Laboring the Earth: Transnational Reflections on the Environmental History of Work

Abstract

This article explores the intersection of work and nature in environmental history, and it reflects on possible new paths of investigation. More specifically, it focuses on physical labor performed in agriculture and industry-especially in the last two centuries-questioning how experiences in farming, mining, and manufacturing historically have shaped the relationship between working-class people and their environments. Based on secondary literature in English, Italian, and Portuguese, and on original research, the article proposes a tentative interpretative framework for the environmental history of work that incorporates analysis of the landscape as evidence of past human labor, the workplace and its relationship with the local community, and working-class and labor environmental activism. Ultimately, the article highlights the need to investigate the labor/environment dichotomy as a cultural and political construct and seeks to contribute to the formulation of labor-friendly sustainability policies.

The Labor(s) of Degrowth

“…While the history of 20th-century environmentalism is ridden with conflicts between environmental activists and workers, which have compromised any possibility for political alliance in many cases, it also shows importantif less well-knownstories of labor environmentalism, some of them opening the possibility for truly emancipative ways of organizing social metabolism. Probably, the most well-known example is that of the rubber tappers' struggles of the 1980s, which initiated the emancipative conservation experience of the Amazon "extractive reserves" (Barca 2014b). But other stories can be dug out of oblivion, and other voices from working-class and labor environmentalism can be heard.…”

Performing Counter-Hegemonic Common(s) Senses: Rearticulating Democracy, Community and Forests in Puerto Rico

“…These connections are crucial to challenge the mainstream discourse that portrays the working class and environmentalists as clashing forces (cf. Barca 2014).…”

Dangerous assemblages: Salts, trihalomethanes and endocrine disruptors in the water palimpsest of the Llobregat River, Catalonia

“…El Cogulló mine tailing, for example, is the largest accumulation of industrial waste in Catalonia, with at least 50 million tons of salts and around 5000 extra tons being added every day (El Periódico, 2013). As a landscape produced by almost a century of human labour (Barca, 2014b), mountains of salt debris have become non-human actors on their own right. Even if human activity would radically come to a halt, these massive mine tailings would remain in the landscape and continue salinizing the basin for the years to come.…”