Compounded extraction: An examination of early agro-extractivism in the US Heartland

Abstract

The concept of agro-extractivism was developed by scholars of Latin America to characterize socio-ecological processes of dispossession and the commodification of human and nonhuman nature by colonial and capitalist actors. Here, I use it to understand the process of white settlement in the US Heartland in the nineteenth century. With the state of Iowa as the case study, I analyze how the creation of the state's infrastructure, from railroads to education, was based on land expropriation through a variety of land grants in what I define as compounded extraction: a massive redistribution of wealth that used the land itself to bootstrap extractivist development activities. I use a variety of primary and secondary sources, from historical documents to census data, to illustrate how the land grants helped finance the changes in the landscape that accompanied the settlement process. I show that the structure of the land grants and their effects on agriculture put the state in the middle of global financialization processes, which were reinforced via feedback loops and boom-bust cycles, and predicated on export markets and tech fixes that create treadmill accelerationist effects to this day. I present evidence that these rapid and massive land use changes had multiple negative environmental effects, many of which were clear to scientists at the time, from soil erosion to species extinction. The infrastructure created via the land grants is still at the core of many environmental and socio-economic issues the state faces today, having become one of the planet's landscapes most modified by humans. I conclude that agro-extractivism in general and as manifested via compounded extraction is a compelling organizing concept in considering the past and present of settler agriculture in the Heartland and in other settings because it illuminates the complexity of dispossession and financialization processes.