ABSTRACT
The birth of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s focused attention on planetary boundaries. Activists warned against a collapse in the organic infrastructure that supports all life on Earth. This chapter argues that such a globalist and apocalyptic framework created a type of politics that discounts the lived experience of those living on the frontlines of environmental harm and therewith unwittingly supports the current hyper-extractivist age. Global threshold thinking enables elites to ignore how environmental harm lands on the bodies and nervous systems of those who live “downstream” and thus enables a politics of postponement wherein the privileged can indefinitely defer dramatic environmental protection efforts since threats appear, at most, circumscribed rather than genuinely global. The chapter also examines the emergence of extrACTIVISM as a relatively new wing of the environmental movement and explains how, by contrast, extrACTIVISTS around the world look beyond planetary ecological measures and focus attention and effort on on-the-ground industrial efforts to rob people of their livelihoods, resource base, and very existence. On the whole, the chapter charts the challenges and promises of waking up to a hyper-extractivist world.
