“Visual Tailings” (manuscript draft)

Roth, Emmanuelle, and Gregg Mitman. “Visual Tailings” (Draft). To appear in Environmental History, 2026.

In 1969, the Liberian-American-Swedish Minerals Company (LAMCO) commissioned a series of twenty-one watercolors from Swedish landscape painter Roland Svensson. LAMCO had been extracting iron ore from the Nimba mountain, in the northern reaches of Liberia, since 1963. Half a century later, four of those paintings are framed on a wall of the Nimba Ecolodge’s restaurant, which opened in 2024 inside the nature reserve that replaced the mine. (Excerpt)

© 2026 Emmanuelle Roth and Gregg Mitman. All rights reserved.