species of New Caledonian tree that produced mint-green latex; more than a quarter of the latex, by dry weight, was found to be nickel, “easily the highest nickel concentration ever found in living material.” Instead of killing plants, the metal seemed to be interacting with organisms and steering their development in curious ways. A 2009 study, which measured the number of unique vascular plants growing in different regions of the globe, gave New Caledonia “by far the highest value,” with thousands of species found nowhere else. Scientists still discover, on average, a new plant species there every month.
In 2000, a team of scientists argued, in Nature, that defending New Caledonia and other biodiversity hot spots could be a “silver bullet” for environmental conservation. For years, the Earth has been in the midst of a mass extinction inflicted largely by humans; the paper’s authors, among others, argued that safeguarding the world’s most biodiverse places can slow the crisis down. But as nickel gains a reputation as a remedy for another crisis—climate change—two strands of environmentalism are coming into conflict. In New Caledonia, the quest to save species is at odds with the mission of protecting the climate. Mining companies extract the nickel from New Caledonia’s soil by razing the forests that evolved on it; the engines of the so-called green transition could leave Earth’s most verdant corner in tatters.
During my third week on Grand Terre, Bruno Fogliani, a plant biologist at the University of New Caledonia, led me on a search for some of the rare plants that absorb nickel. I followed him off a trail in Parc Provincial de la Rivière Bleue, a national park, into a thickly forested area where he remembered seeing Sebertia acuminata, the tree with green latex. We could rustle through the understory without worrying: New Caledonian forests have no dangerous snakes or other serious threats to hikers. The only native mammals were bats, and the first human settlers, who arrived thousands of years ago, hunted the largest animals—a sixty-pound flightless fowl, a horned tortoise, a terrestrial crocodile—to extinction. But the rain forest made up for the absence of animals with a superabundance of plants: it packs in more trees per hectare than even the rain forests of Papua New Guinea and the Amazon. Fogliani found a tall and skinny trunk, borrowed a pair of shears that I had brought along, and dug the blade into the gray bark. “I don’t like doing this,” he said, and we waited for a gush of green that never came. “No—that’s not it.”
Botanists have found more than ninety plants in New Caledonia that hyper-accumulate nickel in their tissues and fluids, along with plants that specialize in other metals, such as cobalt and manganese. One theory holds that the plants co-opt the metals as insecticide; another, that the leaves fall to the ground and decompose, enriching the topsoil with a mineral barrier against weeds. Plants that do not accumulate nickel have found ways to avoid taking up the metal, for example, by evolving special physiological mechanisms or symbiotic relationships with microorganisms in the soil. Even when European colonizers brought mammals such as dogs, pigs, and cats, which wreaked havoc on New Caledonia’s native birds and lizards, invasive plants struggled to find a foothold in so-called ultramafic soils. The nickel worked almost as an environmental immune system, warding off intruders and protecting native plants.
Fogliani, a patient man with blue eyes and thinning dark hair, started guiding foreign scientists through the forest in the two-thousands, after researchers discovered that Amborella, a shrub endemic to Grand Terre, was the oldest living lineage of flowering plants. Biologists soon began making pilgrimages to see it in the wild. The species seemed to contain secrets about the origins of flowers, which Charles Darwin had called an “abominable mystery.” Fogliani often led visitors to Amborella shrubs that he had found a few metres from a road. The plants were spindly, with dry, flavorless red fruit and tough, weathered leaves. “It is a plant that only a botanist could love,” he told me.
We had less luck finding S. acuminata. Fogliani gazed up into the canopy in search of its leaves, nicked another tree trunk with his knife, and muttered under his breath in French. Something rustled nearby, and we turned to see a heronlike bird with orange legs, powder-blue feathers, and blood-red eyes. It was a flightless species called the kagu, and I had seen it all over the island, in cartoonish logos for various local businesses. It is the only animal, apart from some humans, known to live in “fraternal clans” of brothers. Fogliani turned up his hands and asked the bird, “Where is the hyper-accumulator?”
When the bird wandered off, Fogliani admitted defeat. We walked to a nearby river, whose water was so clear that little fish had evolved translucent skin as camouflage. Here, though, we found another nickel accumulator—Geissois bradfordii, an endangered species that had never been found outside this national park. Its hairy red blossoms dangled over the riverbank. “It’s the first time I saw so many flowers,” Fogliani told me. He made a note to ask the park authorities for permission to gather seeds, which he hoped to plant in greenhouses at the university.
