The late Guyanese historian and political activist Walter Rodney began his posthumously published A History of the Guyanese Working People 1881–1905 (1981) by analyzing the “physical environment and class interests” in coastal Guyana.Footnote 2 Writing against narratives that privileged the roles played by European capital and technology, Rodney argued that working people made large contributions to the “humanization” of the Guyanese environment. He noted that a powerful planter class placed severe constraints on working people who were “in no position to control the available technology or to initiate environmental intervention.”Footnote 3 Political power was important, but Rodney noted that the environment played “a determining role in limiting the activities of all sections of the population [original emphasis].”Footnote 4 Writing an “intelligible narrative” of Guyana's history then, was “impossible” without an understanding of Guyana's environment.
Most contemporary environmental historians would likely agree with Rodney: Making sense of the lives of working people requires scholars to be sensitive not only to social relations (e.g., property or labor markets) but also to ecological dynamics (e.g., pathogens, floods, or energy flows) and to how societal responses to such dynamics both reflect and modify social relations. Moreover, Rodney's attention to class conflict, ecological constraints, and control over people and environments resonates forcefully with the central themes of recently published studies that combine labor and environmental histories.Footnote 5
However, labor-environment dynamics quickly fade in Rodney's narrative; vivid images of slaves up to their knees in water excavating drainage ditches give way to more triumphant depictions of stevedores leading a strike over wage rates that helps to spark an urban riot. Rodney concludes his analysis of the causes of the unrest by calling for a “culture history” of the Guyanese working people to better understand what made them “long-suffering or impatient or what transformed them from apathy to combat.”Footnote 6 He suggests that working people and the middle class “clarified their identity” through political struggle, an idea with which many labor historians would agree.
The tensions within Rodney's narrative, which begins by exploring environmental constraints on working people and ends with a focus on working-class identity and politics, hint at both the potential payoffs and challenges of writing labor-environmental hybrid histories. By narrating how workers’ lives are shaped by ecological as well as social relationships, labor-environmental hybrids create new ways of rematerializing labor history without recycling Marxian models of political economy whose critiques of capitalism tend to reinforce valuations of nature derived from economic theory. In addition, integrating environmental perspectives into labor history can help to undermine linear narratives of progress or decline by revealing the importance of contingency and the dynamism of the material world. Nevertheless, environmental historians’ desire to incorporate nonhuman elements into their analyses runs the risk of creating a “green” determinism in which phenomena like diseases, climate change, or soil exhaustion are invoked to explain the collective actions taken by working people. A rematerialized labor history therefore, should follow Walter Rodney's lead by acknowledging the dynamic environmental contexts in which people live without forgetting the ways that discourses, images, and rituals largely define, mediate, and modify nature.
This is not the first essay to explore ways to bring labor and environmental history closer together; for at least twenty-five years, scholars have either advocated for more dialogue between social and environmental historians or critiqued dominant strands of North Atlantic environmentalism for elitism and/or cultural parochialism.Footnote 7 In addition, a handful of scholars have called attention to the role of organized labor in the United States in advocating for pollution controls or conservation.Footnote 8 Historians studying working people outside of the United States are also paying increased attention to the environmental dimensions of lived experience.Footnote 9 Instead of attempting to write an exhaustive historiographical review, I provide a critique of two relatively recent prize-winning books, Myrna Santiago's The Ecology of Oil and Thomas Andrews's Killing for Coal, in order to probe how scholars are conceptualizing and writing labor-environmental histories. I reference the work of several scholars in the process but many others are excluded due to constraints on space and time.Footnote 10 My objective then is to go beyond cheerleading for liberal-left scholarly coalition building in order to identify some of the tensions that run through these important projects.
Conceptualizing Histories of Labor and the Environment
Any discussion about the vigor of labor-environment hybrids presupposes a shared understanding of what the two “parent” terms mean. In fact, putting clear bounds around either labor or environment has proven to be difficult and often contentious. However, one readily discernable trend over the past twenty years has been a broadening in the meanings of both terms.Footnote 11 As Rodney's 1981 study anticipated, a decoupling of environmental history from movements to preserve “wilderness,” along with efforts to expand labor history beyond the confines of an industrial (usually male) proletariat, have opened up spaces, both literal and figurative, in which hybrid labor-environmental histories can take root.
