Colonial extractivism is the process of going into an area, taking what is there, and transforming it to sell for profit — and over the last 500 years it built the modern world. This final chapter of Introduction to Anthropology begins with the anthropology of disaster, traces extraction from Andean silver through Caribbean and Brazilian sugar to the Industrial Revolution, dispels three persistent myths about humans and the environment, and closes on what the textbook proposes instead. For the wider environmental-anthropology context, see the Environmental Engagements hub.
Key Concepts
- A disaster, defined anthropologically, is a natural hazard that strikes an unprepared society (464) — the hazard alone is not the disaster.
- Vulnerability is differential: the same earthquake devastates one neighborhood and spares another, and the difference is construction, materials, and income rather than magnitude.
- Path dependency locks a society into one technology or crop. The Hohokam of what is now southern Arizona built sophisticated but inflexible irrigation that long droughts brought down, centuries before Europeans arrived.
- Extractivism is “the exploitation of environmental resources at scale to sell globally, with the capitalist goal of making profits” (486).
- Indigenous population decline in the Americas during the first century of Spanish conquest was probably on the order of 90%, through disease and labor practices.
- Roughly 10 to 12 million Africans were enslaved and taken to the Americas — about 4 million to Brazil alone — mostly for sugar rather than cotton, the commodity that moved the most people in human history.
- Johannes Fabian wrote that anthropology emerged “less as a science of human nature than as the study of the damage done by one part of mankind to another (and thereby to all of humanity)” (2001, 204).
- Three myths — the population bomb, the tragedy of the commons, and the ecological noble savage (482–483) — each justified displacement, privatization, or coercion, and none survives contact with the anthropological record.
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What Makes a Disaster: Hazard Plus Unprepared Society
The anthropology of disaster begins from a definition that cuts against everyday usage. A disaster is a natural hazard that hits an unprepared society (464). There has to be a hazard, but there also have to be human beings, and they have to be unprepared in some way. What we casually call a “natural disaster” is never simply natural.
Yungay, Peru in 1970 is the case that makes this concrete. A devastating earthquake left roughly 70,000 people dead across the region. An earthquake met a very unprepared society, and the result was catastrophic beyond what the seismology alone would predict.
The pattern shows up on maps. When an earthquake hits an area, certain neighborhoods are completely devastated while others are fine. The magnitude is the same; distance from the epicenter explains only part of it. Most of the difference comes down to poor building construction, the wrong building materials, and a lack of preparation for earthquake-zone activity. The same holds for flooding and fire. These are in part natural hazards, but they affect people differently based on where they live, what their houses are made of, and what their income levels are. They hit harder in poor and marginalized communities than in wealthier areas.
Vulnerability and Resilience
Vulnerability is differential both between societies and within them. Its flip side is resilience — the capacity to rebuild and reshape lives after a disaster. Some of the same communities that are most vulnerable, because they are poor and marginalized, turn out to be more resilient in certain respects, because they have long depended on connections among people and are accustomed to a greater level of hazard. That can produce a real capacity to band together and rebuild.
This is not automatic. Resilience sometimes disappears under particular disaster conditions. But it is something to build into a society before the hazard arrives, and to draw on in order to weather it.
Path Dependency and the Hohokam
The textbook’s concept for a society getting locked in is path dependency: you get hooked on a particular technology or a particular crop, and once something disrupts the path you depend on, the society is in trouble. Famines that follow from monocropping work this way — too much dependence on potatoes, corn, or wheat.
The example is the Hohokam of what is now southern Arizona, who built sophisticated irrigation and water-management systems and did well for a considerable period. The system was not very flexible, and the Southwest experiences long periods of drought. This was a place where a society rose to high levels of complexity and then declined, in part through path dependency — and it happened before Europeans ever reached the Americas.
The parallel to the present is uncomfortable. Modern Arizona has its own irrigation canals, taken over and ramped up to industrial scale, and communities there are often nearly at war with one another over water. Parts of the Southwest may be vulnerable to the same hazards, on a much larger scale, if water and food supplies fail. It raises the possibility that the Indigenous move away from intensive irrigation was the better-adapted response all along.
