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Climate change, racism, and environmental violence share the same last name: extraction. They find root cause in the same atrophying of our national moral character and loss of communal responsibility. We are really up against old problems that every so often like to present a new face; today in the ways of police brutality, of insurgent wildfires, or of acid rain.
We all participate in the economy of extraction when we practice the belief that our Earth has no dignity, no life, or inherent value apart from what we get out of it for utility and for short-term profit. We participate in this economy when we continue to strip the dignity from any sort of bodily — or embodied — work and exploit mainly Black and brown bodies for hard labor with criminally low wages and working conditions in exchange for comfort enjoyed only by some. We all fall prey to the logic of extraction when we engage mindlessly in consumerism and accumulation, whether through buying stuff we do not need or wasting what we have. There are a thousand ways to participate in the economy of extraction, and most of the time we do it in willful ignorance.
Yet this legacy of extraction cannot co-exist with God’s dreams. In God’s order of things, nothing is created in vain, nothing goes to waste, and everything is treated with care. God longs for and is working toward wholeness and healing, toward justice and restoration for all created beings. We know this and we want to participate in building this radical and sacred economy — one where each person and every created being is indispensable and worthy of care.
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