Your son is talking about cobalt. It has to do with his high school geology homework. You’re shopping for running shoes on a rainy Saturday afternoon. 

Cobalt, you ask, like the color? You think of the sky. The color of your car isn’t cobalt but something called abyss blue pearl. You are distracted by your phone. Child labor, he says. Mining in the Congo. Like for materials to make your phone. You say, hmmm. And for electric cars he says. For the batteries. You look up so he can show you pictures on his phone of small, muddy boys with shovels standing in a slurry of brown water. He explains that his assignment for geology is to investigate minerals used to make cars. Find the means of extraction. He picked cobalt. 

Did you know this, he asks, about the boys in the Congo?

You mumble some vague answer because you don’t know which is worse, to know or not know, but later and when you are alone, you read more about cobalt. You find it exists, most commonly tangled with the silvery gray and sometimes pinkish nodules of nickel, though it can be found with other minerals, like copper, and that in its natural state, it is not blue but a silvery gray. Swedish chemist Georg Brant discovered cobalt in 1735, or rather, figured out how to extract cobalt from nickel. His was a family of miners. Cobalt has been around forever, or some 400 million years anyways, and humans have used cobalt since the Bronze Age, though in its lesser compound mode. And no one called it cobalt then. The Egyptians, Persians, and Chinese colored their pottery and glass bottles and jewelry with the color, as did the Europeans. Tinges of cobalt have been found in the rubble of Pompeii, in the fragments of pottery and artworks left behind.  

It’s true what your son says, about the mining of cobalt in the Congo, or the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Children as young as three. The exploitation of the nation’s resources has been going on since the Portuguese slave traders mined for copper. Belgium’s King Leopold II came for rubber in the 1800s, and in the 1930s, Belgium monopolized the copper mines. In the 1930s, cobalt was found useful in the manufacture of plane engines and turbines. In the last five or so years, demand for cobalt has grown exponentially, driven by its newfound use in the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles and store solar and wind power. Renewables, as they are called. Seventy percent of the world’s cobalt comes from the DRC, mostly as a byproduct of copper and nickel mining. Eighty-five percent of the mining is done by large multinational corporations. The rest, as you read, is done by “artisanal diggers.” These are small-scale local miners desperate to hit it rich. And though the price of cobalt has risen exponentially in recent years, the DRC remains one of the poorest countries on the planet. 

You read that the word cobalt comes from the Latin word cobaltum or goblin. Goblins are those often mischievous, vengeful, and greedy beings of European folklore whose primary purpose is to cause trouble to humankind. It was German miners who first called it the goblin ore in their silver mines of Saxony sometime around the year 1500. They thought the ore was trying to fool them into thinking it was silver. They sickened and sometimes died when they tried to smelt the ore. It was arsenic and sulfur vapors that sickened them, vapors that emerged when they smelted what was not silver but nickel and cobalt. It did not occur to them that they had discovered an altogether new ore.  

Some seventy years after Swedish chemist Brant discovered how to isolate cobalt, a French chemist named Louis-Jacques Thenard created a paint using cobalt. At the time, ultramarine was the most popular blue pigment in use by European artists, but it was wildly expensive as it was made by grinding up lapis lazuli. In Latin, ultramarine translates to beyond the sea. Painters used the pigment sparingly, to color the robes of Mary or the swaddling blankets of the baby Jesus. Vincent van Gogh famously used the new pigment cobalt to create Starry Night, which was partially and mostly the view from his asylum window. He found the color soothing.

You read that some of the new proposed alternatives to mining cobalt in the DRC is to mine Greenland. Or the ocean. The once fantastical notion of mining the deep ocean is now heralded as a new industrial breakthrough. The area between Hawaii and Mexico known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, or a 4.5 million-square-kilometer abyssal plain, has the highest concentration (an estimated 27 billion tons) of polymetallic nodules in the world. “Poly” because they contain multiple metals like nickel, magnesium, and cobalt. These nodules lie deep down on the ocean floor. No one is totally sure how they got there, but there they are. Deep-sea mining industrial folks talk as if one can pick these nodules up off the sea floor with little to no harm done. That this is necessary for a green transition. To save the planet from climate change. There is also a lot of money to be made. 

