Word.ws English Dictionary

extractivism

extractivism noun: extractivist practices in the management of natural resources.

Noun

extractivism (uncountable)

  1. Extractivist practices in the management of natural resources.
    • Extractivism, a term born of anti-colonial struggle and thought in the Americas, is a mode of accumulation based on hyper-extraction with lopsided benefits and costs: concentrated mass-scale removal of resources primarily for export, with benefits largely accumulating far from the sites of...2022 December 8, Rosemary Collard, Jessica Dempsey, “‘Extractivism’ is destroying nature: to tackle it Cop15 must go beyond simple targets”, in The Guardian
    • Industrial extractivism (a definition that Vidal would extend to include modern intensive agriculture) has contributed to the recent freefall in bird, mammal and amphibian numbers.2023, Oliver Balch, “Animal, Mineral, Pathogen”, in Literary Review, number 520

Origin of extractivism

From extractive + -ism, originally applied to mining practices in Latin America.

Questions about extractivism

What does extractivism mean?
Extractivism means extractivist practices in the management of natural resources.
What part of speech is extractivism?
Extractivism is a noun.

Words near extractivism in the dictionary

  1. extractive
  2. extractive principle
  3. extractively
  4. extractiveness
  5. extractives
  6. extractivism
  7. extractivist
  8. extractivists
  9. extractor
  10. extractor fan
  11. extractor fans

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: extractivism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “extractivism.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/extractivism. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.