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, 2021Do we live in an economy of theft?
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- The fear is related to the forest, not the plants. This feeling is very old, it goes back to Roman civilization. For the Romans, the forest was the place of the “stranger”: It was in the forest that the barbarians hid. Moreover, the French word “forêt” [forest] comes from the Latin foris, which mea …
What if we invent an ecosystemic economy
What if we invented an ecosystemic economy — an economy that begins not with the question of how much we can extract, but with the question of what it means to take?
If extractivism is, in Simpson’s words, “taking without consent,” then where does stealing actually begin? When a company tears minerals from the ground? Certainly. But what about breaking a branch from a tree, taking a flower, eating the honey that bees have produced for their own offspring? It is taking without consent. We are entangled in countless relations of taking. We eat, drink, occupy land, use materials, consume the work of other humans and the labour of countless more-than-human beings. The question, then, is what do we return?
We pay taxes to states because we recognize that we live from infrastructures and resources that are collectively maintained. But what would it mean to pay a kind of tax to the Earth? Not as another financial instrument, and certainly not as a licence to continue extracting, but as an obligation to repair the relations that make our lives possible.
For those extracting on a massive scale, this cannot mean simply pouring money into biodiversity projects or buying the next corporate restoration certificate. Restoration cannot become another commodity through which extraction absolves itself.
Perhaps returning has to involve something more difficult: restoring relationships through a different physical and mental presence in this world. Spending time caring for damaged places. Relearning how to inhabit landscapes in a respectful manner. Paying attention to the beings whose lives are entangled with ours. Accepting limits. Becoming accountable to something other than the market.
After centuries of taking, what kind of debt do we owe to the Earth, to plants and animals, to other human beings — and how could such a debt ever be adequately repaid?
Maybe an ecosystemic economy would begin when we start to think about what we owe to them.
Meike Gleim, 2026of our Imagination
