Extractive ecological transfer is the sharpest of the three transfer terms and the one the framework most wants to make visible. An ordinary ecological transfer is only movement across a boundary, and much of it is healthy — trade, migration, aid, and teaching all move capacity between ecologies. A transfer becomes asymmetric when one side captures the gain while another absorbs a disproportionate burden. It becomes extractive at the point where the local gain is not merely unequal but causally dependent on the loss — where a participant raises its own viability precisely by lowering someone else’s, or by consuming the optionality a larger ecology needs to stay adaptable.
The distinction matters because it keeps the framework from condemning strength as such. A local ecology that grows while returning capacity to the field is doing exactly what the whole project wants. Extractive transfer is the failure mode — wasted geometry relocated across a boundary so it no longer shows up on the extractor’s books — and it is what the leakage audit and the transfer projects are built to detect.