Resource Extraction and Melville’s Extracts

Abstract:Informed by recent work in the Energy and Environmental Humanities, this essay considers two forms of extraction and their literary representations or manifestations: first, material extraction, like the mining of valuable minerals and the various processes for taking fossil fuels from the earth, and secondly, extracts, or the practice of literary extraction, such as copying, excerpting, borrowing, and reproducing. The former, of course, is violent, exploitative, instrumentalist, and, we now know all too well, unsustainable and ultimately self-defeating. The latter, by contrast, is playful, generous, generative, and renewable—and finds its apogee in the “Extracts” that Melville assembles and presents as preface to Moby-Dick. Thinking about these two forms of extraction together, the essay suggests, can help get us beyond conceptualizing extraction and extractivism, the primary causes of our current planetary emergency, only in terms of exhaustion, depletion, and scarcity and their unappealing consequences, austerity, sacrifice, and self-denial.