For decades,��a plot of federal land in southeastern Arizona called Oak Flat has been at the center of a fight over resource extraction. Since 2005, a mining venture has been pushing the U.S.��government to let it��excavate the site’s copper ore, which was discovered in 1995. The potential consequences of the mine��go far beyond the estimated of waste��it��would produce:��it��would destroy land that has been��sacred to the San Carlos Apache tribe��for generations.��Oak Flat, called��Chich’il Bildagoteel��in the Apache language,��would quite literally collapse into a void; if that happens, “our spiritual existence will be threatened,”��tribal chairman Terry Rambler says��in , Lauren Redniss’s��new book about the conflict.��

Oak Flat��takes a unique approach to the difficult task of putting the��stakes of this conflict��to paper.��Like Redniss’s three previous books, which focus mainly on science and history,��Oak Flat��combines intensive reporting with Redniss’s own illustrations and design touches. Pages filled with��historical detail��or snippets of interviews are accompanied by��hand-drawn portraits and sometimes give way to more surreal illustrations and poetry-like musings. As a nonfiction graphic novel, Oak Flat��makes centuries of history feel immersive and concrete, managing to��give��proper��weight to everything that stands to be lost along with the land, and showing��just how deep injustice runs when Native Americans fight to protect what’s theirs.

Redniss became interested in writing about Oak Flat in 2015��after reading a short in The New York Times��about the land-transfer debate. There wasn’t much mention of the people who would be affected, she remembers. Her own reporting would come to revolve around those��who live on the San Carlos Indian Reservation and in the nearby town of Superior. She spent the next five��years getting to know a family with��multiple generations of activists: Wendsler Nosie, his daughter Vanessa Nosie, and her three school-age��daughters, Naelyn Pike, Nizhoni Pike, and Baasé-O Pike.��Redniss also spent time with local families who have worked in the mining industry for decades. “Whether they support the mine or are against the mine, I wanted to understand their lives and their challenges and their reasons,” she told me. “I didn’t want to paint individuals with blame. I think that what we can hold accountable is the government and the corporations.”

When it came time to write, Redniss, who is not Native American,��wanted to make sure she presented stakeholders’ voices in��as unmediated��a way��as possible. She devotes many pages to��transcripts of conversations with the Nosies and to Naelyn’s testimony at a congressional hearing about Oak Flat in 2013. She contrasts the Pikes’��incredible activism with their everyday lives as teens and preteens. (At one point, Naelyn posts on Instagram, “I’m just a modern day Apache female warrior fighting for my people against corporations trying to take over mother earth!”) Throughout Oak Flat, Redniss takes care to let the family’s��sense of humor and closeness come through.

The book is, in large part, about bearing witness to the religious and environmental significance of the land. Oak Flat is known to Apaches as the home of the Gaan, or mountain spirits, and is the location��of many ceremonies. The land holds some of the best-preserved Apache archaeological��sites, as well as untouched flora and fauna like old-growth trees and threatened species like��ocelots, which Redniss��draws��in realistic detail. She returns often to the Sunrise Dance ceremony held on Oak Flat for every girl when she reaches puberty, depicting��the dance��with portraits of the women’s faces��or illustrations of the event in deep red tones. (Such dances were by the Department of the Interior��and held in secret for a time in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.)��Toward the end of the book, Naelyn speaks again to members of Congress, telling them that “Oak Flat sets a precedent for all sacred sites.” Redniss��then guides us through sweeping illustrations of each site as Naelyn names them: Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon, South Dakota’s Black Hills. “If these sacred lands are gone, who are we?” Naelyn asks.

The ongoing battle over��Oak Flat��is a helpful demonstration of the (often deliberately) confusing political maneuverings that make extractive industries so hard to fight. In 2014, some members of Congress to sneak in��a land exchange that gave Oak Flat to the mining company Resolution Copper. President Obama then signed it into law. The Forest Service has since been inching along with an environmental impact statement on the proposed mine; simply publishing the document would legally mandate that the land be transferred to the mining company within 60 days.

Since Oak Flat went to print, the situation has sped up considerably. In recent months, the outgoing Trump administration has been for the environmental��impact statement��so that the land transfer can be triggered before the Biden administration takes over.��Although it’s not clear whether the president-elect would save Oak Flat if the process were delayed until he takes office, he has ��to work more closely with tribal leaders.��In early January, the Forest Service it would proceed with publishing the environmental impact statement by January 15, despite multiple objections from the Advisory Council��on Historic Preservation, one of the federal agencies consulting on the land exchange,��that it hadn’t adequately consulted with the tribe.��On January 12, , a group led by Wendsler Nosie, the federal government in an attempt to stop the land transfer, they hadn’t been given proper notice about the review and that their religious rights were being violated.

Oak Flat translates this aggravating world of red tape and tedium��into a thoughtful, often beautiful,��and deeply human story. The book manages to do justice to Oak Flat as its own universe of nitty-gritty legal details and clashing interests, but one that’s also representative of broader dynamics and abuses that have played out in America for centuries. At seemingly every turn in the history of the fight, there is bureaucratic nonsense, disingenuous political grandstanding, and evidence of the blatant disenfranchisement of Native Americans. “We think of the history of the United States as a history of conquest and treaty violations,” Redniss says. “And what we see here is that it’s not just history.”

