For nearly 20 years, Diane Williams has seethed whenever she walked by a street mural depicting the genocide of Ohlone people by Spanish colonizers artwork she finds demeaning because the Native American men are depicted as fully nude. Just this week, plans to remove the wall art were halted at the last minute, after tenants of the building's apartments at 41st Street and Piedmont Avenue demanded that the history on display be left alone.
Today, the Rio Blanco mining camp in south-central Ecuador lies in ruins. Shattered china litters the ground not far from a hollowed-out kitchen with no walls left standing. An abandoned mine tunnel as wide as a house stands on a hillside, overlooking the charred remains of a diesel station. In 2018, environmentalists hailed Rio Blanco's closure as a landmark win for conservation.