The tour guide for ASARCO’s open-pit copper mine in Sahuarita, Arizona, was a stooping man with a salt-and-pepper beard and a monotone voice. His name was Dave. He addressed us from the front of a bus, where our group sat wearing branded hard hats and orange safety vests. “Mines,” the tour website had warned, “are inherently risky places.” By visiting an active copper mine, we assumed the risk of injury or death, but thankfully we could mitigate that risk by wearing closed-toed shoes.
It was an October day somewhere above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, unseasonably hot. The bus trundled through a landscape of creosote, cholla, and the occasional saguaro—habitat, Dave told us in rapid succession, for javelinas, deer, bobcats, snakes, coyotes, raccoons, skunks, Gila monsters, roadrunners, foxes, quails, scorpions, and rattlesnakes. If we looked to the right, he said, we could see grayish-green graded mounds. These were tailings, or waste left over from the copper extraction process, and they were green in color because they contained a polymer that Dave described as a sort of superglue for dust suppression in case the winds picked up. Further up the road, he said, we could see the tailings pond, a massive toxic body of water and chemicals also left over from extraction, six feet deep in places and large enough to be seen from Google Earth. The mine, he said, used about three hundred gallons of water per ton of copper ore milled, a mixture of groundwater and Colorado River water pumped hundreds of miles to Sahuarita from Lake Havasu.
We parked at what Dave called “the overlook,” which featured a pair of fixed binoculars and an iron barrier to protect us from falling 1,200 feet into the open pit below, a two-and-a-half-mile long crater that miners began carving into the earth sixty-six years ago. Within the crater were ledges and roads. Standing at the rim felt like peering into the ruins of an ancient civilization. Dave promised we would witness an explosion. We readied our phones—which, he later pointed out in a well-rehearsed bit, contained copper.
Copper, Dave also told us, is an antibacterial agent. It kills algae. Copper stimulates the immune system and repairs injured tissues. It occurs naturally in dark green leafy vegetables, asparagus, grains, nuts, seeds, shellfish, dried fruits, and cocoa. We use copper in electrical wiring, batteries, pipes. We use it in intrauterine devices to kill sperm, in fungicides to kill molds. Fifty pounds of copper go into the average gas car, while the average electric car requires more than three times that. “A person born in 2008 will use 1,500 pounds of copper over their lifetime just to enjoy daily living,” Dave said. The whole of modern human civilization, the copper industry likes to say, exists thanks to this metal.
Humans have been extracting copper from the Earth’s crust for millennia. At some point between seven and ten thousand years ago, our ancestors discovered copper embedded in rock, figured out how to harvest it, determined the metal was soft and malleable and began hammering the material into pendants, bowls, and eventually tools like fishhooks, knives, and axes. Somehow, they learned that extreme, concentrated heat could extract copper from its ore—an early version of smelting—and we left the Stone Age for the Bronze Age.
Over time, our thirst for copper has yielded increasingly fantastical and ambitious methods for obtaining it, like the process, now standard, that Dave showed us at ASARCO’s mine in Arizona. The explosion that we did eventually witness left a plume of smoke and dust in its wake, along with a pile of rock that trucks would cart away for further crushing. The resulting slurry of coarse gravel would be ground further into a sand, which would then be mixed in a tank with pine oil, calcium oxide (also known as lime), and chemical reagents to separate the copper from the “gangue,” or non-copper rock. That separation is a complicated process called “froth flotation,” which basically makes copper waterproof so it can latch onto bubbles for further processing—smelting and refining—while the rock waste piles up as tailings.
These are dirty techniques. Copper mining requires enormous amounts of water and threatens to contaminate the air and groundwater with heavy metals like arsenic, lead, and uranium. It destabilizes land. It destroys the habitats of endangered species. In 1998, ASARCO settled with the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up hazardous waste and water pollution at copper mines in Montana and Arizona; the Arizona mine, a different one two hours north of Sahuarita, had contaminated ground and surface water with carcinogenic arsenic, mercury, and lead. More recently, in 2023, the Sahuarita mine emitted 2.2 million pounds of toxic byproduct, the EPA found. (ASARCO did not respond to a request for comment.)
Yet today, copper is getting a major green rebrand. A highly conductive metal important in electricity generation, copper is necessary for building wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicle batteries, and large-scale grid storage—all crucial to transitioning the world’s transportation and energy economies from fossil fuels. Industry heads argue that these environmental benefits outweigh the devastation caused by its extraction. “We seek to provide products and services that accelerate the transition to inclusive, low-carbon economies, maximizing the generation of benefits for our stakeholders and society in general,” the company notes in the sustainability section of its website.