Colonial Extractivism Built the Modern World
Extractivism, as the textbook defines it, means going into an area, taking things out of it, and transforming them so they can be sold for profit (486). Its modern form was first felt by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, who were displaced from their lands, pushed into a labor process, and subjected to what can only be called genocide. The population decline in the first century of Spanish conquest was probably on the order of 90%, through disease and labor practices together.
The first goal was gold and silver. There was not a great deal of gold available, though the Spaniards took what they could from the Inca and elsewhere and melted it down. Silver was the transformation. Mines in what is now Bolivia and what is now Mexico supplied almost half the world’s silver, which completely reorganized the global economy by injecting a new currency into trade routes that had existed for centuries. For the fuller treatment of the silver city and why the standard history of it is wrong, see Potosí.
Sugar, Enslavement, and the Plantation as Factory
That currency and that mining paved the way for a new phase of plantation agriculture built around sugar cane, which transformed diets across the world. Something like 10 to 12 million Africans were enslaved and taken from their homes to work, for the most part, on plantations in the Americas.
The United States tends to remember this as a cotton story. Cotton matters, but for the most part this was a sugar story. Jamaica, Saint-Domingue — present-day Haiti — and a number of quite small Caribbean islands imported enormous numbers of enslaved Africans relative to their size. Brazil, under the Portuguese, was the largest single destination, with something like 4 million people taken there to work the sugar plantations. It was among the deadliest work available, and the average lifespan of someone put to it was about seven years. In terms of the story of the Americas, and of the commodity that moved the most people in human history, it was sugar.
The organization of labor on a plantation looks much more like a factory than like traditional agriculture. Processing sugar required substantial industrial equipment, and so did mining — there was a distinctly industrial component to the silver operation long before what we know as the Industrial Revolution. For more on how colonial hierarchy was arranged before anthropology existed, see World Before Anthropology.
What resulted were societies across the Americas structured by what we can recognize as structural racism: the people who owned the plantations, the mines, and the commodities grouped at the top, and the people forced to labor for them — taken from elsewhere or displaced from their own societies — at the bottom. For the full treatment of how race was constructed and how racialized societies persist, see Race and Racism in Anthropology.
Silver, sugar, gold, timber, and furs from the Americas fueled the Industrial Revolution, which came much later. The laborers in its factories could work as long as they did in part because they were fueled by the newly cheap sugar calories arriving from the Americas.
Haiti, Napoleon, and the Louisiana Purchase
Saint-Domingue was one of the richest places in the world and was considered the crown jewel of French colonialism. Napoleon intended to base part of his American empire on control of it. The Haitian Revolution overthrew the French; when Napoleon sent another army to re-enslave the Haitians, they drove that army into the sea, and he abandoned his imperial ambitions in the Americas.
This is why Thomas Jefferson found himself being offered so much land so cheaply. Once Napoleon had lost the colony that actually generated the wealth, the remaining North American territory was not worth holding — the main generators of wealth in that period were sugar plantations. The Louisiana Purchase is difficult to explain without the Haitian Revolution, and we rarely learn to credit the Haitians for it.
The scale of this is easy to underestimate. At the time of the Civil War, the value of enslaved African people in the United States exceeded the combined value of all the country’s railroads and factories. We tend to learn instead about the cotton gin and about European factories. Those matter, but much of the story of how the world was made has been buried, because we forget the places that fueled the rise — in much the same way we forget what goes into our phones and cars until somebody blockades the Strait of Hormuz.
Anthropology Was Born From Disaster
Disaster anthropology emerged as a field in the 1970s and has since extended into archaeology. It studies “the process that precedes, unfolds during, and follows a hazard that creates significant human harms” (465). As a named subfield it is only about fifty years old.
There is a case, though, that anthropology has always been disaster anthropology. Anthropology began in European and North American societies studying other people — and those other people had already been reached. Others had crossed the world, taken over their land and resources, and begun extracting and selling on global markets. Most of the peoples anthropologists went to study had already been through a disaster before the anthropologist arrived.