In recent years, scientists have dreamed up a clever use for hyper-accumulators: “agro-mining.” Humans would cultivate species that draw metals out of the ground, which would then be harvested and processed to collect ore. It was nice to imagine that greenery might one day do the work of heavy machinery. But another way that New Caledonian plants have adapted to harsh and nutrient-poor soils is by growing extremely slowly. One study estimated that a New Caledonian rain forest needed two hundred and fifty years to recover from a fire; mountains scarred by nineteenth-century fires, which had been set to clear forests, still looked like the knuckles of fists that had punched through the earth. Forests that once covered ninety per cent of the island covered barely twenty per cent by the mid-nineties. I had trouble imagining a mining company patient enough to wait for trees to grow.
The open-pit mine that furnishes nickel for Tesla batteries is largely hidden from public view behind a mountain. At the southern tip of Grand Terre, however, the Goro refinery steams and clanks like a warship, on land that once belonged to the Kanak people. France seized New Caledonia in 1853 and began mining nickel shortly thereafter. It would become a key ingredient in stainless steel. (Some of Fogliani’s ancestors were Algerian dissidents whom the French exiled to New Caledonia.) Mineral wealth probably influenced France’s decision to maintain control of the territory even when it relinquished most of its empire in the twentieth century. The mine at Goro was started in the nineties by a Canadian mining company called Inco, and was then taken over by Vale, a Brazilian multinational. The operation experienced so many technical and financial problems that a Reuters columnist called it “one of the most problematic start-ups in the history of base metals.”
Then, in 2021, a local consortium called Prony Resources bought the mine, betting that rapidly growing demand for electric-vehicle batteries would turn the ship around. The reality has been more complicated. Like its predecessors, the company has struggled. When a slump in global nickel prices pushed Goro back into crisis earlier this year, the French government stepped in to bail it out. Soon after, many Kanaks took to the streets to protest electoral reforms, fearing a tightening of French control. Conflicts between local protesters and French authorities have paralyzed Nouméa and claimed more than a dozen lives. Goro ceased production for six months, only to bring back workers this month.
In a statement, Prony Resources emphasized its commitment to minimizing impacts on New Caledonia’s natural heritage, promising that their operations are held to “the highest industrial and environmental standards.” But the company also acknowledged that, because of the current economic climate, it has suspended some of its sustainability initiatives, such as a new solar plant. Tesla, Prony’s partner, did not reply to requests for comment. Other mining companies have struggled because of New Caledonia’s high cost of electricity and small local workforce; the territory has less than half the population of Wyoming. Still, almost fifteen per cent of Grand Terre is under concession or a research permit to mining interests, and many of my attempts to explore the island ended prematurely at the gates of mines. I wanted to climb a mountain where ecologists studied New Caledonian crows, which are famous for making tools from leaves to catch insects, but the road was blocked by a tall barbed-wire fence that was labelled S.L.N., for a company called Société le Nickel. Earlier, I parted ways with Philippe Bouchet, a mollusk taxonomist from France’s National Museum of Natural History, when he headed to Nouméa for safety training from a mining company. He needed the training in order to visit a stream where, years earlier, he had discovered several new species of microscopic snail. “If the place has been mined, it’s gone,” he told me. (Afterward, he told me he was relieved to find good habitat at the stream.)
Hervé Vandrot, a frequently barefoot botanist with a patchy head of hair, was inventorying rare plants at mining sites in Grand Terre’s northern province. He suggested that I accompany him by hiding under blankets in the bed of his pickup truck. “You got the botanists and the mining companies,” he said. “It’s a war.” In the end, he secured special permission for me to join him for a day’s work on Kopéto, a mountain that is home to another mine.
The inventory project was, Vandrot admitted, a “hypocrite job.” Public authorities usually require mining companies to survey biodiversity and take compensatory action for any potential impacts. This means that the search for unique plants often involves working with, or even for, the mining companies that control access to many mountains. Conservationists have questioned whether a company can adequately compensate for the destruction of a forest—especially one that needs centuries to grow. Complicating matters is the fact that many mountains in New Caledonia have completely different plant species than their neighbors, sometimes with populations that, in total, can be counted on one hand. Fogliani and a team of scientists have found eight plant species that grow only on Kopéto and a neighboring mountain called Paéoua.
We ascended Kopéto along a road so bereft of plants that it beggared description. “If you know it’s going to look like that, you think, What am I doing? I’m not protecting plants,” Vandrot said. Sections of the mine were named after non-native flowers. We crossed over the denuded summit and parked in “Fuchsia,” where thick maquis scrubland descended the leeward slope.