This rebrand is about more than rehabilitating the image of a controversial industry. It also has land-use consequences: renewable energy production serves as one of the copper industry’s main justifications for opening new mines. But not everyone is confident that the environmental trade-offs are worth it, and critics question whether copper extraction can really be called green at all. Exacerbating copper’s ambiguous role in the energy transition is the fact that federal agencies can’t agree on whether or not to formally designate it as a “critical mineral.” It’s a linguistic debate that has real-world ramifications, including tax incentives and expedited permitting processes, as well as possible environmental ruin for the rural communities around mines. The picture has been complicated even further by the second presidential term of Donald Trump, whose interest in copper mining runs counter—or at least entirely parallel—to the mineral’s supposed environmental bona fides.
It’s Electric
In 1831, the English chemist and physicist Michael Faraday made a discovery that gave rise to life as we know it today. In his most famous experiment, Faraday insulated two coils of copper wire in twine and calico, wrapped them around different sides of an iron ring, and passed an electrical current through one of the coils to see what effect it would have on the other. When the current reached the second coil, he confirmed his theory of electromagnetic induction, which held that you could induce electricity with a magnetic field and an electric conductor. His discovery made possible the transmission of electricity over long distances. Wireless telegraphs, railroad communications, telephones, and transformers to distribute electricity followed—all thanks to copper. In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, the world got copper phone lines, copper car radiators, and HVAC systems. Copper started replacing lead in plumbing pipes because it was corrosion resistant. Demand soared.
Critics question whether copper extraction can really be called green at all.
You could argue all these uses make copper critical. But what does critical even mean? To different American government agencies, it can mean essential to national security and defense. To economic output. To energy production. To renewable energy production. To the manufacture of certain products, like cell phones and laptops. Critical can also mean vulnerable. As in, vulnerable to supply chain disruption. Vulnerable to an increase in demand without adequate supply. “Mineral criticality,” the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) states on its website, “is not static, but changes over time as supply and demand dynamics evolve, import reliance changes, and new technologies are developed.”
In 2017, President Trump directed federal agencies to create a list of minerals deemed critical specifically to American economic and national security, with the intent of reducing the country’s dependence on minerals from other countries, especially China. Currently, the United States imports 45 percent of its copper. Chile is the world’s top copper producer, with 5.3 million metric tons of copper mined in 2024; China is fourth, while the United States comes in sixth. China also mines and refines a large share of the minerals, like gallium, used in American defense industry technology, including semiconductors for missiles, radar systems, and communications equipment. Many lawmakers and policy experts agree that this puts the United States in a vulnerable position, where China could meddle in American weapons.
The list that resulted from Trump’s executive order was published by the USGS in December 2018. Its purpose was not just informational. A mining company proposing to extract a mineral that the USGS deems critical may have an easier time getting its permits approved. That’s no small thing; according to the analytics firm S&P Global, it takes an average of twenty-nine years to get from discovery—when companies are searching for ore deposits underground—to production. Often, it takes much longer.
In its first list, the USGS decided that thirty-five minerals were critical. (Today, there are fifty.) The original USGS list included, among others: beryllium, “used as an alloying agent in aerospace and defense industries”; hafnium, “used for nuclear control rods, alloys, and high-temperature ceramics”; lithium, “used primarily for batteries”; and titanium, “overwhelmingly used as a white pigment or metal alloys.” Copper was not included, nor is it on the list today.
In 2023, under the Biden administration, the Department of Energy, spurred by the Energy Act of 2020, created its own critical materials list, with a focus on minerals important not only to national security but also renewable energy technologies. Unlike the USGS list, copper was included because of its use in solar panels, EV batteries, and grid storage. Companies mining minerals on this list were, under the Inflation Reduction Act, eligible for certain loans, federal grants, and tax credits. In January of this year, Biden’s secretary of energy, Jennifer M. Granholm, said that 94 percent of IRA funds directed to the DOE, and 70 percent of grants and loans from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—over $170 billion—had been obligated, meaning that the agency and companies, nonprofits, and other funding recipients had signed legally binding contracts. Some of that money went to mines in Arizona. Freeport-McMoRan, a company based in Phoenix, received $80 million to use geothermal energy to help extract residual copper from already-mined material.