Johannes Fabian put the point sharply in Anthropology with an Attitude: anthropology emerged “less as a science of human nature than as the study of the damage done by one part of mankind to another (and thereby to all of humanity)” (2001, 204).
This has methodological consequences. It would be a mistake to study the traditional culture of an island community without registering that many of those people were moved around and placed in very bad conditions before any anthropologist showed up — or that they may not be on the island where they were born, because it was used for nuclear testing. Anthropology tries to understand people’s lives, including the lives of those who made the modern world possible and were then forgotten. The discipline’s position is that we should not study only the powerful.
Modern Assumptions and Three Surprises
When anthropology was founded a century or so ago, a set of assumptions came with it. The first was that Indigenous peoples had already gone — a sad remnant of what they had been — and that any who remained would disappear soon, wiped out by what was called progress. The second was that industrialization was the universal path. Everyone should industrialize, in India, in China, everywhere, using the efficient techniques Europeans had developed. Whatever other people were doing with their land, water, and resources was dumb or inefficient. A hunter-gatherer should get a tractor, plow the land, and put crops in it.
Surprise One: Indigenous Peoples Are Still Here
Despite enormous losses, Indigenous peoples did not disappear. There are still people who identify as Native American, and they would like some control over their lives and resources. Many are increasingly important politically and economically. The framework that assumed a vanishing population has had to be rebuilt.
Surprise Two: Industrialization Brings Its Own Disasters
Gary, Indiana was the site of the largest steel mill in the United States and the source of enormous wealth, American steel, and aircraft. It was left environmentally poisoned. The same pattern appears across many places, including sites in New York State that were contaminated by the industrialization that once sustained them. The pattern first became visible in the Americas through mining and plantations, but it recurs wherever industry concentrates.
Surprise Three: Traditional Practices Might Be Smart
Practices that were mocked — hunting and gathering, traditional agriculture, growing crops without chemical inputs — turn out in many settings to be more sustainable than what replaced them. The plants and animals people worked with in the Amazon appear to have been sustainable for that region. Plowing up rainforest to run cattle on it, by contrast, is not proving to be a sustainable practice in a rainforest.
Where the Costs Land: Environmental Justice
The Mohawk nation spans the border between the United States and Canada and pre-exists that border. Alcoa, General Motors, and Alcoa Reynolds built plants in the area, producing things that mattered to the wider economy and, in the process, PCBs, fluoride, and heavy metals. These contaminated the waterway and made it very difficult to eat the fish, wildlife, and soil that Indigenous communities had depended on. For a long stretch, fish from the St. Lawrence River were not safe to eat at all; after cleanup the guidance improved to roughly one fish a month.
Hyde Park, Georgia is the textbook’s example of environmental injustice in the city (474). A predominantly Black neighborhood in Augusta, it was surrounded by a power substation, industrial areas, a scrap metal yard, a landfill, and a pair of railroads. Residents raised families in the middle of that, and the soil was eventually found to be contaminated with lead, arsenic, creosote, and other heavy metals. The neighborhood no longer exists: Augusta approved its demolition in 2014, and the last resident was relocated in 2018.
The Marshall Islands carry a starker version. The United States decided the islands were a suitable location for nuclear testing and blew them up, having first moved the people off. Some of those islands remain uninhabitable, and the people have never been able to return. Others in the Pacific were depopulated to harvest nitrates for fertilizer.
The siting question has not gone away; it has changed form. Data centers draw enormous quantities of power and water, and there are active debates about where they get placed. We all use AI, and every use draws power from somewhere. How much power it will take to run our devices may be the newest environmental issue of our time — and the question of whose neighborhood absorbs it is the old one.
Three Myths About Humans and the Environment
The textbook collects three of these in a box titled “dispelling myths and misconceptions about humans and the environment” (482–483). Some are traceable to a particular author; others are simply common conceptions. Each is worth taking apart, because if we reach for these myths to solve disasters and environmental problems, they point us at the wrong causes.
Myth One: The Population Bomb (482)
The population bomb rests on the idea that there are simply too many people, that more people produce still more people, and that the population must therefore be limited. It descends from Malthus a couple of centuries ago and the argument that people multiply exponentially and exhaust their resources; a 1968 book of that title revived it.
