It's us.

Every time we buy a new phone, a car, a bicycle, water in a plastic bottle...we are scaring the planet. It has been estimated that a single cell phone requires 75 pounds of mined material.

I encourage everyone to visit an open pit copper mine. Many of them have a viewing area. I've been lucky to tour several, going down into the depths of the pit, driving a van along with the giant earth moving machines. It humbles you, makes one realize, as you gaze at the staggering scale of it all, look out on the vast piles of waste rock in the lined ponds, yellow with sulfur, that I am responsible for that.

Me. You. Us.

As a mentor once told me, "If they didn't want it, we wouldn't mine it. So go find more."

I once toured a limestone quarry perched in the scenic skyline above Colorado Springs. I asked the foreman what he thought of the residents calling it the "scar on the mountain." His reply, "When I am up here all I see are a couple of hundred thousand houses, sidewalks, roads, and highways that all came from this scar."