The discrepancy between the two lists has created uncertainty about copper’s future. “Everyone’s like, well, what the hell does this mean? Now we have two different federal bodies saying something’s important and not important,” Jack Conness, an analyst at the nonprofit Energy Innovation, told me. So: Which is it?
King Copper
On a cool February morning, I drove to Scottsdale to speak with Misael Cabrera, director of the University of Arizona’s School of Mining and Mineral Resources. Arizona provides around 70 percent of the country’s domestic copper supply, thanks to its particular geology. Copper formed from magma in Arizona’s ancient volcanoes, and some fifty to eighty million years ago, earthquakes caused that magma to rise to the Earth’s upper crust, cool, and harden. Arizona’s arid climate meant that erosion didn’t wash away the copper, and when the minerals did decompose, they sank further into the Earth and concentrated, creating the deposits for which the state is famous today. “As a human species,” Cabrera told me from a couch in a bright white conference room, “we have evolved to really thrive. And to thrive, there are two essential things we need: energy and water. Copper is essential to both.”
The same conductive properties that made copper ideal for early telephones also make it essential for EV batteries.
Before getting into mining policy, Cabrera, who has well-coiffed hair and kind, concerned eyes, worked at the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, where he managed the cleanup of six state superfund sites. He described his move from the world of environmental regulation to the world of mining as one of optimism. He is enthusiastic about copper’s green potential, is adamant that mining can be done sustainably, and believes that people are fundamentally good. For the time being, Cabrera is not especially concerned about the possibility of Trump deprioritizing copper mining, given how much emphasis the president has placed on domestic energy production and security. “It is very difficult to have a thriving economy without abundant economic supply of minerals,” Cabrera said. “While I won’t speculate, I would assume that he and members of his administration understand that.” Still, there’s no guarantee that, even if the United States mines more copper, any of it will actually go to the green energy infrastructure that requires it, given Trump’s clear disdain for such technologies.
Today, Cabrera told me, the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental agency based in Paris, has deemed copper a mineral important to the green energy transition. The same conductive properties that made copper ideal for early telephones—its ability to generate, transmit, and store energy—also make it essential for EV batteries. In May 2024, the International Energy Forum, an intergovernmental nonprofit, published a report arguing that the world needs six new large-scale copper mines each year to meet net zero goals by 2050. Unlike the DOE and the USGS, however, the IEF does not have the power to direct policy or funding in the United States or elsewhere.
To Cabrera, copper ought to receive the same kind of federal funding and speedier permitting that minerals on the USGS list receive. In June 2024, he testified to the House Subcommittee on Energy and Natural Resources in support of a bill that would expand the USGS’s definition of critical beyond the realm of economic value, essentially combining the USGS and DOE lists. The Critical Mineral Consistency Act passed the House and was referred to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, but it failed to become a law. Arizona Representative Juan Ciscomani reintroduced the House bill in January, while Utah Senator Mike Lee, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, introduced a similar bill in February along with bipartisan cosponsors.
We need to mine more copper—billions and billions of tons of it—according to Frances McAllister, chairman of the Arizona Mining Association and vice president of land and water for Freeport-McMoRan: “for the decarbonization of the electrical industry, of the auto industry, and everything else.” The problem, he said, is, “we don’t have the resources to do that. We don’t have the ore bodies to do that. We don’t have the exploration.”
Then there’s the matter of copper’s regular old use for electricity generation. “I’m in my fifties. I’m kind of an old guy, and in my lifetime, which is not that long, the population of the planet has doubled,” Cabrera told me. “It’s gone from four billion to eight billion people just in my lifetime. Forecasters suggest that that’s not going to level off until 2060 or 2070, and by then, we’ll have somewhere between ten and twelve billion people on the planet.” As the world’s population increases, people will simply need to consume more electricity, which means the world needs more copper. Or so the industry claims. “I don’t know that we can produce enough of it,” Steve Trussell, executive director of the Arizona Mining Association, told me.
Cabrera believes that, with materials like copper, humans can innovate their way out of climate change. “While I do think there are certain risks that could wipe out the planet—thermonuclear war, for example, is a real risk—when I look at the rest of human history, we’ve shown that we’re not like the bacteria in a petri dish that consumes all of the gel and then dies,” he said. “Human history suggests that we are creative and innovative, and increasingly we are also conscious of our planet.” Just as we’ve shown our capacity to destroy, he said, we’ve shown our capacity to create.