What the myth justified was not benign: forced sterilization, restrictions on immigration, and eugenics — the position that only the best should reproduce, survive, and move from place to place. It runs directly into structural racism.
The reality is more complicated than either Malthus or the 1960s version predicted. There is no simple equation between the number of people in a place and its poverty rate or its environmental destruction. What matters is how people are organized, how far resources are concentrated at the top rather than distributed, and levels of economic development. You cannot go country to country, measure the population, and read off how much trouble it is in.
There is now a considerable irony. Many countries are trying to encourage people to have more children because birth rates have fallen below replacement and they fear they will not have enough people. Italy, France, and Spain — Catholic countries long stereotyped for having the most children in Europe — now have some of the lowest birth rates in the world. It has become hard to find young people for the jobs that need doing, which has contributed to increased immigration and to social conflict around it. These countries are paying people to have children, and it is not working.
Japan has one of the oldest populations in the world; if birth rates do not increase, and there is no indication that they will, its population is projected to fall by half over the next fifty to a hundred years. South Korea, once a place where people were assumed to be having many children, has fallen below replacement. China has suspended its one-child policy and now encourages larger families. These trends are proving very difficult to reverse.
None of which means population should be ignored. It means the simplistic version — more people will ruin the earth — is not what the evidence shows.
Myth Two: The Tragedy of the Commons (482)
In the 1960s Garrett Hardin published an article called “The Tragedy of the Commons,” arguing that collectively held resources — land, a lake, a fishery — must end badly. The reasoning: if a field where cows graze is held by the whole group, and nobody owns it, each individual gains by adding one more cow. If everyone does that, the resource is depleted and the outcome is disaster. Substitute a fishery and the logic runs the same way, with every fisher having an incentive to take out more.
What this justified was privatization. Indigenous peoples could not be permitted to hold land in common, the argument went, because they would wreck it; the land had to be divided, measured, fenced, and owned. It also justified pushing people off land altogether, on the theory that national parks should have no people in them.
The reality, looked at anthropologically across societies and historically over time, is more complicated. People do not always manage resources well, and resources do sometimes fail — path dependency and collapsed irrigation systems are real. But for the most part people talk to each other, and across all kinds of societies they develop systems for sharing resources without falling into the tragedy. This has been documented repeatedly.
There is an important qualification. Commons arrangements do come under strain when money-oriented capitalism enters. If people begin selling from a fishery or from common land to outsiders — if they are drawn into extractivism — the demand for more fish, more crabs, more cows can break what worked when the arrangement was internal and communal. For the fuller treatment, see Tragedy of the Commons Myth.
Myth Three: The Ecological Noble Savage (482)
The third myth sounds like praise. People often say that Indigenous peoples live in harmony with their worlds, or manage their resources well. But it is a romanticization, and all people are complicated. Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, some are extractive of their resources and some are not. Stereotyping people as ecologically good is still stereotyping.
What it justified was displacement. If people were merely living in harmony rather than working the land, the argument ran, they were not using it efficiently — so the land should be taken, planted, and put under tractors and factories. Their traditional ways were not the ways things should be done.
The reality is that many Indigenous societies, in Australia and across Native North America, used complex systems to modify their environments in support of the hunting and gathering they wanted to do. In North America people used fire to reshape the landscape, burning off areas that would regrow and support the animals and plants they were after. By the time Europeans arrived, the landscape had been radically reshaped by fire. Europeans read it as an untouched Garden of Eden — and after displacement, many of those landscapes became less abundant, precisely because the people tending them were gone. For more on Indigenous environmental management and the wilderness idea, see Pristine Wilderness Myth.
This myth also projects backward in time, carrying the assumption that Indigenous peoples have all gone away, or soon will. The losses of the last 500 years of the colonial capitalist system should not be downplayed — a 90% population decline in the first century of conquest, destroyed settlements, islands emptied for fertilizer and for weapons testing. But in contrast to the predictions, Indigenous peoples are still here.
