It feels safe to say that our present social, political and ecological juncture requires many hands on deck. Similarly, it seems obvious to argue that this juncture calls us to attend to and nurture ways of living that depend less on the various forms of (industrial) extraction, and decentre the idea of ‘development’ as unidirectional, linear, financial and material growth. We – a collective of interdisciplinary scholars and artists – argue that such action requires understanding not only the extractive sector, its socio-ecological impacts and the lives it enables and disables, but also engaging with forms of research and education that aim to decolonise knowledge and foster possibilities for diverse past, present, and future worldings. Decades of critical research and activism have revealed the highly uneven distribution of extractivism’s (economic) benefits and harms (Beckert et al. 2021; Behzadi et al. 2023; Green 2020; Hamouchene 2023; Winchell and Howe 2024), and that the search for alternatives so far has only challenged development models and practices, not altered or replaced them. Supposedly sustainable development trajectories, by reproducing conventional extractivist models and their implications, are increasingly recognised as a new wave of ‘green extractivism’ rather than a real alternative to it (Bruna 2022; Curley 2018). At the same time, extractivist projects like fossil fuel or industrial agricultural development continue to invoke promises of development and economic growth, and inspire hope in many. With this initiative and manifesto, ‘Alternatives to Extractivism’ (A2E),2 we explore how researchers can better attend to the diversity of ways of being, knowing and doing alongside the (sub)soil and other-than-humans more broadly. In what Chakrabarty (2021) might call ‘a planetary move’, the (sub)soil makes itself known to human and other-than-human beings on Earth through earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and other ‘natural’ disasters. If we don’t find more careful ways to navigate the planet’s reaction to growing human influence, it may become uninhabitable by life as we know it.

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• Anthropology - Social Sciences