Ed Burtynsky

No, this isn't a lava flow, it's a creek in PA, downstream from a nickle mine.
The wrokings behind the Three Gorges Dam in China. The thing is so huge that they had to move 12 major cities to make room for it. When they filled it, scientists measured a wobble in the Earth's rotation.

Monuments of the modern world: pyramids of coal for a single steel factory in China.
The carcasses of single-hulled oil tankers after the Exxon-Valdez catastrophe. All of them ended up in India and Sri Lanka to be dismantled by hand (using blow-torches).
Old tires at a dump in Califoria.

A factory in China. Old, stripped computer boards by the side of the road (in China). Not only do the Chinese manufacture everything we consume, they collect and salvage out waste. Taking the precious metals off of computer harddrives is a big, though illegal, industry.

Ed Burtynsky is a Canadian photographer on a mission to document the human footprint on the Earth. He is famous for his photographs of places (mines, dumps, factories), though he does occasionaly do portraiture. Hear him talk about his work at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/56 .