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Book Review: Interrogating Ecocide: Welcome to the Political Economy of Existences

Markus Kröger’s new book deserves better than an overpriced hardback and generic Routledge cover, standard in academic publishing. Unique covers and paperback pricing, while seemingly insignificant, better honors the fieldwork, hardship, care and horrific issues explored in Extractivisms, Existences, and Extinctions: Monoculture Plantations and Amazon Deforestation. Luckily, the book is open access through the publishers, allowing greater exposure into the cutting, mining and reconfiguring of the Amazon rainforest with monocultures. An associate professor at the University of Helsinki, this is Kröger’s fourth book and builds on 15 years of fieldwork in Latin America, Finland, and to a lesser degree, India. Extractivisms, Existences, and Extinctions consist of a prologue, introduction and four chapters, which includes a conclusion. The prologue begins in 2005, when Kröger first arrived in Belém, a eastern Brazilian coastal town. Narrating experiences challenging to explain in writing, Kröger positions their inquiry by explaining his introduction to animist practices with trees and more-than-human natures. Stories of communicating with nonhumans, witnessing rural gentrification in Santarem and wider territorial changes, lays the foundation to “explore the existential transformations, redistributions, annihilations, and changes to existences that are created by different extractivisms” related to mining and soybean plantations in the Amazon and Cerrado forest (xx). The introduction proceeds by declaring its preoccupation with forests “and what happens to these worlds when forests are lost, removed, fragmented, degraded, deforested, and are transformed” by plantations, mines, and infrastructure (2). Extractivism, then, necessarily raises issues of “genocides, ethnocides, and ecocides” for Kröger (3). Exploration begins by connecting Finnish folklore, language and animistic practices with Amazonian groups to better understand what is lost and erased with mining and monocultures. Offering greater space to “non-modernist forces,” practices and cosmologies, Kröger—following Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser (2018)—highlights the inadequacy of the “Anthropocene,” “ecosystem,” and “biodiversity” terminology. The term “existences,” then, serves as a response to this technical terminology, challenging the limited (Western) modernist and hierarchical taxonomy associated with the term “species.” Existences indicate the multiplicity of “spirits,” “earth-beings,” and “more-than human natures” (Kröger, 2022: 8–9). This framing reveals how materialist frameworks and language conceals the destructive effects of extractivism(s), which are far greater than people realize. Chapter 1 continues challenging “the skewed and blind modern and Western ways” that reduce habitats to dead matter for extraction. Reminding the reader that mining increased “2000 percent” in Latin America in the 1990s and the simultaneously onset of the sixth mass extinction (28), this chapter situates itself within extractivism literature. Kröger highlights “what is being destroyed” by extractivism “is rarely discussed in detail or elaborated upon” (31). Although Astrid Ulloa (2020) is a noted exception, Kröger criticizes the extractivism literature for its materialism, homogenizing unique features of habitats and limiting the existence of more-than-human natures to the Amazon or Indigenous groups (31–34). This suggests that different nonhuman existences are attached to land and forests everywhere. Ignoring the multiplicity of existences or nonhuman natures, Kröger contends remains instrumental to the extractive process and, consequently, invites extinctions. The review shifts towards highlighting the work on extractivism that acknowledges more-than-human natures, the types of violence associated with mining, the impact of COVID-19, and the works on agrarian extractivism(s), which emerges as the book’s central focus in later chapters. Introducing a productive typology of extractivism, Chapter 2 charts the diversity and intensity of extractivist projects. Kröger (2022: 47–8) offers four qualitative characters (e.g. erasure; monotonous regimentation of life-forms; socio-ecological outcomes; and inequalities) and seven scales between “hyperextractivist” (5) to “non-extractivist” (0) and “anti-extractivist” (−1), the latter is regarded for its potential to reverse habitat degrading processes. Discussing these seven scales across various mines and monocultures in Finland and Latin America, Kröger emphasizes how Book Review