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Manny Rangel, a captain in the Phoenix Fire Department, has been climbing and developing routes in the area around the Oak Flat Campground, about 50 miles east of Phoenix, Arizona, since the climbing-rich resource was first discovered by climbers in the 1970s. It's since become a proving ground for some of the best American��climbers.��Rangel��clearly recalls the 1996��Phoenix Bouldering Championship, held at Oak Flat, which at the��time was one of the world’s largest outdoor rock climbing competitions.��During the event, a California kid who looked more like a surfer than a climber stepped up and slayed the more than 500 other entrants.

“There was this overhanging finger crack that definitely shut me down,” Rangel said. “Even some of our area’s strongest climbers couldn’t get. And then this kid just walks right up to it, doesn’t even breathe hard and he hikes it. Our jaws just dropped collectively.”��That kid was Chris Sharma. He was only 14 then, and took home the championship, a feat that represents his explosion onto the climbing scene.

Now, Oak Flat, which boasts about 500 sport climbs and more than 2,000 bouldering problems as well as a slew of traditional routes, is facing an existential threat.

In December of 2014, Arizona’s Congressional Delegation, spearheaded by Senator John McCain, inserted a rider into the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual must-past piece of legislation that funds the Department of Defense. The resolution handed over the title to 2,400 acres of land encompassing Oak Flat to a copper mining interest called Resolution Copper Mining, owned by British and Australian mining multinational corporation Rio Tinto. The mining company needed an Act of Congress to acquire the land because President��Dwight Eisenhower's administration withdrew the Oak Flat Campground and surrounding area from mining considerations via Public Land Order 1229 in 1955.

Rio Tinto’s proposal includes plans to dig more than a mile beneath the earth to extract the precious metal. The process would��cause the ground surface to sink into a large pit resembling a meteor crater about one-to-two miles wide and 1,000 feet deep, according to the . The lawmakers who pitched the resolution say��the mine would create jobs and provide essential copper to the military. Officials at Tonto National Forest are now reviewing the proposal and are expected to begin hosting public hearings on it��later this year.

But where lawmakers see an opportunity for resource extraction, climbers see the possibility of wiping one of the country’s best bouldering areas off the map.

“If this mine goes through it would be the biggest loss of a rock climbing resource in U.S. history,” said Brady Robinson, executive director of the Access Fund, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting to keep rock climbing areas in the U.S.��open and available.

The Access Fund isn’t the only outraged stakeholder group. The San Carlos Apache tribe, which claims the area in question as a sacred site, the local Sierra Club chapter, and the town council of Superior, situated just miles away from the proposed mine site, also oppose the mine. They cite the loss of recreation and the revenue that comes with having an influx of visitors, as well as the potential for environmental issues to emerge.

Plus, they say, the resolution that handed the land to the mining company creates a dangerous precedent. “You have a piece of legislation overturn a public land order that was created specifically to protect recreation and camping,” says Curt Shannon, an Arizona resident and policy analyst for the Access Fund. “If they can overturn that here, you can basically do that anywhere. What happens if they find a valuable mineral reserve under Yosemite?”

Public Land Orders are one of the many executive orders that U.S. Presidents and heads of the Department of the Interior use to set aside and protect land. They’ve been used to add to national parks, create national wildlife reserves, and augment national forest systems. Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota, the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, Taos Ski Valley in New Mexico, San Juan Archipelago in Washington, and many other public lands have all received protection.

The orders are most often executed by the Secretary of the Interior under the authority of the president, as was the case with Oak Flat.��Orders function similarly to executive orders like the one President Obama employed last month to designate three new national monuments in Southern California. Most often they’re used to set aside recreationally significant areas within national forests to protect them from being used for timber, minerals, or other natural resource extraction. Basically, the orders exist to prevent exactly the type of proposal hovering above Oak Flat, which is why the environmental community so concerned.

“Anything not explicitly protected by Congress could be turned over to a private company for economic exploitation,” Shannon says. The Oak Flat resolution’s passage was underhanded, opponents say. “Something like this, that’s very controversial, that would have failed on an up or down vote,” Robinson says.��“To��sneak it into the National Defense Authorization Act is reprehensible.”

Whether the mine proposal is approved may hinge on economic arguments put forward by both sides.

In a , McCain lauded the mine as a means of bringing in “thousands of jobs and billions in economic activity for Arizona.” Resolution Copper estimates there is a copper ore the size of a mountain beneath Oak Flat, . “The Resolution Copper Mine Project has potential to produce 25 percent��of U.S. copper demand by developing the largest copper deposit ever discovered in North America,” McCain wrote.

Critics say that economic argument is shopworn and shortsighted. “The whole jobs argument fundamentally denies the economic value of the land now and into the future,” Robinson says. The lifespan of the mine is about 40 to 60 years, he says, after which nothing will remain aside from a mile-wide crater and a huge mountain of toxic mine tailings. “If they truly cared about jobs they would invest in the long-term recreation economy,” Robinson says. “There’s this line you get about how extraction and mining, well that’s real business and recreation is just B.S.”

Outdoor recreation is more sustainable, mine opponents say. The Outdoor Industry Association, the leading trade association of the outdoor industry, estimates that outdoor recreation in the state of Arizona alone, while providing 104,000 jobs in the state. A 2013 report from the Arizona Mining Association shows that mining contributes about half those numbers to the state economy. It provides a $4.87 billion impact to the economy while creating about $51,000 jobs according to the report.

The economic case for outdoor recreation leaves mine opponents with the hope they can turn the tide and convince enough people in the state to leave $16 billion worth of copper in the ground—an admittedly daunting prospect. Ultimately, the situation at Oak Flat can be viewed as a case study in our values as a society.

“Towns like Superior have to find out what they want—to be a hub for outdoor recreation or another boom or bust mining town with bad drinking water,” Robinson says.��

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