Is it possible to ‘live [well] with extraction’?
This question is currently provoking heated divisions, discord and anxiety around the motu with a number of major new mining projects and expansions of existing mines at various stages of consideration under the Fast-Track Approvals Act (FTAA). The question also resonates with the work of Büscher and Fletcher (2021) on ‘convivial’ conservation when they suggest that the notion of conviviality – ‘living with’ – may provide a way to ‘move the Anthropocene conservation debate forward: to skillfully and sensitively engage with the radical ideas now on the table and to imagine and enable a transition to a postcapitalist conservation.’
In this presentation, Professor Glenn Banks seeks to hold these two contexts together to explore what possibilities might exist for a convivial extraction conversation – and what place there may be in such a conversation for ‘just transitions’, relationality, and other recent ideas around new extraction pathways. In the end, we need to consider whether a post-capitalist paradigm of extraction is even possible and, if so, most immediately, how can we prefigure some of these forms and ideas in the context of Aotearoa’s current mining blitz?