The nature of labor: Fault lines and common ground in environmental and labor history

Environmental History

Volumn 11, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 212-238

  Peck, Gunther ^a  

^a DUKE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ECONOMIC HISTORY; ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY; LABOR;

EID: 33745490746     PISSN: 10845453     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/envhis/11.2.212     Document Type: Article

References (149)

1. On the hoped-for emergence of a working-class green coalition, see Solidarity, May 2000, 16-17;
2. John Bellamy Foster, "The Limits of Environmentalism without Class: Lessons from the Ancient Forest Struggle of the Pacific Northwest," Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 4 (1993): 1-18;
3. and Roger Keil, "The Green Worker Alliance," Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 6 (1995): 63-76.
4. On the teamsters, See Phil Magers, "Arctic Drilling Said Critical to Security," United Press International press release, April 2, 2002;
5. Elysian Hunter, "Pacts with the Devil: 'Organized Labor' Is Nobody's Friend," Ether Zone, May 1, 2002, at www.etherzone.com/2002/ hunt050102.sltml..
6. William Cronon, "Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History," The Journal of American History 77 (Winter 1990): 1,131;
7. Donald Worster, "Seeing Beyond Culture," The Journal of American History 77 (Winter 1990): 1, 144;
8. Richard White The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: hill and Wang, 1995);
9. Richard White, "Are you an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?.," in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995):171-8 6;
10. Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1990 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
11. In the mid 1990s, many scholars foresaw a convergence between environmental history and social history. See Alan Taylor, "Unnatural Inequalities: Social and Environmental Histories," Environmental History 1 (October 1996): 6-19;
12. and Giovanna di Chiro, "Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environment and Social Justice," in Uncommon Ground, ed. Cronon, 298-320.
13. In the journal Environmental History, several younger scholars have examined intersections between environmentalism and the labor movement. See Chad Montrie, "Expedient Environmentalism: Opposition to Coal Surface Mining in Appalachia and the United Mine Workers of America, 1945-75,"Environmental History 5 (January 2000): 75-95;
14. Scott Dewey, "Working for the Environment. Organized Labor and the Origins of Environmentalism in the United States, 1948-1970," Environmental History 3 (January 1998): 45-63;
15. and Robert Gordon, "'Shell No!' OCAW and the Labor-Environmental Alliance," Environmental History 3 (October 1998): 460-87.
16. On labor and the body, see Douglas Sackman, "'Nature's Workshop:' The Work Environment and Workers' Bodies in California's Citrus Industry, 1900-1940, "Environmental History 5 (January 2000): 27-53;
17. Christopher Sellers, "Thoreau's Body: Towards an Embodied Environmental History," Environmental History 4 (October 1999): 486-514.
18. On class analyses of the conservation movement, see Benjamin Heber Johnson, "Conservation, Subsistence, and Class at the Birth of the Superiro National Forest," Environmental History 4 (January 1999): 80-99;
19. and Karl Jacoby, "Class and Environmental History," Environmental History 2 (June 1997): 336.
20. On promising dissertations that engage labor and environmental history, see Thomas Andrews, "The Road to Ludlow: Work, Environment, and Industrialization in South Colorado, 1870-1914" (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2003);
21. and Matthew Klingle, "Urban By Nature: An Environmental History of Seattle, 1880-1970" (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2001).
22. White, The Organic Machine;
23. and Hurley, Environmental Inequalities.
24. Environmental historian William Cronon is perhaps best associated with historicizing the phrase "geography of capital." See William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 83-84.
25. More recently, environmental historians have adapted the work of Marxist geographer David Harvey, whose work theorizes how geographies of capital and labor have coevolved. See, for example, Kathryn Morse, The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 65.
26. For an analysis of how Cronon, White, Morse, and others have used and misused Harvey, see my ensuing discussion entitled "The Labors of Environmental History."
27. On the challenges and history of bounding western history, see Patricia Limerick, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West(NewYork: W. W. Norton, 1987).
28. On the relationship between western and environmental history, See William Cronon, "Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner," Western Historical Quarterly 18 (April 1987): 157-86.
29. On the relationship between western and labor history, See GuntherPeck, "In Search of an American Working Class: National Fictions in the Making of Western Labor History," Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts fur Soziale Bewegungen 25 (Summer 2001): 29-46.
30. To list all of the books in western labor and western environmental history that organize their narratives around the concepts of alienation and declension would itself constitute a book-length bibliography. For paradigms built around alienation in western labor history, see Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1969).
31. For western declension and alienation, see Donald Worster, The Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