The Green New Deal. The transition to cleaner energy. Lately, you’ve been reading about the cost of transition. A good thing you know. To transition. But it’s not just cobalt that’s needed, but lithium, nickel, and copper. You think about Miner’s Ridge in the nearby Glacier Peak Wilderness, nearly your backyard, the area saved from mining so many years ago. You think about the battle to stop copper mining there, and how the area is supposedly forever protected. A place you’ve spent most of your working life building and maintaining trails, sheltered from the crumbling world. You labored your days away under the volcanic and snowy slopes of Glacier Peak, or Dakobed, or the Great Mother as she is called in Lushootseed, the language of the Sauk-Suiattle people who lived here forever, or until settlers and the Forest Service came along. 

You read the Biden Administration is pushing to achieve zero emissions by 2050. A noble goal for the nation, to transition to zero emissions. You read those goals can’t be achieved without mining. But where will the mining happen? To what standards? Because you also read that the push is to mine the US, but there is confusion on the standards by which the federal government is going to allow mining, because the laws that govern mining have not changed much since 1872. You read about the battles that have occurred to update these laws, to change these laws, especially in the past couple years, especially pertaining to public lands. And while cobalt will come from elsewhere in the world, copper and nickel and lithium will come from the US. Mostly from North Carolina, Nevada, Utah, and Montana. You read that the mining that has happened in the West will look like a pittance, child’s play, to what might be coming. 

You buy the running shoes and begin the drive home. As you drive, your son reads more from his phone. He reads about slavery and oceans and then looks at the results of his last running race. He is soon to leave for college and thinks he might study geology and mountains, wonders if geologists do more than work for oil or mining companies. He muses that all mining is destructive, it’s the nature of the beast, it’s a lie to pretend otherwise, he says. 

You drive and think about how fond you are of your phone and car. How you love to fly in planes. You’ve brought your son to the ocean over and over. All along the west coast of the US—Washington, Oregon, California, and Hawaii. And to Thailand, Mexico, Belize. To snorkel and swim. To eat fish. To visit family. To play under an azure sky, cobalt nights under full moons with the rustle of palms. You tell yourself it’s important for your son to see a world beyond his home but maybe you just like to travel. You love a good road trip. Especially into those wide-open spaces filled with blue. Blue you’ve been running to all your life. How you like to drive random roads toward a seemingly infinite sky. One mirage after another. The horizon never reached. Blue you dive into. Ocean waves and fractured light. You think about how you love to hold your breath to stay down longer—how the last time you and your son and husband went snorkeling you played at who could go deepest toward the bottom. How you had the privilege of a seemingly vast and beautiful coral garden all to yourself. You remember watching your husband and son weave in and out of the tall corals, remember their grace, how they seemed to belong to the water, fish-like in the scattered light. You remember another time when you and your son and husband traveled to Hawaii and went on a snorkeling tour. The last stop was the Drop Off, found just beyond the uninhabited half-moon island of Molokini. Where the blue turns dark and the bottom unfathomable. There were ten or so swimmers and you all jumped off the boat, then gathered and held hands. Floated out together with your then nine-year-old son in the middle. You floated just long enough for the shelf of shore to disappear.  

 It's all about choice, isn’t it, you think. The products that you buy every day. You should ask yourself, what do you really want? You think about goblins and their trickery, how they’ve fooled humans into giving their children devices that keep them indoors, that make them sad, and even maybe want to kill themselves. You picture the goblins laughing at the greedy humans picking away, tearing the world apart, fighting, enslaving, carelessly allowing the small hands, the bent backs of children, the poor and desperate, to do the dirty work. How we might destroy our oceans, give up our wilds, if that’s what’s needed. You think of van Gogh and his sky. What he saw from the asylum. 

You think of the linked hands of the swimmers that day near Molokini, holding each other from floating away, the care taken to be sure your son was safe, and you are grateful the way a mother is, relieved that your child is being cared for, like all children should be. You think about Glacier Peak, the Great Mother, how she’s taken care of you and your family and all the beings within her rivers and valleys. You always thought the idea of the Great Mother was about water and snow and glaciers, but it’s really the fire in her, the power of heaving herself up to catch the rain, the snow, to make a blanket to hold moisture, anticipating like any good mother the needs of her children. Isn’t it true that how we take care of the earth is how we take care of each other? 

You imagine the line of swimmers all in a row, all together like that, floating toward some great abyss the color of blue, children of the earth and ocean, floating into an uncertain future. Drifting. The earth, her children, so much potential. You wonder what decisions they will make, her children. You’re hoping they’ll make her proud.