ABSTRACT
This chapter gives the introduction about the subsequent chapters of the book. It illustrates how grassroots oppositional groups develop legal tactics rooted in community-based activism to fight seemingly overwhelming and entrenched political and economic structures produced by legacies of extraction. The roots and implications of extractivism in Latin America, viewed through the lens of Uruguay's leftist government, which utilizes extraction as a means to support national social progress agendas. The chapter describes the experiences of extraction, impacts refer to infrastructural changes such as road building, railway extensions, or earth removal. It defines impacts as the deterioration of water and air quality, or dangers to public health. Impacts can also take shape as cultural displacements brought on by changing personal relationships to space, or by disruptions in the social fabric of a community. In all of these instances, impacts alter the well being of human and environmental systems, with secondary and tertiary impacts of unknown consequence.
