Le blog de Berliner Gazette

A reality of war that recedes into the background in peacetime but is all the more destructive manifests itself in environmental violence as an integral strategic approach in the “arsenal” of capitalist violence, Damir Arsenijević argues in his contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism,” exploring the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In order to contest extractivist relations between humans, as well as between humans and nature, we have to disentangle extractivism and mobility, change mobility patterns that underpin, enable, and foster extractivism, and set off to imagine non-extractive mobilities, Tim Leibert, Lela Rekhviashvili, and Wladimir Sgibnev argue in their contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism.”

The coal region of Lusatia in the former East Germany is undergoing fundamental socio-economic changes. The challenge is to work collaboratively and collectively on a just transition – with humans and with non-human and more-than-human community members, Kat Austen argues in her contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism,” drawing on her artistic research for “This Land is Not Mine.”

Conservation measures secure not only a wealth of natural resources that are in danger of being lost, but also the world and the way the world is produced. Hence, structures and mechanisms are being secured that caused the very loss in the first place, Franziska von Verschuer argues in her contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism,” exploring the case of seed banking.

Ecocide isn’t simply the fault of “humanity.” Rather, it is caused by capitalism’s relentless pursuit of profit: cheapening labor, making life more expensive, and decimating the environment. Countering this, we need a new kind of collective political subject to arise, Carme Arcarazo and Rubén Martínez argue in their contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism.”

Following Europe’s colonial-industrial expansion, the climate catastrophe has long since arrived in places that themselves contributed least to it. As lasting environmental destruction has caused not the least large-scale displacement of people, it is high time to decolonize environmental and migration politics, Nishat Awan argues in her contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism.”

In view of the man-made climate crisis it is high time to question the predatory subjectivity that prevails in the Global North: the ideal, shaped in the colonial era, to seek our freedom and personal fulfillment precisely in decoupling from the environment and the responsibility for human togetherness, as Jaron Rowan argues in his contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism.”

Investment protection takes precedence over environmental protection, and international treaties ensure that companies can still profit even from climate measures by suing against the “curtailment of their profits.” A movement that elevates nature to a legal subject opposes this, as Kevin Rittberger and Fabian Flues show in their contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism.”

While ecological and economic systems are collapsing, a battle for white supremacy is raging; it is not least a class war for (controlling) access to the shrinking living space on the planet. It is high time to counter this development with a radical politics of earthcare, Manuela Zechner argues in her contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism.”

In Peru, where nature is treated as a cheap and inexhaustible source for profit accumulation, the reality of extractivism is becoming violently tangible. Resistance to this violence reveals indigenous life forms that, though facing extinction, could be the key to our planetary future, as Eliana Otta shows in her contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism.”