As a result, demand for cobalt is expected to grow by almost 500 percent from 2018 to 2050,3 and there is no known place on earth to find that amount of cobalt other than the DRC. Aside from this, the land of the Congo is destroyed by toxic runoff chemicals from mining operations. During the Iron Age, iron ore was mined and smelted into steel, which was used to fashion more powerful tools and weapons. Did you know that during the pandemic there was increased pressure put on Congolese cobalt extraction?

In The Casement Report (1904), Roger Casement, British consul to the Congo Free State, described the colony as a “veritable hell on earth. Your mother is also under constant threat of sexual harassment, assault and rape as she works at the mines.An unflinching investigation reveals the human rights abuses behind the Congo's cobalt mining operation, and the moral implications that affect us all.

In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo—because we are all implicated. The nexus of these links resides in a shadow economy at the bottom of the mining industry that flows inevitably into the formal supply chain. Oil, coal, and natural gas are extracted in every corner of the globe, beneath oceans, deserts, mountains, and land. The severity of harm being caused by cobalt mining is sadly not a new experience for the people of the Congo.It also gives a lot of insight into other cultures and ways of life completely alien to those of us who live in first-world countries and puts into perspective how fortunate we are to have been born in one of the richer countries in the world. Even the inhabitants living close to the mining areas who do not work as artisanal miners have very high concentrations of trace metals in their systems, including cobalt, copper, zinc, lead, cadmium, germanium, nickel, vanadium, chromium, and uranium.