In divinity school, people often talk about “callings” and “finding God.” In the beginning, I couldn’t relate—as an atheist, I was more fascinated by religion than enthralled with it. 

In my second semester, I took an ecotheology course. I had just started my first climate job at an energy justice nonprofit, and was envisioning what it might be like to mesh these two worlds together. The first day, my professor said: Theology need not be theistic. You don’t need to believe in God—but you do need to believe in something. One assignment was to write out our personal theologies—our belief systems. And what I realized I did believe in—deeply—is humanity. I believe in a planet worthy of veneration, worthy of being saved.

It reminded me of my climate “come to Jesus” moment, which came years earlier. I was watching the film First Reformed, about a pastor who gets radicalized into climate terrorism. A question haunts him: Will God ever forgive us? It consumed my mind for days. Here I was, an atheist, waking up in a cold sweat, wondering if God would absolve us for what we’d done to His creation.

And somehow, I knew deep in my gut that the answer was no.

Everything was dry, dusty, and orange.

The proposed Resolution Copper mine project is owned by Rio Tinto, the second-largest metals and mining company in the world. The site is located in Tonto National Forest and includes part of Oak Flat, a sacred site for many Indigenous groups. The Apache, for example, see Oak Flat as a direct corridor to speak to their Creator. 

After over a decade of controversy, President Donald Trump approved the transfer of 2,422 acres of federal land in support of the mine and fast-tracked its permitting process this April. Apache advocates filed a legal appeal to the mine last year, arguing that it would decimate Oak Flat and violate their religious rights. The Supreme Court denied the petition in May. 

It was here in 2022 that I joined a group of policymakers, academics, and private sector folks as part of my work trying to resolve the seemingly unsolvable critical minerals issue. We were there to learn about the mine and its opposition. This story is one of hundreds playing out across the country every day, and the energy transition depends on their peaceful and prompt resolutions. 

Upon arrival, the mining company staff ushered us into their office trailer. We sat around a fake wood conference table, patiently waiting for our required safety briefing. They passed out “southwestern-style” egg and cheese burritos, along with our non-disclosure agreements. A bearded man came in and explained the history of copper mining in this valley. He then walked us through emergency scenarios, while assuring us that none of them would come to pass. My throat tightened.

We went to the locker rooms to change into our gear: a heavy miner’s uniform, safety vest, and helmet. I truly looked like a miner, and that image of myself was hard to shake. I pictured avalanches and explosions and faces covered in soot. I saw bottles of opioids and bouts of cancer and poisoned wells. 

Too soon, it was time to go below ground.

I spend a lot of time thinking about excavation and extraction.

Between water, oil, critical minerals, and even labor, we have created an economy of extraction. I think of how lucky we are to live on a planet that has such bounty—that has given us the resources to grow as a species, though we have poisoned Her in the process. I think of the irony of extracting even more of Her resources, in the hope of righting our wrongs.

Paradoxical as it may seem, we were here at a mining site out of a deep love for the Earth. To prevent the worst impacts of climate change, we must first and foremost stop burning carbon—and clean energy technologies, from solar panels to battery storage, require minerals like copper.

A transition away from fossil fuels requires more minerals than exist in our country, and way more than are currently being mined globally. The scale of the problem is enormous. A concerted effort to achieve the Paris Agreement goals would require quadrupling mineral demand for clean energy technologies between 2020 and 2040, according to the International Energy Agency. An even faster transition, to hit net-zero globally by 2050, would require six times more mineral inputs in 2040 than today.

Where are these materials going to come from? Who is going to excavate them, and where?

Could excavation and extraction—our original climate sin—become our ultimate salvation? 

I’m sure God would appreciate the irony. 

The head miner is tall and broad, with reddish skin and a wide smile. “I’ve been underground my whole life,” he told me proudly. I snagged on the word underground. To spend more hours a day below the Earth’s surface than above it—what does that even look like? I cannot fathom it. “Alright, everybody,” he said. “Step on in.”

The mining shaft, which fit only four of us at a time, descended through the stones of the desert. We were headed to an early level, only a couple of thousand feet down. The temperature cooled as we plunged toward the darkness below. One of the people in the lift with me turned on the head lamp at the front of their helmet, illuminating the small space. Before long, we stepped off the shaft and into a giant tunnel, following the head miner through a rusted metal gate. 

He showed us the trolley that transports the minerals to the surface to be processed, sold, and molded into our commodities. Looking at its tracks, I was reminded of the famous trolley problem.

A runaway train is barreling toward five people tied to the tracks. You can pull a lever to divert the train onto a second track, on which only one person is strapped. If you do nothing, five people will die, but you did not actively kill them. If you pull the lever, one person is sacrificed to save the others. 

The hypothetical raises countless moral and philosophical dilemmas. Is it permissible to kill for the greater good? Is doing active harm worse than allowing passive harm? Is there a fixed value that one can even put on a human life?   

It is your choice. What is the right thing to do? 

It is our choice—my choice. What is the least wrong thing to do?

Climate change and divinity school have one crucial commonality: making you face your own mortality, over and over again. What I have concluded is that I do not fear the uncertainty of death. I fear suffering.

In my environmental economics course, we learned how economists concerned with the climate try to quantify uncertainty—this vain attempt to know the unknowable, like praying to God with numbers. It is foolish in that it assumes we can, yet wise in that it knows we must.

In this same class, we learned that a tenet of welfare economics is that there are always winners and losers. The hard work—the work of this mine visit—is picking who will lose, so that the planet, and most people on it, can win.

I once attended a panel at divinity school about the spiritual implications of climate change. The reverend asked us to be rooted not only in future suffering, but in present suffering. It made me think of another talk I had recently attended by the founder of a deep-sea mining company, who showed real footage of young boys being crushed to death at unregulated cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was violent, and jarring, and real. 

“Is uncertain, potential harm to ocean ecosystems worth the certain, ongoing harm to human children today?” he asked us.

I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.