I thought about the city of Phoenix, not far from where Cabrera and I were speaking. Its population is 1.65 million, with a metro population three times that. Arizona as a whole is one of the fastest growing states in the country, with a net gain of more than 62,000 residents in 2023. But at the same time, it is becoming less livable for many. Last year, Phoenix saw 143 days at or over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and more than six hundred people died of heat-related illness across Maricopa County. Mining boosters often point to these kinds of figures as the precise reason we need more minerals like copper—to lessen our reliance on fossil fuels and remediate the effects of climate change enough to combat excessive heat. But can we really mine our way out of that death toll? Even if it were possible to reverse the trend of global warming by producing more solar panels and electric cars, it isn’t just red tape standing in the way of new mines. People who live near proposed mining projects are worried about the impact to their local environment.
This Little Land of Mines
Today, copper extraction is still governed by the 1872 General Mining Law, which opened up public lands across the country to mineral exploration. It decreed that any U.S. citizen could stake a claim to a plot of land they thought contained minerals from which they could profit. Then, they could file a request with the government for a small amount of money. The law was intended to develop the West, and indeed, it helped bring prospectors to Arizona, which became a state in 1912.
We need to mine more copper—billions and billions of tons of it.
Nineteenth-century lawmakers had envisioned small claims miners digging little holes across the West. But thirty-odd years after the law passed, in 1907, the Boston Consolidated Copper & Gold Mining Company, together with the Utah Copper Company, opened the world’s first open-pit mine in Utah’s Bingham Canyon, some twenty miles southwest of Salt Lake City. Bingham Canyon contained low-grade copper, and after a few years mining with smaller, more labor-intensive methods entirely underground, the companies merged and decided to scale up their production to extract more ore for less money. Under the guidance of Daniel C. Jackling, the engineer who pioneered the open-pit method, the company attached steam shovels to railroad cars and began cutting a massive hole into the earth, one that would eventually become almost a mile deep and over two miles wide, one of the biggest open-pit mines in the world. It paved the way for large-scale mineral extraction across the western United States.
Legislation has yet to catch up with industry. In a 2022 congressional hearing, Steve Feldgus, the deputy assistant secretary of lands and minerals management at the Department of the Interior, emphasized that the 1872 mining law belonged to an America that no longer existed. “Congress did not . . . account for the legacy of environmental degradation that mining would have on its surrounding communities,” he said, “nor did it provide for royalties or a comprehensive system to evaluate, permit, develop, and reclaim mines to ensure sustainable mining and healthy public lands for future generations. In short, it was very much legislation of its time.”
Mining executives insist that these concerns are offset by the extent to which mining technology has improved in the century and a half since 1872. Companies have more precise drilling techniques, they say, and use water more efficiently. But several Arizona mines, proposed and existing, suggest otherwise.
After visiting Scottsdale in early February, I drove south to the town of Superior, population 2,470, to learn about a proposed copper mine that’s generated decades of controversy. Today, most working people who live there commute an hour north to Phoenix for their jobs, but a few decades ago, Superior was a thriving company town. Residents worked at the Magma copper mine just beyond the town’s limits. “Traditionally, you went to high school, and if you were fortunate enough to go to college, you’d go to college,” Henry Muñoz, who was born and raised in Superior, told me. “But there were so many mines around here that you’d just go work in a mine. You could graduate in May, and by August or September, you’d be driving a brand-new car. That’s how much money [you were] paid.”
Muñoz worked nine years underground in the Magma mine. It was dangerous work. Miners there employed a method called inclined cut and fill—a labor-intensive technique used primarily in ore with high concentrations of copper—to blast rock, extract ore, and then fill the spent tunnels with mining waste to stabilize the ground above. Though the work was grueling, Muñoz liked it enough, and it allowed him to buy a house and start a family.
But after global copper prices crashed in 1982, due in part to an economic recession that caused demand to fall even as supply increased, the mine shut down. Magma laid off 1,200 workers, and the town’s economy contracted. Muñoz moved to the company’s mine in San Manuel, fifty-five miles away. In 1999, however, that mine closed too, leaving 3,300 people out of work. Muñoz was devastated. He believed in the work and wished he could continue, but he decided to retire from mining. He found a job working in a nearby prison and joined a group called the Concerned Citizens and Retired Miners Coalition. Initially, the group was worried about the high cancer rates among miners and people who lived near San Manuel’s smelter. But eventually their work evolved in an unexpected way: protesting a copper mine coming back to Superior.
