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, these are materials bought and sold in areas that have a lot of human conflict, often at the expense of human lives or through the endangerment of human lives.
Minors in places who do the digging for these diamonds risk life and limb in quite a literal sense over misplacing a stone, let alone taking one with him intentionally. So you've got these sorts of horrific human practices, social practices that are then, in turn, fueling other things. For example, the sale of those gems might be encouraging the buying of firearms, ammunitions, and other agents of war.
The conventional jewelry trade has begun to establish guidelines for buying certified conflict-free gemstones, which is certainly not every rock out there.
The real truth behind this example, in particular, that I think is going to hold true for the rest of the rocks and minerals that we'll talk about, is... you genuinely just can't know the entire evidence of a stone in most cases. So, maybe we've heard about these conflict diamonds, maybe we've heard about the horrible things happening with the generals in Mozambique, or in Myanmar with the Jade mines, or all these other places where the indigenous people are subject to some pretty brutal atrocities in the name of gems, and we start to think about, well, I wonder what the rest of the crystal healing mark is like.
A few years ago, there was this really poignant piece that came out for like conventional media outlets about the dark side of the crystal healing industry. It really focused on some of the conditions of miners in Madagascar. The example they kept coming to time and time again was rose quartz, because that was what the journalists uncovered and followed the most. And it's pretty grim, so this is not to sugarcoat that, but we have to remember that these are singular examples; the rock and mineral industry has been going on since the beginning of commerce.
Since the beginning of trade, we have evidence of gemstones being traded across great distances for huge expenses.
So there's nothing here that is new, but there's also nothing here that we should ignore just because it's old. You may think the growing popularity in an ethical source stone idea is because enough people have realized other sectors of the market matter. And if we want to walk our talk and be these highly evolved spiritual people, we've got to look at our own practice, which is sometimes hard.
You look at a beautiful object, and I pick up this beautiful barite from Morocco, and I don't really know how it got to me in this particular instance. I don't know who mined it at what time of year under what conditions, how much they were paid, etc. But it's a lovely object that I have in my possession. It is a spiritual tool that I use for the betterment of myself and my clients, and my students. I would like to think that all of that is fine on its own. But there are still other ripples being cast by these stones. It's time at least to have uncomfortable conversations about what those ripples look like, even if we don't have all the answers. I think it's really good to open the door.
Ashley: Yeah. I would definitely agree with that, and I think one thing that you have kind of brought up a little bit that I want to harken back to is this idea that perhaps the reason this has become so important to so many of us is because it almost feels in opposition to the beliefs that many of us hold spiritually.
If we believe in compassion, if we believe in non-harm, if we believe in stewarding the earth and in Oneness, and connection, and taking care of one another as part of this human Collective, then It seems that some of these atrocities obviously are in direct opposition to that.
It is a painful question to examine. How can these two things coexist and fit together as part of the sphere of Human Experience, right? Because you don't have that beautiful barite without that. I think it's important to realize that ultimately whenever we're talking about a case of extraction, there is a cost somewhere.
So let's dig into what makes a mineral ethical because I'm going to tell you, I have a bit of a pet peeve right now with this term, ethical. Well it's not with the term, it's with the way that the term is being used. Because I cannot tell you how many crystal shops pop up on my feed, and I go to their page, and the first thing it says is “a hundred percent ethically sourced minerals.” It is so misleading. It is so inaccurate, especially when I frequently see some of the stuff on those pages, and I know where it's from, and I know there's no way.
What, in your eyes, classifies a mineral as ethical? What should we strive for?
Nicholas: So let's start with an example of something we can guarantee is entirely ethically sourced, something that I know I have total agency over. I go to a place in nature. I find a stone, and it is a place where I am legally and morally allowed to pick up the stone. There, I pick it up myself, and I haven't left much of a carbon footprint. I haven't disrupted too much of the environment with my presence there. Although I've stepped on blades of grass, I have broken twigs, there are still ripples. I bring that stone home, I clean it lovingly, and I put it in my toolbox. That stone is probably as close to 100% ethically sourced as anything can be. And everything else has a bigger footprint than that.
I was listening once to an interview that Sabrina Scott, the author of a book called "Which body did?", was talking about her vegetarianism. The interviewer made the assumption that maybe that had something to do with ethics or morals, however it was actually entirely a dietary need for her. And she said, and I'll paraphrase this quote, that there is nothing without violence. Even being a vegetarian, even consuming only plants, means organisms sacrifice their lives and their well-being to feed us.
So, with any stone we pick up, there is some level of violence,
