The ruins of the LAMCO mining site, once the largest iron ore mining operation in the world, sprawl out against the backdrop of a nature reserve at the base of West Africa’s tallest mountain. Throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the ore extracted from this site made LAMCO—the Liberian American (Swedish) Minerals Company—Liberia’s biggest revenue earner, and Yekepa the third largest town in Liberia. Operations were disrupted in the bloody civil wars of the 1990s and early 2000s. Today, the abandoned equipment is being reclaimed by the forest and harvested for…
