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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- 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 tell a different history
Claiming that resource extraction is stealing challenges the conventional history that frames mining as civilizational progress. The term "stealing" is not merely polemical but analytical, highlighting that extraction involves taking without consent, without giving back, and without considering the consequences for those being “robbed.” The only difference from what is typically called theft is its legality: extraction is legalized theft, disguised as production and value creation, while masking the true cost to the land and ecosystems. Renaming it in this way shifts our perspective and opens the door to reframing our relationship with resources.
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