Presentation short abstract

This paper discusses anti-extractive everyday practices of being-in-the-world rooted in South American sites of colonial and neocolonial extraction. It questions the managerial reductionism of mainstream environmentalism rooted in extractive principles that perpetrate sacrifice and injustice.

Presentation long abstract

The idea that societies will transition from a temporarily self-destructive to a permanently self-sustaining mode of living shows its incongruity through the specular languages of apocalypse and salvation. The transition model, with the 1.5C climate ceiling set not by climate scientists but by an economist, promises to double down on morphing the earth to an unprecedented scale in line with the green growth agenda. (1) Is the transition paradigm yet another iteration of the same extractivist model that has perpetrated a corrosive way of life? (2) What alternative configurations of being-in-the-world are there to help us imagine non-extractive planetary futures? This paper will first flesh out the extractive principles of contemporary ecological thought by tracing a thread from German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s theory of dwelling as saving, which is a philosophical cornerstone of contemporary environmental thought, to English maverick scientist James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, which has increasingly informed twentieth and twenty-first-century scientific and sociological understandings of humans’ relationship with the earth. It will then develop as a counterpoint a cultural-linguistic analysis of Aymara everyday conceptual practices of being-in-the-world from South American sites of colonial and neocolonial extraction to question the managerial reductionism of mainstream environmentalism, which perpetrates sacrifice and injustice, and propose a non-extractive eco-social way of being-in-the-world based on principles of interdependence and unpredictability.