Literature in an Age of Extraction: An Introduction

The world is on fire. We are witnessing a global epidemic of deforestation sparked by an intense wave of resource extraction. Global extraction and consumption of raw materials in general—including fossil fuels—increased eightfold between 1900 and 2005. This massive wave of extraction flies in the face of rosy pronouncements from some of the dominant institutions of global governance about so-called green growth. In this introduction, editors Ashley Dawson and Alok Amatya offer a critique of dominant ideologies of green growth as they appear both in the publications of international organizations and in contemporary cultural production.