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?
Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
Collections that include this source
Keep exploring the Alterlibrary
- 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 …
# 6
Why do you fear the forest?
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 means “outside”. In English, the word “foreign” refers to what you don’t know, that which is far away. It may be due to the ecological legacy of antiquity that the tree continues to be considered a material for trade, which is not very commendable. We have remained within this fear of the forest and the desire to sell wood.
Francis Halle, A Life drawing trees, Interview with Emmanuele CocciaInvitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
Collections that include this source
Keep exploring
- But who really owns land and nature? Humans have no more self-evident rights than grass, trees, and squirrels, not to speak of fungi and bacteria. Property, the conceit that state-backed human social relations give us absolute rights over things, does not go far in the realms of land and nature, wh …
of our Imagination
