After Extraction: A Partial Political Ecology of Central Illinois

Beyond Extraction is the fifth in a series of five field guides that aim to provide readers with the contextual information necessary to become responsible uninvited guests in the Anthropocene Drift, while being non-prescriptive about the nature of that response. The field guides assemble images, texts, maps, and other materials around key themes and locations within our geographical and conceptual region, resonating with the content of the Anthropocene River Journey mobile seminar.

The once-dominant biome of tall grass prairie found in Central Illinois was maintained through the overlapping work of Indigenous peoples, grazing bison, weather-induced fires, and the underlying, deep effects of geological and climatic forces. Environmental historians tell us these grasslands were, in geologic terms, a relatively new and fragile, biome. Their near-complete destruction, including the lifeways through which they were constituted, only took about one hundred years. The Westward expansion of the settler-colonial nation state brought legal and mechanical technologies that turned the complex landscape before it into a simplified medium for extracting row crops and coal. This field guide combines creative non-fiction and montage-based images to depict a partial history of extractive land use in Central Illinois.