Colonial extractivism is unsustainable and causes extinction.

Extractivism and infrastructure are the two sides of the socio-ecological coin. The extraction of human and non-human life to ‘develop’ states, grow economies and modernise infrastructures, while responsible for creating living possibilities and enchantments (Alexander, 2008; Harvey and Knox, 2012), is undeniably the modality of development that is responsible for socioecological and climate catastrophe (Kallianos, Dunlap and Dalakoglou, 2022). ‘The invention of the boat’, as Paul Virilio ((2008 [1983]), 46) reminds us, ‘was the invention of shipwrecks. The invention of the steam engine and the locomotive was the invention of derailments. The invention of the highway was the invention of three hundred cars colliding in five minutes’. Ward Churchill (2003) and Winona LaDuke and Sean Aaron Cruz (2012), taking this further, remind us that colonial genocide–ecocide process on Turtle Island are foundational to nuclear weapon production. Colonial conquest and the ‘Indian Wars’ established the means to exterminate Hiroshima and Nagasaki via atomic bombs dropped on Japan.1 With the wider public recognition of climate change, we can now say that the invention of capitalist industrialisation (as we know it) has consolidated the pathways towards ecological and climate catastrophe.

Technological progress, its speed, convenience and possibilities, offered existential purpose and enamoured people (Harvey and Knox, 2012; Anand, Gupta and Appel, 2018), meanwhile masking, ignoring and externalising the underside and ‘costs’ of this wonder—‘[t] he negative side of technology and speed was censored’, as Virilio ((2008 [1983]), 46) contends. This underside is not only accidents and disasters as Virilio indicates, but an entire self-reinforcing and administering institutional network of extractivism and infrastructure powered by capitalism(s). This, of course, refers specifically to materialintensive, or ‘hard’, infrastructures, such as roads, pipes, power lines, data centres, power stations and more (Anand, Gupta and Appel, 2018; Tarvainen, 2022), which function as the skeleton of capitalism, the shape of modernity, the driving force of extractivism. Patrick Wolfe’s (2006, 388) contention that colonial ‘invasion is a structure not an event’, indicates—past and present—how the modernist process seeks to literally ‘steamroller’ and absorb Indigenous peoples and ecologies, revealing how political economy maintains this socio-ecological apparatus of conquest. Wolfe’s ‘structure’ refers to settler colonialism and colonial societies, their political economy and forms of political organisation— the state (Dunlap, 2018; 2020). Viewing statist2 infrastructures as conquest reminds us of the extent to which intense socio-ecological destruction is tolerated and normalised within the current institutions and economies. This is to say that colonial/statist3 invasion is also infrastructural (Dunlap and Arce, 2022, 461; Tornel, 2020), which implies the necessity of rethinking and changing ‘resource’ extraction practices and modern infrastructural construction (Kallianos, Dunlap and Dalakoglou, 2022), which extends to bureaucratic, judicial and mental infrastructures. Mental infrastructures are formed by systematically bombarding people with efforts at subjectivity persuasion (e.g. ‘brain washing’) by private industries and governments in order to cultivate particular forms of public conduct and consumer practices (Bernays, [1928]2005; Herman and Chomsky, [1989]2010; Verweijen and Dunlap, 2021). If people want to mitigate ecological crisis, they must become responsive and challenge the persistence of ecologically destructive infrastructures and begin (re)transforming their habitation practices to support their environments. This chapter seeks to address an anthropocentric extractive and infrastructural bias that predominates within extractive and environmental justice (ej) literatures. This bias relates to how people chart (multi-scalar) extractive supply webs, the state and ‘justice’ phraseology. Critical approaches, the chapter argues, still suffer from ‘infrastructural coloniality’ (Dunlap, 2021a, 6), which underestimates the accumulation and interdependence of extractivism(s) and enables them through processual and egalitarian concerns that maintain the supremacy of modernist infrastructures over ecosystems. Infrastructural coloniality frequently results in ‘selling out’ ecosystems/habitats, thereby subordinating nonhuman life (e.g. animals, rivers, mountains, trees and habitats) to the desires of various human populations under the influence of colonial mentalities and, later, industrial-‘technocapitalist’ desires. Civilisation, Empire, Monarchy and Colonialism, guided by various statist forms and economic logics, have progressed alongside technological developments, which reinforce each other to continue industrial capitalist trajectories into cybernetic and computational capitalism(s) that remain normal features of (statist) market societies.