National Geographic: “Latin America over the past decade has seen its mining sector triple in value to $300 billion. Peru’s economy, among the fastest growing, derives one-sixth of its gross domestic product from minerals. At Cerro de Pasco, you can see the entire history of Peruvian mining —and the costs it sometimes imposes: The mine here is literally consuming the 400-year-old town that supports it. The open-pit mine operated by a subsidiary of Volcan Compañía Minera, a Peruvian company, is a crater terraced like an inverted ziggurat. Over a mile long by a half-mile wide by a quarter-mile deep, it laps at the retreating town like a hungry sea. A line of abandoned houses, their steel roof tiles rusting and pockmarked, serves as a no-man’s-land between the chasm and the living city…”