Extractivism

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Extractivist practices in the management of natural resources. uncountable

    "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 extraction."

Example

More examples

"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 extraction."

Etymology

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

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.