Pathways Beyond Colonial Extractivism
The textbook’s page 489 carries an image of a Water Walker from the Ojibwe people — Sharon Day — carrying a ceremonial copper pail of water and an eagle staff from the headwaters of the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, to raise awareness of pollution in the river. The peoples who were supposed to disappear may be the ones telling us the most about how to use our resources. Alongside it is a Navajo billboard reading “water is life,” from the pipeline protests against oil extraction.
Indigenous sovereignty (486) is the first recommendation: the right of peoples — referred to in Canada as First Nations — to autonomy and self-governance, as other peoples have. This does not mean anything goes, or that every decision made on Indigenous land will be the right one. It means the question belongs on the table.
Relationality (485) is the second: an understanding of how humans are related to nonhuman creatures, animals, and plants, and how we share one interconnected world. We are not apart from these issues. When someone walks from the Great Lakes down the Mississippi to the Gulf, it involves all of us. The travails of people elsewhere have global effects, as the coronavirus made plain. For the graduate-level treatment of relationality, Arturo Escobar’s pluriverse, and the critique of the Anthropocene, see Indigenizing the Anthropocene.
Climate change makes the same point about interconnection. Tuvalu’s minister for justice, communication, and foreign affairs delivered a deliberately staged press conference to draw attention to rising sea levels threatening Pacific islands. It was apparently not enough to blow these islands up and mine them for minerals; they are now threatened by the water.
Minimizing extractivism (486) — reducing “the exploitation of environmental resources at scale to sell globally, with the capitalist goal of making profits” — is the third. To a degree people are starting to understand this. To a degree the last few years have run the other way, toward maximizing extraction, captured in the slogan “drill, baby, drill.”
A sustainability transition (487) is the fourth: new political and ecological arrangements that are less extractive, wasteful, and carbon emitting. The road looked open for a while. The textbook was published not long after the largest climate legislation in United States history, when subsidies were moving toward electric vehicles and the grid. Then the direction reversed and those programs were cut.
The closing argument is nonetheless not a pessimistic one. There is a great deal of wisdom in human societies, and people are still learning. There is creativity, both technological and in Indigenous societies that have worked out long-standing solutions to exactly these problems. What may be shifting is a growing recognition, across the world, that we are connected to one another and that no single country’s course can simply be trusted — that this requires working together. As the textbook puts it, “we have the capability to use our wisdom, power, and creativity to solve big problems” (487).
Frequently Asked Questions
What is colonial extractivism?
Colonial extractivism is the exploitation of environmental resources at scale to sell globally, with the capitalist goal of making profits (486). In its modern form it began in the Americas with the displacement of Indigenous peoples, the silver mines of the Andes and Mexico, and plantation agriculture worked by enslaved Africans.
Why do anthropologists say disasters are not natural?
Because a hazard alone does not make a disaster. A disaster is a natural hazard that strikes an unprepared society (464). The same earthquake devastates one neighborhood and spares another, and the difference lies in construction, materials, preparation, and income rather than in the hazard itself.
Was the transatlantic slave trade mainly about cotton?
No. Cotton matters to the United States story, but sugar moved far more people. Of roughly 10 to 12 million Africans taken to the Americas, about 4 million went to Brazil alone, and the Caribbean islands imported enormous numbers relative to their size — overwhelmingly for sugar.
Is the tragedy of the commons true?
Largely not. Garrett Hardin’s 1960s argument predicted that collectively held resources must be destroyed, and it was used to justify privatization and displacement. Anthropologists have documented societies across the world developing durable systems for sharing resources. Commons arrangements do come under strain when outside markets and extractive demand enter.
Why is the ecological noble savage a harmful idea if it sounds flattering?
Because it was used to justify taking Indigenous land, on the argument that people living “in harmony” were not working it efficiently. It is also inaccurate: Indigenous peoples in North America and Australia actively managed their environments, reshaping landscapes with fire long before Europeans arrived.
Course Navigation
Previous class: Race and Racism in Anthropology. This is the final class of Introduction to Anthropology. Related pages: Anthropology and Sustainability, Pristine Wilderness Myth, and Anthropocene Anthropology. Hubs: Environmental Engagements and Power Analysis.