An “environment” then, need not conjure images of unbroken forests, snow-capped mountains, or winding rivers but increasingly refers to a built (or degraded) place that is an assemblage of things and processes modified, but not entirely controlled by people. As scholars such as Richard White and Bruno Latour have argued, even the most complex (“technologically advanced”) workplaces are tied in very real, if indirect, ways to basic environmental processes.Footnote 12 A labor-environmental history then, could transpire in a nineteenth-century logging camp or a twentieth-century plutonium-manufacturing complex because in both settings porous human bodies interact, directly or indirectly, with air, water, other organisms or geophysical processes (e.g., radiation).
In these diverse settings, scholars have incorporated a wide range of working people into labor-environmental histories. Some of the first formulations of “working environments” drew their inspiration from occupational health hazards found in industrial factory settings.Footnote 13 However, recent labor-environmental histories have involved workers in agriculture, mining, petroleum, and ranching. “Working people” include wage laborers, slaves, debt-peons, smallholders, and hunter/foragers, a reflection of a wider trend among most labor historians not to limit their field to unionized, industrial workers.
Labor-environmental histories have also conformed to one less fortunate tendency among labor historians: They have largely neglected environmental-reproductive labor histories, leaving the women and men who forged livelihoods in households, nurseries, or the service sector on the margins.Footnote 14 There may be an unintended machismo in a tendency to study work in “extreme” environments (e.g., subterranean mining or deep-sea fishing) instead of the ubiquitous spaces where reproductive labor occurs. Provisioning households with food, fuel, water, and emotional sustenance—responsibilities primarily assumed by working women—has historically been both time-consuming and a source of social conflict. These conflicts take place in both households and parliaments; twentieth-century governments of all stripes have been challenged by the need to provision urban households.Footnote 15 Moreover, biological reproduction from conception to childbirth has been, and continues to be, a socioecological process filled with dangers for poor women and their infants.Footnote 16
Some readers will question the merit of defining a field of inquiry so broadly as to include mines, assembly lines, kitchens, and bedrooms as valid sites in which to situate histories of labor and the environment. Although there may be diminishing analytical returns from a further broadening of definitions of labor, meaningful distinctions are best formulated when they are derived from a series of comparative explorations rather than a priori divisions (e.g., rural-urban; private-public; or agricultural-industrial) that often inform histories of working people.Footnote 17 In theory, any labor undertaken by people is connected to environmental processes and therefore labor-environmental hybrid approaches have broad applicability and the potential to spark conversations across subfields.
Writing Labor-Environmental Histories
Both the benefits of holism and the pitfalls of “overexpansion” are readily apparent in how recent scholarship has put environments to work. One revealing tendency is that many scholars have sought to find terms other than “environment” with which to perform analytical work. For example, Myrna Santiago's study of petroleum in Mexico uses the concept of the “ecology of oil.” Thomas Andrews's reinterpretation of the mine wars that rocked early-twentieth-century Colorado employs “workscape.” Other scholars have used the terms “landscape” or “agroecology.” A jaded reader might dismiss these terms as scholarly jargon, but they are indicative of the authors’ attempts to find language that can operationalize an approach that is simultaneously holistic and sensitive to frictions and fault lines—what Rodney expressed as “environment and class interest.”
