Kolwezi is a Wild West frontier, home to roughly one-fourth of the world’s cobalt reserves. The city’s extraordinary mineral endowment has resulted in considerable environmental destruction due to the rapid expansion of mining operations. Look up Kolwezi on Google Earth and zoom in. See the colossal craters, the behemoth open-pit mines, and the immense swaths of dirt. Small artificial lakes provide water to the mining operations, not to the city’s inhabitants. Villages have been flattened. Forests have been razed. The earth has been gouged and gashed. Mines swallow all.
