People already living in impoverished conditions are the most exposed and vulnerable to human-caused EV. Trapped in this dynamic are the riparian communities along the Pampana River, Sierra Leone. People there are struggling to emerge from the aftershocks of a bloody, 11-year civil war and a deadly Ebola outbreak that killed 4,000 people. Intersecting with and upending this already-daunting recovery process are the daily effects of EV. The riparian communities live with and downstream of gold mining operations, which are actively poisoning the Pampana River watershed, a resource that many people depend on for their everyday life needs. In this chapter I use the EV framework to investigate local accounts of growing EV in the Pampana River watershed in Tonkolili District and Koinadugu District, Northern Province, Sierra Leone. I track EV in action in this local setting and connect it to its global drivers and its contributions to change in broader Earth System processes. By plugging EV in a local case into its global implications and connections, both of cause and of effect, we can more fully see the value of EV as an analytical tool and a functional concept.