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Post Extraction Landscapes

What happens to living communities after humans substantially and rapidly modify them? This question can be asked at several scales: for living communities after major disturbance in general, after human disturbance in particular, and after extractive activities such as mining in especially concrete ways.

Issues to consider:

  • Forms of impact, social, economic, environmental, health, etc.
  • Possible responses, e.g. restoration, remediation, regeneration, etc.
  • Existing responses and why their scope is more restricted that what is possible in principle.
  • Ways to achieve more ambitious, transformative change.

Who is involved? Who is empowered? What are the systemic constraints and opportunities? What are the ethical and political dimensions of these issues? What are the implications for design, and how can design contribute to addressing these challenges?

A useful literature frame is to combine work on extractivism and damaged landscapes with work on more-than-human design, restoration ecology, and legal-political innovation. The design angle becomes stronger when the topic shifts from technical remediation alone to questions of governance, representation, care, and long-term coexistence.

References

Extractivism, Ruins, and Damaged Landscapes

These texts help frame post-extraction landscapes as social, ecological, and colonial formations rather than as purely technical remediation problems.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Gordillo, Gastón. Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Kirsch, Stuart. Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between Corporations and Their Critics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.

More-than-human and critical design

These texts are useful when the project asks how design might work with damaged ecologies, contested communities, and nonhuman stakeholders rather than treating them as background conditions.

Roudavski, Stanislav. “Interspecies Design.” In Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene, edited by John Parham, 147–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Escobar, Arturo. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.

Escobar, Arturo. “Designing as a Futural Praxis for the Healing of the Web of Life.” In Design in Crisis: New Worlds, Philosophies and Practices, edited by Tony Fry and Adam Nocek, 25–42. Oxford: Taylor & Francis, 2020.

Costanza-Chock, Sasha. Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020.

White, Damian. “Ecological Democracy, Just Transitions and a Political Ecology of Design.” Environmental Values 28, no. 1 (2019): 31–53. https://doi.org/10/gfvh2r.

Poikolainen Rosén, Anton, Antti Salovaara, Andrea Botero, and Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, eds. More-than-Human Design in Practice. London: Routledge, 2025.

Restoration, Remediation, Regeneration

This cluster is useful for moving from critique to intervention. It also helps distinguish restoration, remediation, regeneration, and rewilding, which often get conflated in design discussions.

Hobbs, Richard J., and Viki A. Cramer. “Restoration Ecology: Interventionist Approaches for Restoring and Maintaining Ecosystem Function in the Face of Rapid Environmental Change.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 33, no. 1 (2008): 39–61. https://doi.org/10/cnq2dt.

Lorimer, Jamie, Chris Sandom, Paul Jepson, Chris Doughty, Maan Barua, and Keith J. Kirby. “Rewilding: Science, Practice, and Politics.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 40, no. 1 (2015): 39–62. https://doi.org/10/gfsjh5.

Perino, Andrea, Henrique M. Pereira, Laetitia M. Navarro, Néstor Fernández, James M. Bullock, Silvia Ceaușu, Ainara Cortés-Avizanda, Roel van Klink, Tobias Kuemmerle, and Angela Lomba. “Rewilding Complex Ecosystems.” Science 364, no. 6438 (2019): eaav5570. https://doi.org/10/gfzxfg.

This literature is especially relevant if the project asks who speaks for damaged places, how nonhumans gain standing, and which institutions could support more ambitious post-extraction futures.

Boyd, David R. The Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution That Could Save the World. Toronto: ECW Press, 2017.

Celermajer, Danielle, Anthony Burke, Stefanie Fishel, Erin Fitz-Henry, Nicole Rogers, David Schlosberg, and Christine Winter. Institutionalising Multispecies Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Useful directions for case studies

  • Mine closure and post-mining transition towns.
  • Tailings, toxicity, and uneven exposure to risk.
  • Indigenous governance, land back, and repair after extraction.
  • More-than-human participation, guardianship, and proxy representation.
  • Design for monitoring, maintenance, stewardship, and slow regeneration rather than one-off remediation.