This article contains strong language. My name is Tess McClua and I work as the Guardians Commissioning editor on the Age of

Extinction which is a section that covers environmental decline and the nature crisis and I'm the author of Dark Crystals,

the brutal reality behind a booming wellness craze, which was published in 2019. What drew me into this story initially

was just that a few people in my own social circles had gotten into crystals.

They were using them to purify their homes or

charging them up under the full moon and I got intrigued by the trend and at the

same time I've always been interested in supply chains.

And there seemed to be this vacuum of information

about where these crystals were actually coming from.

It was interesting to me that these objects were a kind of physical manifestation

of spirituality or of cultural value. On the one hand, they're these very physical objects created by the earth, pulled out by

people's physical labour.

But on the other hand, they were being sold and kind of divorced of all of that physical context.

So I got interested in drawing those things back together.

The thing I want people to keep in mind is the broadness of the issues that it's dealing with. This particular story

is the story of the crystal trade and its boom and I think there's maybe a temptation to say, well, healing crystals are a little silly.

But the kind of mining that's described in this piece, which is called artisanal mining,

more than 40 million people work as small scale miners and

another 150 million rely on the income it provides. They're key producers of minerals like gold or tin.

This story focuses on a small segment of the mining world,

but there are far broader questions

whether you're interested in healing crystals or not, about where our materials

...