For example, Myrna Santiago defines the ecology of oil as an “integrated package” of “rapid and radical” changes in local land tenure, local land use, and local social structures.Footnote 18 She begins by tracing shifts in Mexican government policies related to ownership of land and minerals before describing, in considerable detail, the ecological and social transformations brought about by the extraction of oil in Veracruz. By paying attention to both the materiality of the region's crude oil and shifting legal regimes, Santiago is able to explain both why indigenous people initially collaborated with petroleum surveyors, and the severe hazards posed for oil workers and local communities by explosions, gushers, and spills. Her framework also allows her to explain how foreign oil companies’ racist policies left Mexican workers and their families living in vulnerable places.Footnote 19
Santiago devotes her final three chapters to what she calls “challenges” to the ecology of oil, the culmination of which was Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas's decision, in the face of widespread labor unrest, to expropriate the holdings of foreign oil companies in 1938. Santiago argues convincingly that as early as 1921, the hardships facing oil workers’ provoked a shift in how the revolutionary Mexican government viewed the oil industry. Instead of praising foreign oil companies for modernizing Mexico, some officials characterized the oil fields as “wastelands” where foreign businesses polluted waterways and squandered the nation's wealth.Footnote 20 However, in the last two chapters, the tight connection between ecological and social change somewhat unravels; Santiago's history adheres closely to nationalist narratives of organized labor struggling against foreign capital. The Ecology of Oil, then, shares some of the uneven quality of Rodney's study of Guyanese workers. It successfully puts the environment to work as a dynamic context that has concrete effects on labor process and worker health, but the connection between the timing and content of labor mobilizations and environmental change remains tenuous.
Thomas Andrews's Killing for Coal also explores connections between environmental change and labor conflict—Colorado's “Great Coalfield War” of 1913–1914. More precisely, Andrews sets out to examine how “underground interactions between men and nature fomented decades of militancy in the southern Colorado coalfields.”Footnote 21 In order to do this, he introduces the notion of a “workscape”:
a constellation of unruly and ever-unfolding relationships—not simply land, but also air and water, bodies and organisms, as well as the language people use to understand the world, and the lens of culture through which they make sense of and act on their surroundings.
This definition, presumably inspired by theories of landscape, combines the physical and the symbolic. But, for all its breadth, it seems incomplete—how, for example, do capital or technology fit into this definition?
But my main concern with workscape has less to do with any omission than with the heavy lifting it does in the book. Andrews argues that the workscape “constituted both the source of the southern colliers’ persistent discontent and a unifying factor that drew coalfield migrants from remarkably diverse backgrounds to make common cause.”Footnote 22 This is simultaneously a powerful and a muddy statement. On the one hand, Andrews's detailed description of mine work and the hazards it presented for miners leave little doubt that Colorado coal miners, like their counterparts in other places and times, struggled to maintain control over a working environment that often proved deadly.
However, Andrews elsewhere attributes mineworker mobilizations to “a complex mixture of causes” including downward pressure on miners’ wages and the arrival of United Mine Workers organizers.Footnote 23 He also suggests that the paternalism underlying coal companies’ establishment of company towns chafed against the miners’ sense of masculinity. Here Andrews makes an intriguing linkage to living spaces, workplace culture, and labor militancy that resonates with work done elsewhere on company towns.Footnote 24 However, his laudable attention to the above-ground worlds inhabited by miners and their families potentially weakens his argument by pointing to multiple roots—above and below ground—for miners’ collective actions.
Killing for Coal, then, uses the environment or “workscape” to explain worker resistance to big capital; the experience of working in the mines drives workers to make common cause against the coal companies. Andrews seems to attribute the development of class consciousness, or at least short-term solidarity, to the material conditions in the mines. However, he does not provide the evidence or theoretical framework to identify with precision the relationship between environmental change and the timing and content of workers’ collective action.
In sum, Andrews does a magnificent job of recontextualizing coal miners’ lives by exploring the materiality and meanings of coal at points of production and consumption. By depicting not only the hardships of mining, but also the transformative nature of burning coal on the lives of people in growing cities like Denver, Killing for Coal makes an invaluable contribution toward revitalizing mining history at a time when mineral extraction is sparking conflicts throughout the world. However, the concept of “workscape” ultimately cannot bear the burden of historical explanation for miners’ collective action because, to borrow Walter Rodney's words, Andrews does not explain how or why miners became sufficiently “impatient” with their “long-suffering” to take up arms when they did.
