Extractivism is the orientation toward the living world as a resource depot — material to be mined, drilled, logged, fished, and depleted for profit or industrial use. It is not simply an economic practice but a relational stance: the world is treated as raw material available for human appropriation, and the relationships that constitute ecosystems, communities, and species are rendered invisible or irrelevant.
Extractivism is inseparable from settler colonialism. The dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands is the precondition for extraction: land must first be emptied (legally, conceptually, physically) of the peoples who relate to it as home, territory, and kin before it can be treated as a resource base. This is why Indigenous land defense — blocking pipelines, protecting forests, refusing mining permits — is simultaneously ecological action and anti-colonial action. The distinction between the two is an artifact of the extractive framework, which separates “environmental” concerns from “political” ones.
The relational framework names what extractivism denies: that the relationship between human communities and the lands and ecosystems they inhabit is constitutive, not incidental. Extractivism treats this relationship as something that can be severed without consequence — or rather, whose consequences are borne by someone else (Indigenous peoples, downstream communities, future generations, other species). Climate justice is the demand that these consequences be named and addressed rather than externalized.
Related terms
- Settler colonialism
- Climate justice
- Total liberation
- Land back
- Substance metaphysics — the ontological framework that enables extractivism
- Animism — the relational stance extractivism denies
- Social reproduction — extraction applied to human reproductive labor