While extraction has occurred in Morocco for centuries, new kinds of extraction in the rural periphery have spurred conflict as residents question how resources are valued and benefits returned to their communities. In the southeast, for example, residents draw similarities between the environmental and economic impacts of a silver mine and a recently-constructed solar energy plant. Press accounts and ethnographic research reveal a shared conception of mines and renewable energy alike as extractive because of how the state approaches governance of these and other natural resources. Residents are not only concerned about the impacts after extraction happens—the appropriation of scarce water, the limited jobs, and limited investment in local development. They also wonder how their historic economic and political marginalization informs state policies for valuing resources and facilitating extraction without involving residents in resource governance. While scholars have addressed extraction impacts after projects are implemented, we still do not understand how cultural and political processes contribute to producing resources as valuable for extraction in the first place. Nor do we understand the role of bureaucracies in privileging quantifiable values suited to extraction over the multi-valent values associated with place, culture, and history. This paper will examine how the bureaucratic management of natural resources facilitates extractivism as a mode of governance as well as economic activity. An anthropological approach to the way culture and power inform the daily operations of government illustrates how extraction creates new resource frontiers-- lands where resources are being commoditized for the first time—in Morocco and beyond. This paper is based on collaborative research with civil society actors in Morocco who are exploring how exctractivism intervenes in long-standing debates and claims around rural marginalization, especially in Morocco’s arid southeast.