The strengths of the multi-award winning books by Santiago and Andrews lie first and foremost in their attention to the materiality of life. They situate working people in worlds that are at once historical and spatial, social and ecological. These histories do not unfold onto static stages: Oil fields and coalmines are dynamic, variable, and shifting. Moreover, both scholars are attentive to racial, class, and gender fault lines that shape working people's cultures. But, in contrast to earlier histories written on these topics, social relations at the point of production are crucial but not all-determining; technologies, biogeophysical environments, and living spaces, or places where the work of reproduction occurs, all condition workers’ lives, creating both constraints and opportunities for collective actions.
I have little doubt that both Santiago and Andrews are well aware of the dangers of explanatory frameworks rooted in material conditions. The shortcomings of both books reflect the challenges associated with blending labor histories that tend to be structured around events occurring in discrete periods of time, and environmental histories that often trace long-term processes of change. Because both Santiago's and Andrews's narratives are largely driven by critical moments of labor uprisings, environmental contexts serve primarily to explain the origins of social unrest.
I encountered similar problems when trying to integrate labor and environmental history in the context of the export banana industry in Honduras.Footnote 25 On the one hand, I chose to focus on monocultures controlled by corporate agribusiness because I wanted to call attention to how environmental change affected wage workers in order to counter what at the time was a tendency for environmental historians to focus on actors, including indigenous people, who often lived on the margins of labor markets or modern economies. On the other hand, inspired in part by Elias Mandela's study of rural people in Malawi, I wanted to use a framework that acknowledged the time and energy that rural people devoted to working with plants, soils, and animals.Footnote 26
I chose to use agroecology as an analytical tool because of its premise that cropping systems are “open” and interact with their surrounding environments. In the course of doing research, I gained an appreciation for how the dynamism of export banana monocultures affected the organization of work by helping to give rise to internal migratory flows that included working people moving into, and out of wage labor jobs. Monocultures spawned plant diseases, the control of which triggered crosscutting processes across time and space that created short-term economic opportunities for workers and smallholders. But, agribusiness's turn to techno-scientific responses to production problems, ultimately concentrated power in the hands of capital, increasing small-holders’ economic vulnerability while exposing fieldworkers to new health risks in the form of toxic agrochemicals.Footnote 27
In contrast to Santiago and Andrews, I largely sidestepped a massive strike organized by banana workers in 1954, the outcome of which had repercussions on national politics in Honduras. I devoted more time to tracing how the banana companies responded to the new unions and government social policies that resulted from the strike than I did to explaining how and why the strike took place. This emphasis largely reflected my interest in explaining how the banana industry and the nature of work transformed over the course of a century during which time the power of organized labor rose and fell.
Steve Marquardt's research on the export banana industry in Costa Rica similarly draws on insights from agroecology to explain changes in the labor process, arguing that plant diseases led fruit company managers to devalue fieldworker knowledge of banana cultivation in favor of techno-scientific approaches.Footnote 28 Significantly, evidence from both Costa Rica and Honduras indicates that the leadership of banana unions tended to focus on wages, health care, and job security rather than occupational health and labor control.Footnote 29 However, rank-and-file banana workers did not remain passive in the face of job hazards. For example, banana workers who applied pesticides often voted with their feet—working short stints in jobs considered dangerous before moving on to find other work. They also found ways to convey their dislike of specific agrochemicals or field tasks, compelling fruit company scientists and managers to modify production processes.
Labor-environmental histories of the export banana industry show that songbirds, amphibians, and jaguars are not the only critters whose lives have been endangered by deforestation or exposure to toxic chemicals. Twentieth-century monocultures also created life-threatening conditions for human field workers. That said, these new interpretations of the banana industry?s history underscore the challenges of drawing causal links between the material conditions in which people work and collective action. At times, solidarity among banana workers took the form of strikes, but on other occasions, groups of workers expressed their dissatisfaction by quitting their jobs and migrating in search of new livelihoods.
