For Document’s Spring/Summer 2020 issue, photographer Laurence Ellis brought us face-to-face with a present that could become our collective future should we fail to fundamentally change our relationship to the environment. In our third and final installment, Ellis takes us to Kabwe, Zambia, where a government-owned lead mining and smelting operation that ran unregulated for nearly a century, poisoning millions of people and leaving the city with deadly concentrations of toxic lead in the soil.

Click here for our first installment, exploring how Vietnam’s ‘plastic village’ is a tale of Western excess, and here for our second installment on how rising temperatures threaten to make the Australian Outback inhospitable to humans.

Photo Production and co-ordination Annabel Snoxall. Guides and Coordinators, Zambia Billy Mwansa Lombe and Green Awakening Group. Special Thanks Veronica Larson, Terry Hack at Bayeux Lab, Sibylle and Rolf Faeh at RMS travel cars, Darell Jones, Judy Atkinson, and Alison Meaney.