32. Karl Marx, Capital vol. I, chap. 7, 344ff, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978).
33. Also cited in Sackman, "Nature's Workshop," 27.
34. On the politics of environmental pollution among working-class people, see Hurley, Environmental Inequalities;
35. and Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the Politics of Occupational Disease in Twentieth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y. Cornell University Press, 1992).
36. For environmental approaches to workplace safety and workers' health that move beyond the shop floor, See Christopher Sellers, Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997);
37. and Arthur McEvoy, "Working Environments: An Ecological Approach to Occupational Health and Safety," Technology and Culture 36 (1995): 145-73. None of these fine historians were trained as labor historians, however, highlighting labor history's inattention to environmental questions even on the shop floor.
38. On critiques of Marx's inattention to space or geography, see David Harvey, The Urbanization of Capital: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Modernization (Baltimore;Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985): 33;
39. and Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory(London: Verso, 1989).
40. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920);
41. On Turner's ideas and their historical context, See Cronon, "Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier";
42. Richard White, "Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill," in The Frontier in American Culture, ed. James Grossman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994): 7-66;
43. and John Mack Faragher, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner. 'The Significance of the Frontier in American History' and Other Essays (New York: Henry Holt, 1994).
44. John R. Commons, "Introduction to Volumes III and IV," in History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 3 (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1935), xiii;
45. Werner Sombart, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?, trans. Patricia Hocking and C.T. Husbands (1906, reprint; White Plains, N.Y., International Arts and Scoences Press, 1976).
46. Commons' students, Selig Perlman and Philip Taft, likewise viewed the frontier as a conservative force. see their History of Labor in the United States, 1896-1932, vol. 4 (New York, The MacMillan Company, 1935), 169, 215.
47. Vernon Jensen, Heritage of Conflict: Labor Relations in the Nonferous Metals Industry Up to 1930 (Ithaca: Cornell Unoversity Press, 1950), ix, 1, 2.
48. Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 138-39.
49. For an examination of the conservative uses of frontier ideology, see Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: the Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York: Macmillan, 1983).
50. The main debate within western labor history has continued to follow battle lines drawn by Dubofsky and Jensen, even as scholars have sought to reject their methodological nationalism. On those arguing the West made its workers conservative, see Richard H. Peterson, "Conflict and Consensus: Labor Relations in Western Mining,"Journal of the West 12 (January 1973): 1-17;
51. James C. Foster, "Quantification and the Western Federation," Historical Methods Newsletter, 10 (Fall 1977): 141-48;
52. Ronald C. Brown, Hard-Rock Miners: The Intermountain West, 1860-1920 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1979);
53. Mark Wyman, Hard Rock Epic: Western Miners and the Industrial Revolution, 1860-1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979);
54. and David Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875-1925 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).
55. On those who maintain that the West made its workers more radical, see Richard Lingenfelter, The Hardrock Miners: History of the Mining labor Movement in the American West, 1863-1893 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974);
56. David Brundage, The Making of Western Labor Radicalism: Denver's Organized Workers, 1878-1905 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994);
57. Elizabeth Jameson, All that Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998);
58. and Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
59. Emmons, The Butte Irish, 180-220;
60. Jameson, All That Glitters, 195-97;
61. Peck, Reinventing Free Labor, 204-07.
62. J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997):13.
63. Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-50 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987);
64. Dana Frank, Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994).
65. Chris Friday's fine study of Asian salmon workers in the United States and Canada likewise makes only passing mention of the West. see Chris Friday, Organizing Asian American Labor: The Pacific Coast Canned Salmon Industry, 1870-1942 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).
66. Laura Mercier, Anaconda: Labor, Community. and Culture in Montana's Smelter City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 3, 33,197.
67. Mercier, Anaconda, 202;
68. Salt of the Earth, DVD, directed by Herbert Biberman (Los Angeles: Independent Production Corporation/International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, 1954).
69. Donald Worster, "Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective on History," Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1, 100.
70. Cronon, "Modes of Prophecy and Production," 1, 125.
71. Worster, The Dust Bowl, 4-5, 58-59, 62.
72. Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, xv.
