Sentence:  Already, beautiful places are being wrecked by an electric vehicle resource rush. <WSD>Lithium</WSD> mining, for example, is now poisoning rivers and depleting groundwater from Tibet to Bolivia. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  (Q568) The simplest alkali metal, the lightest solid element, and the third lightest chemical element ("symbol" Li) with an atomic number of 3. It is a soft, silvery metal.