The Alberta oil sands are known around the world, but less visible are the workers who sustain this industry. Extracting Decline investigates how it became normal for workers to travel thousands of kilometres from Canada's Maritime region to make a living in the oil field. Moving between East Coast communities, government offices, and Canada's shifting resources frontier, Katie Mazer reveals the intimate links between regional underdevelopment and Canada's extractive economy. In the decades after World War II, the Canadian state formulated the Maritimes as a national problem. Framing the region's rural economies as unviable, policy makers worked to remake the Maritimes to fit a modern vision of the national economy. Examining sixty years of historical geography, Extracting Decline shows how these narrow stories about work and economic possibility gave rise to unquestioned traditions of mobile resources labour. Weaving together welfare and rural development policy, political economy, and workers' lived experiences, Extracting Decline documents how the devaluation of non-capitalist economies has helped transform land and labour for extraction. While the Maritime region has long been denigrated for its failure, Extracting Decline ultimately argues that it holds lessons for imagining a more just and sustainable world.