Lindsey Webb

[Extraction]

Because humans need materials found in the earth to live, technologies enabling their extraction are as old as we are. Considerably newer, however, is the dizzying, brutal efficiency of these technologies. Developed and expanded via interlocking systems of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, innovations in mining, logging, fishing, shipping, and refining technologies have created both staggering profits and equally staggering destruction. This destruction takes many shapes: pollution, cultural upheaval, genocide, labor abuses, ecological devastation, and so on. To speak of extraction is to speak of systems as large as the planet itself.

This issue gathers several attempts to speak—both of this ongoing destruction and resistance to it. The poems of Lindsay Turner, Alolika Dutta, and Emily Barton Altman chart grief and loss across two continents. Evan J. Massey’s essay and Kylan Rice’s poems look closely at the material reality of extraction, weighing devastation and attachment, the future and the past, in resolutely human terms. Jihoon Park’s story illustrates the truth of colonialism as an extractive technology itself, and may even suggest the same can be said about the history of art. The issue is illustrated by two paintings from Madeline Rupard, whose nostalgic, haunted depictions of gas station rest stops situate us in a lonely landscape, the pillars of the fuel stations appearing fragile and, at the same time, as eternal as the mountains their oil was pumped from. 

The artist and writer Laurie Palmer wrote, “historically, and habitually, we assert our mastery and dominion over matter as if it is passive and we are active… as if we too aren’t material and continuous with the earth that we need and eat.” In what ways does our shared matter speak back against the forces of extractive capitalism? This feature seeks to wrestle with and account for our entanglement with the planet in the wake of both ongoing destruction and ongoing resistance—ongoing life.  

[EXTRACTION]