Hello, and welcome! I'm thrilled to be chatting, once again, with the amazing Nicholas Pearson, author of Crystal Basics - Crystal healing for the heart. He is also the author of so many other amazing Works. Nicholas, thank you so much for being here today to help as answer the question - are your crystals ethical?  Nicholas Pearson: It is my delight, my privilege, my pleasure. These are always my favorite conversations that I get to do. Thank you for having me back! Ashley: Well, the reason we're chatting today, is that you and I were talking on Instagram the other day about ethically sourced minerals. This is something that I think has become of great importance in the collective mineral Community. We want to make sure that we're buying and sourcing gems ethically. Both as consumers, people who purchase crystals, as well as business owners who are selling crystals. So we were talking about a number of things, right? We discussed what actually makes something ethical and about the use of ethics as a kind of buzzword. So let's have a conversation about this for the podcast and really just dig into it.     So, first and foremost, I want to ask you, for those who may not know, why it would be important for us to try and source our minerals ethically.  Nicholas: I think, as people in the conscious living sphere, we care about the impact. There's an expression, “if it isn't grown, it’s mined.” So everything has some relationship to a raw material that came from Mother Earth, whether we sewed those seeds ourselves or leveled the forest to get something that is grown or whether we are digging stuff out of the earth. Anywhere I look in my room around me, not just the rocks on every surface but the services themselves probably have some relationship to the mineral kingdom. Whether it's the plastic drawers for the tumbled rocks or even the fibers in the carpet beneath me are petrochemicals. We can't have an existence, at least at this stage in our development on Earth, that Mining and extraction don't impact. And as conscious consumers, My Hope for myself is that the decisions I make will impact the Earth as conscientiously and as least devastatingly as possible. I care about where Rocks come from, not just because I care about rocks, but because I care about the people who get them out of the Earth, the people who do the work, people who bring them to market. It's such a complex conversation. There's no one way to define or identify an ethically sourced Rock. And we just have to take the information we've got and make the best decision available for us. Ashley: So, before we get into what actually does define an ethically sourced mineral, I want to kind of echo what you were just saying about how this goes so much deeper than just minerals. It really is about our existence in the world of modern humans, especially Western modern humans. This is something that we all have to the best of our ability, be conscious of our decisions about. If you think about all the minerals that it takes to create the devices that were all communicating on, watching this on, listening on, all of these things are, like you said, extracted from the Earth. Every little bit of it. It makes me think of Alan Watts, who has this whole talk on how us humans live in our ticky tacky houses, with our ticky tacky things. And as much as sometimes we feel so separate from nature, from Mother Earth, and from the world, we are a part of it. And everything we do is interconnected and interwoven. Why is it that crystals, in particular, have this bad reputation for being particularly harmful in some circles?  Nicholas: Well, I think a really prime example is the idea of conflict gemstones and other conflict materials. This is a really horrific practice. It is something that is ongoing, and there is vast corruption. For anyone who might not be aware of what the term conflict stone or constant gem means,