In the 1990s, Broken Hill Proprietary, or BPH, a mining company based in Australia, bought the old Superior and San Manuel mines. In Superior, BHP identified a possibly massive low-grade copper deposit. This deposit could become the biggest copper mine in North America, the company says, and would help the United States “meet clean energy goals, bolster supply chain resiliency, and boost national security.” (In 2004, the international mining conglomerate Rio Tinto, based in London, became the majority owner of the project.) But BPH wanted to mine it with a method called block caving, a controversial technique that has spurred lawsuits and permitting delays, all of which have prevented the mine from actually opening.
Block caving happens when all of the surface ore has been extracted. It involves undercutting ore so that it collapses under its own weight and breaks into smaller rocks, which are funneled into preconstructed chutes. The problem with block caving is that it makes the ground around it sink. The proposed BHP/Rio Tinto mine, called Resolution Copper, would be located between five and seven thousand feet below the surface. Muñoz and others worry that kind of deep block caving could leave behind a crater one thousand feet deep and nearly two miles wide.
Muñoz gesticulates enthusiastically when he speaks and often uses other kinds of visuals to convey his point. We met in his garage, where he likes to show journalists the Bureau of Land Management’s final environmental impact statement for the mine, an hourglass that mimics how the mine would make the land sink, and a model of the proposed mine itself. Inside the resulting crater sits a model Eiffel Tower, at scale with the landscape. The crafter dwarfs it.
Midway through our conversation, we were joined by Sylvia Delgado Barrett, vice chair of the Retired Miners Coalition and one of the first women to work underground at the Magma mine in the 1970s. We drove up the mountains to see the area where the crater would form. On the way up, Delgado Barrett and Muñoz told me about how the copper mine would also stress, reshape, and possibly contaminate the aquifer. The BLM’s environmental impact statement indicated that some areas around the mine would experience a groundwater shortage. It’s estimated that Resolution Copper would use forty-thousand acre-feet of water a year—the same amount that the entire city of Tempe needs for its nearly two hundred thousand residents. Delgado Barrett and Muñoz also worry about the stability of a potentially toxic tailings pile. They pointed to a 2015 disaster, in which a BHP-owned tailings pile collapsed in Brazil, killing nineteen people, displacing hundreds more, and causing extreme water shortages. “Tell me how you can justify green energy when you are destroying a town and polluting it?” Delgado Barrett asked.
The retired miners aren’t the only ones pushing back against Resolution Copper. Our drive took us to a campground dotted with oaks and mesquite and long grass. This was Oak Flat, the area that would become a crater. It’s a sacred place for the San Carlos Apache, who gather there for coming-of-age ceremonies and believe that spirits dwell in the land. In the decades since BHP discovered copper ore nearby, a nonprofit group called Apache Stronghold has become a key force in the fight against the mine. In September of last year, they appealed a Ninth Circuit decision that declined to protect Oak Flat, arguing that the proposed copper mine would infringe on their religious freedom. This May, the Supreme Court announced they would not review the case, allowing the land transfer to continue. [1]
We walked around the site. It was cool and smelled like dust under the sun. When it rains, Muñoz said, water rushes down the campground and creates a small lake. As a kid, he and his friends would throw bologna into it, which crawdads would come up to eat. It’s been a while, he said, since he’d seen the campground fill up with water like that.
Tyson Nansel, a spokesperson for Resolution Copper, wrote in a statement that the “project is vital to securing America’s energy future, infrastructure needs, and national defense with a domestic supply of copper and other critical minerals.” The company, he said, is in “dialogue with local Native American Tribes and communities,” and the mine “will be a leader in water efficiency—using fewer gallons of water per pound of copper produced than any other mine operating in Arizona.” He added that Resolution Copper will seek to preserve native species and cultural sites, and “will be required to closely manage, monitor, and report subsidence impacts.”
Mila Besich, Superior’s mayor and a fourth-generation resident, is in favor of the project because she believes it will bring back local jobs. According to her, the exploration and permitting processes already have. “When Resolution came online, this town was boarded up,” she told a group of visiting journalists last fall. “It has created new jobs. It’s brought our young people into the mining industry, teaching them these important high-tech mining skills.” She was also optimistic that her town could play an important role in America’s green energy transition. “That ore body is not going to go away. How do you work with it versus trying to oppose it?”
On my drives between Phoenix and Superior, I saw two Resolution Copper billboards touting the company’s allegedly mindful approach. In one, a woman in a hardhat smiled next to the words making tomorrow’s copper using less water. Another, set against a lush river background, read, mining with less water = more for nature and communities.
