Extractivisms, Existences and Extinctions: Monoculture Plantations and Amazon Deforestation

This book explores the existential redistributions that extractivist frontiers create, drawing on insights from Latin American rural and forest communities. It analyzes the differences between various types of extractivism, such as agroextractivism and mineral extraction, and compares them to local and broader existential changes. The author offers practical tools for characterizing and comparing extractivisms and anti-extractivisms and provides a framework for analyzing the natural resource politics of the post-coronavirus era, climate emergency, and multi-polar world.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 156 pages
Publication date: 31 May 2023
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

This comprehensive book delves into the profound existential redistributions that extractivist frontiers bring about, surpassing previous studies by incorporating a wealth of insights from Latin American rural and forest communities' understanding of extractivist phenomena and the devastating consequences they entail. The author examines a wide range of extractivist practices, encompassing agroextractivist monocultures to mineral extraction, and highlights the distinctions between them. The book provides a detailed analysis of the existential transformations occurring in Brazil's Amazon and Cerrado regions, once home to Indigenous communities, but now being deforested by colonizers who expand soybean plantations. The author also compares extractivism with the local and broader existential changes brought about by global production networks and their shifts, resulting from monoculture plantation-based extractivist operations.

Anchored in the author's own ethnographic data and a comparative analysis of lessons across multiple extractivist frontiers, the chapters integrate diverse accounts of violence, onto-epistemic, and moral transformations within extractivist enclaves. By employing political ontology, the book offers a nuanced perspective on these changes, shedding light on their implications for understanding the complex dynamics of extractivist landscapes.

Furthermore, the book provides valuable insights into how to characterize and compare different types and degrees of extractivisms and anti-extractivisms. It offers a rich theoretical framework for analyzing the evolving natural resource politics of the post-coronavirus era, the escalating climate emergency, and the increasingly complex global landscape. This transdisciplinary work will appeal to students and scholars engaged in international development, global value chains, political economy, Latin American Studies, political ecology, and international relations.

Weight: 326g
Dimension: 216 x 138 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367610333