And the world.

Open for over a hundred years,

it's a man-made rift in the high plateau of the Atacama Desert

nearly 3 kilometers wide, 5 kilometers long and 1 kilometer deep, so vast it can be seen from space.

All this is to say, we don't need to look to hard sci-fi visions of the future to catch a glimpse of what

terraforming looks like.

We are already breaking and remaking the earth right here and right now. Human beings have always harvested raw materials from the rest of the web of life.

We extract water, plant life, materials of all kinds. But capitalism demands such a scale and intensity of extraction

that it is reforming both our politics and our planet. And as we face down the task of rapidly decarbonizing the global economy for a chance at a livable future,

the demand for certain kinds of minerals needed to build green technology is only increasing. If you want things like solar panels and

electrified transport networks, you need things like copper, cobalt and lithium.

Left-wing movements can feel caught on the horns of a dilemma. On the one

hand, the need to avoid the massive toll that mining and extraction can take on people and the

environment, and on the other hand, the urgent can take on people and the environment.

And on the other hand, the urgent need for those raw materials.

Thea Rio Francos is an associate professor of political science at Providence College,

a strategic co-director of the Climate and Community Project,

and a fellow at the Transnational Institute.

Her works include Resource Radicals, from Petron nationalism to post-extractivism in Ecuador.

A Planet to Win, Why We Need a Green New Deal.

And the forthcoming book, Extraction, The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.

I asked her how we navigate the dilemma of extractivism, how we integrate social justice into climate goals.

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