Expulsion-Extraction-Extinction

An invited lecture series in the Spring of 2018, "Expulsion-Extraction-Extinction," will host speakers who work on intersectional issues of global economic, racial, and environmental justice today. The series seeks to interrogate the discourse of the "Anthropocene," or the idea that humanity's impact on the planet has become so great it deserves its own eponymous geological epoch. Yet even a cursory review of modern history reveals that the vast majority of humanity bears little responsibility for the environmental and humanitarian crisis of today. This crisis is the unfolding of the Sixth Extinction Event, a process of erasure not just of species, but peoples, languages, and cultures due to global exploitation of unpaid labor - what Maria Mies has called the triad of "women, nature, colonies." Historical global capitalist expansion has been based on a three step operation of indigenous dispossession, energy extraction, and subsequent ecological extinction: or the process expulsion, extraction, and extinction.