Extractivism
Description
Tim Leibert, Lela Rekhviashvili, and Wladimir Sgibnev:
"We see extractivism as a power relation enabling the exploitation of human and natural resources that does not care for the possibility of reproduction and regeneration of those resources – that is, the opposite of sustainability: running against its core principles of efficiency, consistency, and sufficiency. In line with a broad understanding of extractivist flows and relations, we purposefully adopt a broad, holistic, understanding of mobility, involving the movement of people – from forced displacement to care migration and commuting, to the mobility of goods and ideas, and mobilities of knowledge at work (for and) against extractivism."
History
Alexander Dunlap:
"In the Opening Plenary: Roundtable Discussion of the Global Extractivisms and Alternatives symposium (EXALT, 2020), the issue of defining extractivism was brought to the foreground. One of the roundtable participants, Eduardo Gudynas, accredited for coining or, at the least, popularizing (neo)extractivism (Gudynas, 2009), raised concern over the term’s expansive definitions. While recognizing that in practice ‘extractivism is closer to a political religion’ (EXALT, 2020, 41:30), Gudynas (2021, pp. 3–4) insisted, during the roundtable session and in a relativley recent book, that by branding ‘any use or abuse of Nature as ultimately extractivism’ will lose ‘rigour and precision’. When everything becomes extractivism, this ‘ambiguity’, he contends, first, lends itself to companies to discredit land defenders and advance their interest and, secondly, ‘it becomes very difficult to think of any alternatives’ (Gudynas, 2021, p. 4). Max Ajl (2023), despite ardent political differences with Gudynas (2019, 2021), shares a similar concern and raises valid challenges to extractivism/postdevelopment theory. Calling everything ‘extractivism’, for Ajl (2023), ignores the economic, political and developmental gains made by Zimbabwe, China and the ‘Pink Tide’ governments in Latin America (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, etc.). By making a distinction between ‘extraction’ and ‘extractivism’, Ajl (2025) advocates (authoritarian) communist industrialization, development and anti-Western imperialism (see Tornel, 2025). While Gudynas (2021) expresses an agreeable anti-authoritarian position, both ignore the trajectory towards total extractivism and, thinking with Mark Fisher (2009), implicitly succumb to (state) capitalist hegemony – failing to challenge and think beyond the present relationship of coercion, seduction and dependency."
Discussion
The emergence of Total Extractivism
Alexander Dunlap:
"The ‘classic’ definition of (economic) extractivism, in favour of a more expansive understanding, has already been refuted at length (Artiga-Purcell, 2024; Chagnon et al., 2022; Dunlap, 2021; Dunlap et al., 2024). Inherently advancing this critique, total extractivism seeks to (1) realize the extent of the global extractivism problem and (2) implicitly advocate a politics of total liberation. Total extractivism, is defined by Dunlap and Jakobsen (2020, pp. 6–7) as ‘the imperative driving the global capitalist economy, centred on the deployment of violent technologies aiming at integrating and reconfiguring the earth and absorbing its inhabitants, meanwhile normalizing its logics, apparatuses and subjectivities, as it violently colonizes and pacifies various natures’. Importantly, the authors recognize total extractivism as a general developmental trajectory, which is ‘never complete – or fulfilled – and always resisted, appropriated and negotiated to various degrees’ (Dunlap & Jakobsen, 2020, p. 6). Total extractivism recognizes that states and techno-capitalism are attempting to expand and totalize, and collectively form a ‘worldeater’. Simon Granovsky-Larsen (2025, p. 7) attests that the visual representation of the worldeater provides useful to ‘communicate grassroots insight’, while Daniela Soto-Hernández (2025) contends that the ‘world eating’ formations and total extractivist trajectories are multiple and plural.
The notion total extractivism emerges from the (ecological) anarchist tradition, but retains complementary roots, overlaps and readings through Marxism (el-Ojeili & Taylor, 2020).[1] Total extractivism embodies the totalizing imperative of capital, which James O’Conner (1998, p. 244) describes as the long-term effort ‘to capitalize everything and everybody’ and, following American Indian Movement (AIM) member John Trudell, is a ‘technologic civilization [that] wants every human being – it tries to break the spirit so the mind will surrender’ to its political economy (Bloom & Trudell, 1992/2021). ‘I’m dealing with another culture’, explains Trudell (Bloom & Trudell, 1992/2021), ‘whose perception is a reality of death’ (Benally, 2023). Total extractivism, which wants ‘everything’ and ‘everybody’ has an affinity with the notion of the Necrocene/Thanatocene – the new era of death – predicated on an extractivism producing extinction. Grey extractivism emerges as a subset within total extractivism, emphasizing – the largely still neglected – sectorial intersections, collaborations and divergences between extractive, energy, construction, high-technology and military industries (see Wiegink & Dunlap, Forthcoming). Total extractivism, said simply, recognizes a totalizing drive towards capturing, harnessing, exploiting and extracting energy – considered broadly – in the service of a state operated political economy, which materializes a collective form through modernist infrastructures (e.g. ‘worldeaters’). The inverse, or antidote, to total extractivism is total liberation, which seeks to remedy exploitation, extractivism and domination.
This article explores the Wyoming Energy Authority’s (WEA) annual summit to animate the relevance of total extractivism. The following section describes and recounts the WEA Next Frontier Energy Summit, which reveals the objective of total extractivism and its articulation as a multi-sectorial and institutional plan. "