Rematerializing labor history by situating production processes, labor markets, or worker health in dynamic environmental contexts generally does not explain collective actions that rupture routines. Historians also need to grasp something of the meanings that workers inscribe on their environments. In his book, The Deepest Wounds, Thomas Rogers examines competing discourses about landscapes in the context of sugarcane production in twentieth-century Northeast Brazil.Footnote 30 Building explicitly on Walter Rodney's desire to give analytical power to environmental factors without having them “balloon to deterministic proportions,” Rogers traces the entanglement of political power, labor, and changing landscapes in an impoverished region that gave rise to powerful rural union movements in the 1960s.
The title of Rogers's book, drawn from an essay by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, refers to the “wounds” inflicted by monoculture, slavery, and land concentration. The author does not accept Freyre's statement uncritically, but rather uses it as a point of departure to explore divergent discourses on cane landscapes. Rogers argues that elites cultivated an idea of a laboring landscape through which power relations became “naturalized,” inscribed not only in regional histories, but also in regional landscapes. Elite power over nature was extended through the bodies of workers, resulting in the enjoining of land and labor in elite memories.
Workers held divergent understandings of cane landscapes, viewing them as “landscapes of captivity,” (a phrase that resonates with the title of a twentieth-century Honduran novel, The Green Prison, about workers’ lives on banana plantations).Footnote 31 However, for some tenant cane workers, access to small patches of land on which to grow crops represented a degree of freedom from the oppressive cane monocultures. Rogers's research reveals that the kinds of crops cultivated by tenants reflected not only soil conditions, but also power relations: Planters generally restricted tenants to crops with short growing cycles; a worker who planted bananas or mango trees made a claim to usufruct rights that implicitly extended beyond a single growing season.
Rogers uses competing ideas about cane landscapes to enrich understandings of “politics, state dynamics, and labor mobilization” during the 1960s when both Catholic and Communist organizers mobilized rural workers. He concludes that workers’ growing engagement with state institutions, including court systems, gave rise to a new class of workers capable of “an admirable level of collective action.”Footnote 32 Rogers does not ignore material conditions, attributing regional differences in patterns of unionization “to environmental and agricultural factors” including the expansion of sugarcane cultivation linked to the development of larger mills and hybrid cane varieties.Footnote 33 In regions where the expansion of monocultures led to land expulsions, workers were drawn to the messages of Communist organizers. Rogers adds “environmental damage” to the list of frustrations that compelled workers to organize, but he provides more evidence of workers’ objections to changes in the organization of work, wage scales, and access to land than of workers’ protestations over environmental degradation.
The Deepest Wounds then makes its biggest contribution to labor-environmental history by putting landscapes to work as a means of understanding both planter expressions of power and workers’ challenges to that power. Rogers builds successfully on Walter Rodney's insights by showing how cane workers’ actions are best understood when situated in both agro-environmental and political contexts. This integration yields some intriguing insights that merit further research, including evidence that some rural workers came to see decent wages rather than land as the best means to secure freedom.
Rogers's analysis of long-term environmental changes, including water pollution and deforestation, is less satisfying, but a chapter about changing perceptions of fire in the cane region raises some intriguing and thorny questions about how historians should read historical landscapes in highly politicized contexts. Finally, Rogers's claim that the power of planters is extended through the bodies of workers merits elaboration not only to demonstrate the hardships that fieldworkers faced, but also to reveal the fiction behind the idea of “selling one's labor” as if discrete acts of labor can be neatly separated from the bodies that perform them.