73. For critiques of Cronon, see the journal Antipode 26 (1994):113-65, and Cronon's response, 166-76.
74. William Cronon, Jay Gitlin, and George Miles, "Becoming West: Toward a New Meaning for Western History,"in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past, William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds., (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992): 20.
75. Cronon, Gitlin, and Miles, "Becoming West," 18;
76. For a narrative and analysis of the creation of the labor movement in Virginia City, Nevada, see Gunther Peck, "Manly Gambles: The Politics of Risk on the Comstock Lode, 1860-1880," The Journal of Social History (Summer 1993): 701-24.
77. White, Organic Machine ix, 44,46;
78. White, "Are you an Environmentalist," 171.
79. White, Organic Machine, 61.
80. For a trenchant critique of White's conflation of nature and play, see Joseph E. Taylor III, "What are We Learning from 'Knowing Nature'?," presented at the American Society for Environmental History conference, Durham, N.C., March 30, 2001.
81. see also Kathryn Morse's critique of White's failure to assess more fully class politics in "Are you an Environmental Historian, or Do You Shovel Snow for a Living?," paper presented at the American Society for Environmental History, Tacoma, Washington, March 16,2000.
82. Both papers in author's possession. A number of recent articles have examined tensions between labor and leisure. see Thomas G. Andrews, "'Made by Toile'? Tourism, Labor, and the Construction of the Colorado Landscape, 1858-1917," Journal of American History 92 (December 2005):837-63;
83. Connie Y. Chiang, "Monterey-by-the-Smell: Odors and Social Conflict on the California Coastline," Pacific Historical Review 73 (May2004)183-214;
84. And Brian Page, "Labor and the Landscape of American Gothic," Labor History 44(2003): 95-110.
85. Morse, The Nature of Gold, 48-50, 65.
86. Ibid., 137.
87. White, "Are You an Environmentalist?" 184.
88. Ibid., 185.
89. On connections between labor unions and environmental politics, see Andrew Battista, "Labor and Liberalism: The Citizen Labor Energy Coalition," Labor History 40 (August 1999): 301-21;
90. Victor Silverman, "Sustainable Alliances: The Origins of International Labor Environmentalism," International Labor and Working-Class History66 (October 2004): 118-35.
91. White, Organic Machine, 9.
92. Efforts by geographers Don Mitchell and Andrew Herod suggest some hopeful answers to these questions. Herod has called for an investigation of a "labor geography," by which he means the roles that workers historically play in "shaping the geography of industrial production" and of capitalism more generally. Mitchell, in turn, has explored the historic connections between labor mobility, class struggle, and the geography of capital in California in his important book, The Lie of the Land. Both Herod and Mitchell suggest that workers' resistance and configurations of capital have to be understood in dialectical relation to one another at both the local level and across broader landscapes of capital accumulation. Indeed, Mitchell illustrates how farm workers in one place-Wheatland, California-shaped California's larger agricultural landscape by politicizing their mobility throughout the region. See Andrew Herod, "From a Geography of Labor to a Labor Geography: Labor's Spatial Fix and the Geography of Capitalism," Antipode 29 (Spring 1997): 1-31;
93. Andrew Herod, Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism (New York: Guilford Press, 2001);
94. Donald Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers a nd the California Landscape (Minneapolis, 1996)
95. and Don Mitchell, Cultural Geography: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
96. Unfortunately, Mitchell built his study around a rare moment when alienations from labor and nature neatly overlapped and fueled each other. Precisely how alienations from nature and labor remade one another in less dramatic contexts remain unexamined topics in Mitchell's work. Nor does nature-here the nonhuman world-receive much sustained attention in The Lie of the Land. This omission is especially apparent in Mitchell's new study, where landscape functions largely as a metaphor for a host of anthropocentric topics in cultural and economic history. Mitchell discusses landscape as a "commodity," a "form of social relations," an "ideology," as "work," a "spectacle," a "theater or stage," a "way of seeing," and a "text," but rarely as a place where classes of people and the nonhuman world intersected. See Mitchell, Cultural Geography: An Introduction, 8, 61, 100, 103, 124-25.
97. David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (London: Blackwell, 1998), 174.
98. Ibid., 189.
99. Ibid., 147, 187.
100. In his earlier work, Harvey focused on the spatial dialectics of capitalism and urbanization. See Harvey, The Urbanization of Capital,
101. and David Harvey The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (London: Blackwell 1989).
102. Others have also asserted the importance of space in social theory, especially Soja, Postmodern Geographies,
103. and Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. David Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991).
104. For critiques of Harvey, particularly his inattention to specific contexts or social practice, see David Ley, "Fragmentation, Coherence, and Limits to Theory in Human Geography," in Remaking Human Geography, ed. Audrey Kobayashi and Suzanne Mackenzie (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 227-44;
105. and Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994), 80-81, 90-93.
106. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 203-07;
107. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 73-76.
108. Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, 198.
109. Labor historians have long explored work beyond industrial work places and wage labor relations, though fewer have explicitly examined relationships between different kinds of labor. On connections between paid and unpaid labor, see Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990);
110. and Eileen Boris and Cynthia Daniels, eds., Homework: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Paid Labor at Home (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).
111. On historical connections between wage labor and marriage, see Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
112. On connections between slavery and wage labor, see David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London : Verso, 1991);
113. David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
114. Robert Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: ?Cambridge University Press, 2001);
115. Jonathan Glickstein, American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety: Wages, Competition, and Degraded Labor in the Antebellum United States (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002);
116. And Gunther Peck, "White Slavery and Whiteness: A Transnational View of the Sources of Working-Class Radicalism and Racism," Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 1 (Summer 2004): 41-63.
117. Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, 4, 232.
118. Carolyn Merchant has voiced a similar argument in her essay "Reinventing Eden: Western History as a Recovery Narrative," in Uncommon Ground, ed. Cronon, 132-70.
119. Heinrich Von Thunen, The Isolated State in Relation to Agriculture and Political Economy, Volume Two: The Natural Wage and its Relation to the Rate of Interest and to Economic Rent (Berlin, 1842),
120. republished in Bernard W. Dempsey, The Frontier Wage: The Economic Organization of Free Agents (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1960),48,
121. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, ch. 25, sec. 2.
122. Cited in Modern Library Books, (New York: Random House, 1953),681.
123. Dempsey, Frontier Wage, 336.
124. Marx, Capital, vol. I, ch. 25, sec. 2, 681.
125. Karl Jacoby, "Classifying Nature: In Search of a Common Ground Between Environmental and Social History," in New Approaches to Environmental History, ed. Ranjan Chakrabarti (forthcoming). The article was first presented at the ASEH meeting in Durham, North Carolina, March 30, 2001. Paper in author's possession.
126. Jamie Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800-1862 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999).
127. Reeve Huston Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Part Politics in Antebellum New York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
128. On the importance of land reform in the United States during the 1840s, see also Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislaver and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-54 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
129. For more details on Evans's life, see Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 17-47.
130. The Workingman's Advocate March 16,1844, 2.
131. Ibid., March 30, 1844, 3.
132. Ibid., March 16, 1844, 2.
133. Sterling F. Delano, Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004);
134. Richard Francis, Transcendental Utopias: Individual and Community at Brook Farm, Pruitlands, and Walden (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997);
135. George Wallingford Noyes, Free Love in Utopia: John Humphrey Noyes and the Origin of the Oneida Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001):
136. John Humphrey Noyes, The History of American Socialisms (Philadelphia: J.B> Lippincott, 1870).
137. The Workingman's Advocate, February 7, 1846, 3; July 16, 1845, 1; January 25, 1845, 1; July 19, 1856, 3; and January 3, 1846, 2.
138. Ibid., July 6, 1844, 3.
139. See Thomas Klubock's essay in Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973-2002, ed. PeterWinn (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
140. See also unpublished papers by Steve Marquadt, "Pesticides, Parakeets, and Unions in the Costa Rican Banana Industry, 1938-1962";
141. and John Soluri, "Banana Cultures in Comparative Perspective."
142. Many thanks to Thomas Rogers for organizing an outstanding conference entitled "Labor and the Environment: Points of Departure," the 22nd Annual Latin American Labor History Conference, April 2005, Duke University. All papers in author's possession and available online at home page for The Duke Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
143. This description of Austin's urban geography is based on years of observation and interviews with residents of both east and west Austin. For a similar description of Austin's residential geography and environmental inequalities within it, see Maria Dahmus, "Finding Common Ground: An Exploration of the Environmental Movements in Austin, Texas in 1991 and 1992," (Undergraduate Thesis, Plan II Honors Program, University of Texas at Austin, May 3,2000), 15-17, 25-26.
144. For an excellent environmental analysis of an urban social landscape, see Klingle, "Urban by Nature," 295-365.
145. Austin American-Statesman, March 1, 1992, A1; June 7, 1992, A1.
146. Austin American Statesman, January 4,1993, A1.
147. See also Dahmus, 'Finding Common Ground," 31-32.
148. For coverage of PODER's campaign against the recycling plant, see Kate Van Scoy, "Eastsiders Decry BFI," Austin Chronicle, May 30,1997.
149. See also, Dahmus, "Finding Common Ground," 42-43.