The Bajau village at Morombo was created by a shipwreck. Thirty years ago, the community lived a nomadic existence on flat-decked sope houseboats from which they spear-fished and dived for clams and conch in the waters off Sulawesi, the orchid-shaped island at the centre of the Indonesian archipelago.

Then, in the late 1990s, their flotilla was caught in a storm, smashing the boats and leaving them homeless. Around forty families settled, temporarily, in this small-mouthed bay on the eastern coast of Southeast Sulawesi, building stilt huts over the water to wait until they could afford to buy new vessels and return to the sea. Like many of Indonesia’s Bajau communities, they ended up staying on land. Traditional boatbuilding has all but died out, and the government offered them incentives to settle down. Despite being becalmed on the shore, they were able to recreate their old livelihoods.

“[The shore] was still green, bright. The water was clear,” says Diana, one of the last generation in the village to be born at sea. “We could collect clams. We could fish with spears.” It wasn’t the same as life on the sea, she says, but they were happy enough. Diana is a taut, wiry woman in her seventies with platinum hair and crystal blue eyes. In her house, suspended a metre above the water, she speaks with a barely restrained fury as she describes how the refuge they found on the shore has been taken away from them.

Five years ago, the nickel rush came to Morombo. First, a few pits opened inland of the village, cutting down trees and stripping back the topsoil to expose the orange dirt below. Gradually, the mines bled together, congealing into an orange ring that completely engulfed the village. To reach the settlement now means driving first through flooded and broken tracks through oil palm plantations, and then through the mines themselves. The sodden path threads between wide concave pits, the whole landscape a rusted monotone overseen by long ranks of Komatsu diggers and the low, loping forms of stray dogs. An access road for the mine runs above what passes for a main street in the village.

Distant explosions echo around the bay. Dust rises out of the pits and blows over the village, settling on every structure. The bay itself has turned the same orange as the land as silt washes down from the denuded hills. Fishing trips yield dwindling catches, and the community is no longer self-sufficient, relying instead on what they call “dust money”—compensation from the mining companies that totals just 400,000 rupiah ($25) a month per household.

“We’re half dead on land,” Diana says. “Everything is broken. The sea turned brown. We’re eating dust.”

The mines around Morombo are part of a vast new frontier for Indonesia’s extractives industry. Nickel has become an obsession of the government in Jakarta, which has declared the mineral to be the foundation of a whole new economy for Indonesia. The mineral is an important component of stainless steel, but also of the batteries used in energy storage and electric vehicles (EVs). That makes Indonesia’s nickel reserves—the largest in the world—a resource of global significance, an opportunity for the country to position itself astride the international green transition.

This boom isn’t just a feature of rising global demand for nickel; it’s a deliberate, engineered rush, pushed by the government in Jakarta via a policy of deregulation, subsidy and political support for smelters and miners. It’s a political project that has delivered, in the form of giant new industrial complexes that have sprung up across the island. Tens of billions of dollars have flowed into Indonesia, mostly from China, and tens of thousands of Indonesians now work in the industry’s furnaces, power plants, docks and quarries.

But the sheer speed that the frontier has grown and the economics behind it have put it into conflict with communities and put pressure on ecosystems and landscapes. To feed the furnaces at the smelters, hundreds of thousands of hectares of land have been licensed for exploration, much of it on top of the country’s rainforests, or close to communities that were already among the poorest in Indonesia. Millions of tonnes of coal are being burnt to power the smelters, reversing the country’s progress on reducing its carbon emissions. To head off dissent, the government has rewritten the law to prevent Indonesians from protesting against the industry, and even deployed the military to protect these new “strategic” assets. In the smelters, injuries and deaths are mounting, and so is the tension between locals and the Chinese companies that have driven the boom.

It has been almost five years since the boom began in earnest. In the meantime, the economics of the EV industry have shifted, as have the currents of geopolitics, with profound implications for the supply chains of critical minerals. A new government has taken power, bringing with it new fears of authoritarian creep and oligopoly. And the urgency to cut carbon emissions is only increasing, driving governments all over the world to take increasingly drastic measures to decarbonise their supply chains. The compromises made to build the industry are piling up, and the nickel reserves are dwindling.

Chapter 1: Power Play

The village of Torobulu has been disappearing in stages. The settlement, on the southern coast of Southeast Sulawesi, is clustered along a trunk road that branches off the main artery from the capital, Kendari. On the western edge, houses and businesses line the roadside; behind them sit small rice paddies and orchards. On the eastern side, the fields have mostly disappeared into familiar rust-coloured pits.

Six years ago, a mining company, Wijaya Inti Nusantara (WIN), acquired land on the eastern edge of the settlement and began to dig. Its excavations crept inexorably toward peoples’ homes. “From the beginning, their methods were reckless,” says Ayunia Muis, who lives close to one of the pits. When the boundary of the mine started to encroach on an elementary school near her home, she and some friends went out to protest. Nothing changed—the mine, she says, made promises to villagers and local leaders, and the opposition to it dwindled. “The eastern part of Torobulu is mostly wrecked because of what the company did through lobbying,” she says. “Then in 2023, when the land in the eastern part was depleted, the company wanted to come back into the residential areas.”