When I first started at TIME four years ago, I got an intriguing pitch from a PR agency. A company was opening the first rare earths mine in the U.S. and they wanted me to come visit and write a story. I was skeptical. Every journalist loves a story about a mine but mines in the U.S. rarely pan (ha!) out; see my 2013 LA Times story about a company opening a gold mine in California and the subsequent story about said mine shutting down a year later. This is mostly because the U.S. has pretty strong labor and environmental standards and other countries don’t, so it is much more expensive and difficult to mine anything here than in other countries where you can use child labor and pollute the water with aplomb and people look the other way. Since the mine was just proposed at the time, we decided not to cover it.
But it turns out that rare earths mine is actually still running today, and was the first of many new mines being proposed and created in the U.S. as we try to onshore mining and the domestic supply chain. I collaborated with the Maine Monitor, an excellent local journalism organization, to write about one such proposed mine:
Gem Hunters Found the Lithium America Needs. Maine Won’t Let Them Dig It Up.
Mining is foundational to U.S. history; Columbus was looking for gold when he stumbled across North America, and much of what followed was Europeans taking the land of native populations and driving west in search of minerals (and other things to dig up like trees.) But if America was built as an extractive economy — a place where we dig up oil and gas and trees and silver and gold and sell them — it has become a service-based economy over the last few decades. Rather than digging up coal and selling it abroad, we sell software and pedicures and derivatives.
Or at least, we did. Now, the Biden Administration is trying to get us to source more of the stuff we need for the clean energy transition, which means more mining for lithium, rare earths minerals, cobalt, and other substances we’ve gotten from elsewhere. (What are rare earths and why would anyone want to mind them, you wonder? I am not sure anybody actually knows the answer to this question. But they’re RARE. So in demand.) This nifty map by Patrick Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity shows just the lithium claims in the western U.S. alone, there are dozens of them.
I’ve been wanting to write something extensive on domestic mining for awhile, but so much of the proposed mines are just that, proposals, that it’s been hard to find a way in. There has also been some good journalism about some of the biggest efforts, including this Huffington Post piece about a proposed lithium mine in North Carolina. Then I stumbled across a great piece by the Maine Monitor about two gem hunters who found a giant lithium deposit in Maine and were fighting to mine it.
This seemed like a great in — they had already found the lithium and mined some of it, and who doesn’t love a story about gem hunters? (Seriously, Hollywood, there’s a screenplay in here somewhere.) But despite my many efforts to contact the couple, named Mary and Gary, I didn’t hear back. My editor suggested I get in touch with the reporter on the story, Kate Cough, and long story short, we decided to collaborate. Kate has been on this story since the beginning, and knows A LOT about Maine and lithium and got to go tour the mine with Mary and Gary. (Would anyone even know about this story without local journalism? Maybe not. Support your local journalism org! Read Kate’s stuff here.)
The fascinating thing facing the Freemans and all the other places in the country trying to start mines is that the U.S. is no longer an extractive economy, and though it might be a good idea to source our own metals, no one really wants a mine in their backyard or on their river or their favorite hiking spot. This isn’t just NIMBYism. Mines have, historically, been very dirty. “All mines pollute in one way or another,” an expert from Earthworks told me. And no one has really proven that they can open a mine, get minerals out of it, and then close the mine without doing a lot of damage to the environment and local communities. The potential for pollution is one reason environmentalists in Minnesota are advocating for what’s called a “Prove It First” law before allowing a copper-sulfide mine in the state—the law would require scientific proof that a copper-sulfide mine has operated elsewhere in the U.S. without causing pollution for at least 10 years and that it’s been closed for at least 10 years without causing pollution. Quite a heavy lift.
Of course, there is a moral argument for not outsourcing these dirty mines to somewhere else which then has to deal with pollution and labor problems and has a lot less regulation to deal with it, and lots of people (including many in the Biden Administration) are arguing that we have to rethink what kind of mining we’re okay with if we want to depend on a lot of gadgets that need minerals. One professor I talked to compared mining to chicken farming — no one really wants to see how a live chicken gets from the farm to your plate, but if you want a chicken sandwich, you do need someone to kill a chicken for you. If you want cellphones and solar panels, you do need mines, so you have to be okay with the proverbial chicken farm.
The story goes into a lot more if this debate, so check it out here:
Gem Hunters Found the Lithium America Needs. Maine Won’t Let Them Dig It Up.
I was also on a podcast, Vox’s Today Explained, talking about my security series. Here’s a link to the Today Explained landing site, my episode was called Mall Cop Nation. It’s quickly become one of my favorite podcasts because the hosts are great and they go into both topical subjects and things that are happening that might not be on CNN or somewhere covering breaking news but are just as important.
I also did a story about the U.S. companies starting to talk about menopause at work, and how remote companies are having a much easier time recruiting than full-time in office companies.
Now’s the Time to Bring Up Menopause At Work
Trouble for Full-Time In-Office Companies
And to end, a recommendation for a book to fall asleep to, or BFAT: an oldie but goodie: River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey. Candice Millard writes a lot of great history/geography books, and this was her first book. It’s about ol’ TR, who, after losing the presidency and a reelection bid, lit out for South America, as rich white dudes are wont to do, and nearly died while trying to survey an unchartered vein of the Amazon. There are some gory details of this book that will wake you right up (tiny fish that swim up men’s hoo-has), but overall its a fascinating look at what explorers went through and while I will probably never visit the Amazon.