Issue 5 — What we should we talk about when we talk about "extraction"
About a month ago, I published a story about dairy biogas — a type of natural gas derived, more or less, from cow poop. To report that story, I spoke with a woman who we’ll call Margarita, who lives in a county in California where cows outnumber people. Each week, Margarita drives 20 miles to buy the clean water that does not run from her faucet. When the air quality is especially bad, she forbids her children from playing outside and tries to minimize her own exposure. And, at least a couple of times a month, she misses work to shuttle her three children to doctor’s appointments, as all three suffer from a combination of allergies and asthma.
While the industrial dairies that surround Margarita’s home aren’t solely to blame for the region’s poor air and water quality — California’s Central Valley is home to a cocktail of contaminants — they certainly play a role, one reinforced by a recent partnership with the natural gas industry. Dairy biogas is only possible because of concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, whereby cows spend most of their time indoors and their waste is collected as liquid in large lagoons. That liquid manure then becomes dairy biogas, a kind of highly marketable “alternative renewable energy” that for someone like me, living in Los Angeles, sounds great on paper. For those surrounded by the dairies, however, there’s the concern that biogas will only further encourage the growth or consolidation of industrial dairies, leading to more problems for already burdened communities.
But rather than rehash that entire story — you can read it here — I wanted to expand upon something Juan Flores, a community organizer and former dairy worker, said to me in an interview:
“When it comes to allowing big dairies to build an economy that extracts from the community, people are not put into the equation.”
It is no accident that Flores characterizes CAFOs and the economies they build as extractive. Besides issues of air and water contimation in California and other states, the dairy industry is backed by trade groups with significant lobbying power who, together with the meat industry, have collectively worked to block climate legislation. As a result you have a food industry that essentially operates like the oil and gas industries, benefitting from the same power structures that mean rural, low-income communities of color are saddled with everything from oil drilling to pesticide drift. This quote didn’t make it into the story, but I’ve been thinking about some of the questions it raises. What do we talk about, when we talk about extraction? Or rather, what should we be talking about?
While this is mostly a discussion of semantics, language has its own power, borne not from profit but from the meaning we assign to it, and “big industry” already knows it. If it were not so, the dairy industry (supported by members of Congress in the U.S.) would not be going after the producers of non-animal alternatives — such as soy milk or oat milk — that label their products “milk.” And, while I usually advocate for precision of language, there is power in association — just look at the companies that latch onto Earth Day each year, irrespective of their own environmental records. To broaden what we mean by extractive, then, is to see the trees from the forest but know that without one, the other would not exist.
Maria Alciro Bolon, a community organizer and indigenous Qʼeqchi’ woman, leads the way to the edge of a palm oil plantation that borders her home in Palestina II, Guatemala.
In some ways, I started to think about this in late 2019, when I stood on the edge of Maria Alciro Bolon’s property in northern Guatemala and looked at the sea of palms that stretched out before me. The plantation was a thing of beauty — arched fronds, red bulbous fruits, and stout furry trunks as far as the eye could see. Palm oil is mostly regarded as a disaster. But what I could see — the trees, the fruit, and the oil that comes from it later down the line — isn’t actually the problem. Like most natural resources, palm oil has only become problematic because of the industry built around it through force, coercion, intimidation, and displacement.
These tactics, arguably perfected over decades by the oil and gas industries among others, render the palm plantations less like farms and more like mines. We perhaps don’t think of them in this light — I certainly didn’t at the time — because in place of a gaping emptiness, we see an abundance, even if it only serves to mask all that has been lost for people like Bolon. But if we can move beyond the literal meaning of the term “extractive industry” — that is, pulling gold or iron from the earth to eventually become something else — then there is the potential to show that sometimes, the industries feeding us function in very much the same way as those that are killing us.
To say that palm oil plantations, or even the kind of industrial fishing that enslaves people and decimates the ocean — to give another example — takes from our communities, from our livelihoods, and from the environment, is to say that they are extractive industries. It does not matter whether the end product is sold at a supermarket or powers that supermarket. What matters more is that they each benefit from the same systems that ensure someone is profiting and someone else, often somewhere else, is exploited. But if we can consider that the CAFO is essentially a coal mine, then we can also imagine solutions that are just as connected as the problems.
An opposite of extraction is addition — what could a future based on the latter look like?
**Thank You For Reading! **
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