Socioplastics 11942 The Damage Moved, the Business Continued
An extraction project may reduce environmental pressure at one site while shifting the process that supports its returns elsewhere. ExtractionDrift names the movement of appropriative pressure from one resource, territory or workforce to another while the distribution of benefit and harm remains substantially unchanged. The analysis follows how costs travel through supply chains, contracts and land arrangements. David Graeber’s history of debt shows how economic obligations acquire moral force and become difficult to question. Silvia Federici examines primitive accumulation, gendered labour and the reproduction of economic systems. Nancy Lee Peluso studies resource control and resistance. Their work helps connect extraction with the social arrangements that make material flows possible and distribute their effects. A construction project could trace a “lower-impact” material from extraction through processing, transport and installation. Researchers would map suppliers, labour conditions, land access, waste and financial returns. They would compare the project’s reported local improvements with pressures moved to other places or groups. The record would identify where evidence is available and where a supplier’s chain remains opaque. ExtractionDrift directs attention from a single project boundary to the routes that sustain it. It helps planners, clients and communities assess whether an apparent improvement changes the underlying distribution of costs. The marker supports procurement and environmental review that follow materials and obligations across territories. A claim of reduced impact becomes more informative when the whole chain of movement is documented. The resulting map can guide procurement choices and show where better evidence or accountability is needed.
REFERENCES
Federici, S. (2004) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.
Graeber, D. (2011) Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House.
Peluso, N.L. (1992) Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java. Berkeley: University of California Press.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
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