Extractivism identifies a political economy premised on the withdrawal of value without corresponding deposit: resources are removed from the Earth, profits from labor, and commodifiable data from plants, bodies, and information systems. Returned to their place is waste, toxicity, disease, exhaustion, and death. Comprising a fundamental logic of advanced global capitalism that is now evident worldwide, extractivism has long been recognized as a fundamental form of colonialism as well: “[E]xtracting is stealing—it is taking without consent, without thought, care or even knowledge of the impacts that extraction has on the other living things in that environment,” notes Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. “That’s always been a part of colonialism and conquest. Colonialism has always extracted the indigenous.” […] Extraction increasingly includes digital appropriation, relating to social media and surveillance-based data mining, IT processing, and algorithmic capture, expanding the extractive zone to the techno- and info-spheres.
T.-J.Demos, The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, 2021 # 12
Do we live in an economy of theft?
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Imagine an Ecosystemic Europe
This quote has been selected as part of one of the collections of Alterlibrary, titled 'Ecosystem Europe.'
In it, we find potential inspirations to imagine an Ecosystemic Continent.
In creating this collection, we reflected on the multiple principles that inform the life of ecosystems. We then asked ourselves how these 'Ecosystemic Principles' might infiltrate our Imaginary, challenging our conventional ways of thinking and helping us envision new forms of coexistence and cohabitation within our societies.
Here are some of the reflections that emerged during the creation of ‘Ecosystem Europe.’
of our Imagination
