What has been hailed as the ‘green transition’ – the global project to end large-scale extraction of fossil fuels – requires a shift to a new set of extractive projects. Green technologies depend on minerals and metals locked in the earth: lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and, above all, iron for steel. The exploitation, corruption and environmental destruction involved in the mining of these materials are not on the wane. But what can be done to counter the interests behind them? What possibilities are there for a less ecologically compromised and economically stratified future?

Thea Riofrancos is a political scientist whose research focuses on the politics and economics of extraction. In 2019, she co-authored A Planet to Win, proposing a political strategy and material blueprint for a just, green future that tackled the dilemma of extraction for the energy transition. Her scholarly book, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (2020), examines Ecuador in the 2000s, and the conflict between new political groups demanding environmental restoration and a traditional Left government that aimed to use mining revenues to pay for social services and infrastructure. In her most recent work, the forthcoming book Extraction, Riofrancos focuses on the global lithium industry in light of the green transition.

The editor of Granta spoke with Riofrancos in February.

Editor:

How should we think of extraction as an activity across the millennia?

Thea Riofrancos:

Extraction is a very old practice. We can say that it is as old as human history. For example, the indigenous peoples that first settled in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile around 12,000 BP mined for silica, iron and copper. Archeological evidence suggests rudimentary quarries, as well as surface deposits of the siliceous rocks used to make knives and scrapers and other tools. Today when we think about extraction, we tend to think about a set of economic sectors, like the so-called extractive sectors of oil, gas and mining. Extraction in these sectors means that you’re removing something from nature that nature cannot replenish on human timescales. That’s why we call them non-renewable.

Editor:

When does extraction in the more modern, large-scale industrial sense begin?

Riofrancos:

The main changes began in the late fifteenth century, when Europeans started to look to the outer world for resources – especially to the Americas. What started as a project to add to the Crown’s wealth of silver and gold became a search for the raw materials that could feed the nascent industrial processes then developing in Europe. A cycle of growth and expansion followed, and extraction on a planetary scale began. Europeans secured capital and resources across the globe, violently incorporating local populations into the extractive circuit. This basic model – large-scale, export-oriented, environmentally reckless mining in the Global South to serve production and consumption elsewhere – continues today. But there have been major changes. Three key shifts are the rise of state-owned mining and fossil-fuel firms in the Global South, the growth of mining powerhouses like Canada and Australia in the Global North, and the entrance of China as a major importer.

Editor:

The conquistadors in the Americas were after precious metals: gold and silver. On the one hand, these were convenient: they didn’t require a great deal of technology to mine and they could be shipped back in galleons to Europe. On the other hand, extraction as it was conducted by the Europeans involves a great deal of forced labor, since you want as many hands as possible sifting through the surface. When does the shift happen to more common metals that require more intense, technology-dependent mining and are less easy to carry off the continent? When does the qualitative shift to modern extraction – which of course hardly precludes slavery, and may even intensify it – begin?

Riofrancos:

If we take the example of Latin America, extraction intensified in the decades after independence from Spain – this was one of the outcomes of the Creole revolutions of the early nineteenth century. The now politically independent states were still dependent on the processes of resource extraction, which became the basis of their economies. Leasing and taxing the state’s resource wealth, whether tin or guano, became essential to public budgets.The independence of these countries coincided with the expansion of industrialization across Europe and North America. If gold and silver previously served to fill the monarchs’ coffers and acted primarily as a unit of exchange, now a whole new bevy of minerals were needed as industrial inputs. This phase of extraction is linked to the production of commodities on a global scale; it’s the start of a new era.

Editor:

Extractivism, as an -ism, seems like a concept fraught with imprecision. What does ‘extractivism’ denote that ‘extraction’ does not cover? How do you make use of a term that seems almost indistinguishable from human activity itself?

Riofrancos: Extractivism is almost extractive as a concept, isn’t it? We often hear the term in relation to Big Tech, cryptocurrency and knowledge sectors. Extraction is the act itself, extractivism is the larger system by which natural resources are taken from one place and moved to another with minimal processing. That lack of processing is the key component, as it preserves an economic imbalance – the raw materials and the finished goods are separated. One way to think about it more precisely is that extractivism is the modality through which capitalism is lived in the periphery. I’m riffing on Stuart Hall’s analysis of class and race. It is through mines that the places peripheral to the centers of finance and industry became incorporated into capitalism. Entire societies are shaped by the fact that the extraction of materials is the fundamental economic basis of their economies, and therefore shapes everything from ideology to civil society, from labor relations to subjectivity. And the implications are not just domestic; extractivism reinforces these countries’ position in the world system. Indeed, one of the factors that defines being part of the Global South is being a net provider of raw materials to the global economy.

Editor:

Can we really say that this is a phenomenon confined to the periphery? Extractivism was – and is – an inescapable part of the imperial cores. The Normandy of Émile Zola figures as a kind of mine-pocked wasteland. The last two hard coal mines only closed in the Rhineland a few years ago, and a new one is set to open in Cumbria.

Riofrancos:

Think of it in terms of the percentage extractive industries take up of the country’s GDP or annual budget. How much state revenue comes from extraction and other ‘nature-facing’ sectors? The US is currently the world’s number one oil and gas producer. But oil and gas are not central to the government because there are so many other streams of revenue, including income taxes. Proper petrostates tend to have very low income or wealth taxes – most of their revenue comes from royalties and taxation on oil. So in the case of an extraction-based economy, we’re talking about the fiscal model of the state. If you have an oil-price crash in the US, it’s considered good news, despite the fact that the US is a major oil exporter. The majority of working people benefit from cheaper gas at the pump. Most oil-exporting countries, by contrast, don’t like oil-price crashes because government income, and by extension the rest of society, suffers.