Copper is a part of almost every part of our daily life. Hurley, New Mexico has been mass producing copper since 1910. To do so, copper was commodified, and the land privatized so the space could become rationalized as a capitalist space. The townspeople endured life-threatening diseases due to the slow violence created by the Hurley Smelter in 1939. More recently, due to the new copper mining process of solvent extraction / electrowinning, the scale of slow violence has expanded to encompass the Rio Grande Valley. This is due to the deregulation which allows the mining company to pollute water without having to clean it up. Thus, it is likely the Rio Grande Valley River system will create a massive environmental ruin through the continued slow buildup of heavy metals. In the end, I argue we can refuse this “inevitable” environmental ruination and utilizing Audra Simpson’s notion of refusal to push for a future not dependent on Copper.