Pedal to the Metal
The end of my Arizona trip took me farther south, to Tucson. An evening rain—one of the first in months—had cleared the sky, and the air out my window smelled crisp and faintly of creosote. I was in town to speak with Roger Featherstone, director of the Arizona Mining Reform Coalition. He greeted me in his front yard, lush with agave. Featherstone’s organization is not against mining; instead, they urge companies to mine better. For example, if a project has already started, it should be mined until the ore is all gone instead of destroying more land to create a new mine, thereby reducing environmental impact. The San Manuel mine where Muñoz used to work has an estimated thirty years of copper ore remaining, but the company left because it deemed mining no longer profitable there.
Are we not being imaginative enough about other possibilities for our planet’s future?
Featherstone has seen the copper narrative shift many times over his forty-year career advocating for change in the industry. Sometimes companies argue they’re important for national defense. Sometimes they’re green. Sometimes they proclaim economic security. “The Mantra company has changed its spots a dozen times in the past twenty years,” Featherstone told me, referring to one copper firm in particular.
Today, the narrative appears to be in flux once again. While USGS still does not consider copper a critical mineral, it is set to update its list sometime this year. Meanwhile, Trump has floated the idea of imposing tariffs on imported copper for national security purposes. (As of this writing, he has yet to do so.) In February, he also signed an executive order “launching an investigation into how copper imports threaten America’s national security and economic stability,” positioning domestic copper production as not only a defense priority but as an important part of his America First trade agenda. A further order, signed in March, instructed the heads of departments and agencies involved in the permitting of mineral production to “take immediate action to facilitate domestic mineral production to the maximum possible extent.” It names copper specifically, along with uranium, potash, and gold.
Featherstone got his start in environmental activism in the 1970s as a college student fighting a proposed nuclear power plant near Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He’s seen a false sense of urgency—the idea that we need to produce more of a given form of energy, or we’ll die—play out over and over again. The owners of the proposed Wisconsin plant, the Tyrone Energy Park, would say, “Unless we build this plant, we’re going to freeze to death in darkness.” Fifty years later, we’re still here, and the Tyrone Energy Park isn’t.
Later, reflecting on our conversation, I thought about how the problem isn’t that we’ll need more energy—it’s that we’ve grown accustomed to having as much energy as we want, whenever we want it. Clearly, we need to transition away from fossil fuels, but in the rush to mine more critical minerals like copper to fuel our present and future energy needs, we’re also harming our environment. Is this local destruction a worthwhile tradeoff for increased renewable energy capacity? Or are we not being imaginative enough about other possibilities for our planet’s future, like reducing consumption altogether?
Because mining companies are concerned, above all else, with profit, they’re not inclined or equipped to address these questions. Neither is President Trump, who declared a “national energy emergency” as one of his firsts acts back in office. His administration intends to produce even more energy, including and especially from fossil fuels. In this political climate, the possibility of states taxing energy and gas use—or even creating incentives for people to hang on to their cars, phones, and laptops for as long as possible before upgrading to new ones—feels more remote than ever.
School of Rocks
After speaking with Featherstone, I drove with a couple of friends to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. Started in 1955 for the benefit of local rockhounds and lapidarists, the show has exploded into a massive commercial event, where nearly three hundred vendors from around the world sell crystals, rocks, fossils, and petrified wood to crowds of residents and tourists alike.
We pulled up to a large white tent just off Interstate 10, paid ten dollars for parking, and made our way through the stalls. Colors announced themselves—green, pink, silver, gold. There was purple amethyst from Uruguay, sparkling pyrite from Brazil, zinc from Madagascar, turquoise from Bisbee, opals from Madagascar, diamonds from Oregon. I bought a pentagon-shaped lapis lazuli from vendors who’d brought the stone from Afghanistan.
I lingered at one stall that displayed acid blue and shimmery brown chunks of raw copper. The man behind the company called himself the “copper guy” and said he searches for “museum-quality” specimens across Michigan. This was copper simply as a mineral, procured with only a shovel. It wasn’t a wire or an EV battery. It didn’t have any future in energy production. It was just a rock. I thought of a man in a baseball hat I’d seen earlier that day, staring down into a box of smoky quartz. “It’s amazing,” he said to no one in particular, “what the earth does.”
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.
[1] This paragraph has been updated to address developments that occurred after the issue went to print.