Working bodies are at the center of Linda Nash's Inescapable Ecologies, a history of ideas about health and environments in California.Footnote 34 Nash does not set out to write a labor-environmental history per se, but rather examines the history of ideas about human health and the environment in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century California. The second half of Inescapable Ecologies focuses on post-Second World War agricultural landscapes marked by a dramatic increase in the use of pesticides and migrant farm labor (mostly from Mexico). By the late 1960s, both Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and the organizing efforts of the United Farmworkers led to a greater appreciation of the porosity of bodies regardless of racial, ethnic or gendered identifications. However, the migratory nature of farmworkers presented challenges to occupational health practitioners who were more accustomed to models of industrial hygiene that assumed workers labored in a specific factory.Footnote 35
The widespread use of pesticides also blurred the division between work and home environments. Chemicals like DBCP, produced in a California-based plant owned by Occidental Chemical, produced sterility among the unionized male workers in the plant and contaminated ground water in the Central Valley where many nonunionized farmworkers lived and labored. Moreover, although the US federal government restricted use of DBCP in 1979, the product continued to be exported to Central America where workers applied it on banana plantations. The transnational dimensions of DBCP's history raise a host of important questions about the outcomes, intended and otherwise, of collective actions of workers and environmentalists operating in a world where power is exercised by both national and transnational actors (e.g., states and corporations).Footnote 36
Inescapable Ecologies is not a labor history in the traditional sense. Nevertheless, by considering the intersection of techno-scientific ideas and practices, toxic chemicals, farmworkers’ bodies, and labor organizing, Linda Nash demonstrates how farmworker protests over pesticide exposure helped to question models of public health predicated on the ability to separate bodies from environments. In so doing, she provides an example of how scholars can merge not only labor and environmental histories, but also the history of science, a field that—not unlike environmental history—often struggles to integrate working people into its analysis.
The Fruits of Labor and the Tasks at Hand
This small sample of recent labor-environmental histories indicates that scholars are conceptualizing “the environment” in at least three ways: (1) as a dynamic context that shapes the quotidian lives of working people; (2) as a set of ideas about relationships among human groups and between people and nonhuman nature; and (3) as an underlying cause of labor unrest.
To date, historians have arguably harvested the biggest fruits by putting the environment to work as a dynamic context. This approach calls attention to negative externalities (e.g., pollution, deforestation, and workplace diseases) seldom considered in labor histories grounded in political economy. In this context, many authors call attention to how environmental change affected workers’ bodies. Mine explosions, pesticide exposures, mosquitoes, floods, contaminated drinking water, and insalubrious housing are just some of the on-the-job hazards that workers faced. By paying attention to health, historians reveal the extraeconomic hardships faced by workers and their families while simultaneously blurring the social and environmental dimensions of work. Ideas about health are historically bound up with notions of race, class, gender, and culture, but by conceptualizing human bodies as porous, scholars can reveal connections as well as divergences. All workers become, to varying degrees, “ecologically modified organisms.”
Situating labor histories in environmental contexts also helps to underscore the radical transformations of life associated with modern political economies, capitalist or socialist.Footnote 37 In so doing, labor-environmental histories can reveal new dimensions on a classic theme of labor history—control over work process. If true that the power to transform environments has historically been extended through human bodies, then the ability of empires, nation-states, slave owners, landed elites, or capitalists to control a workforce is absolutely central to large-scale environmental transformations. If also true that laborers have pushed back against such control in myriad ways, then the proliferation of wage-earning “consumer societies” with large ecological footprints is best approached not as an inevitable outcome of industrialization, but rather as the result of political and social conflict and compromise. In sum, more histories are needed that simultaneously explore the intersections of contests for control over environments and labor.Footnote 38
That said, I am not convinced that a sensitivity to environmental change (or continuities) would significantly alter how we explain the motivations, timings, and/or outcomes of mass protests such as the oil workers’ strike in Mexico, the bloody miners’ strike in Colorado, or the upheaval in the cane fields of Brazil. There can be little doubt that working environments shape peoples’ bodies and minds, but it does not follow that a common working environment produces shared experiences and meanings among laborers. Labor-environmental historians therefore should strive for greater theoretical clarity about the relationship between lived experiences, perceptions of environmental change, and political actions. Consequently, we need not only rich descriptions of changing work environments, but also more studies like those by Thomas Rogers and Linda Nash that explore how elites’ and workers’ ideas about bodies, health, and environments have changed (or not) over time.
There is also a need for labor-environmental histories situated in environmental contexts beyond the forests, farms, pastures, and mines that dominate current research. For example, labor-environmental perspectives on fisheries, tourism, construction, and transportation industries are few and far between. In spite of the early attention to occupational health in factory settings, labor-environmental historians have arguably neglected urban (and suburban) environments. The aforementioned failure to incorporate household labor and environments in a meaningful way merits repeating.
One conceptual shift that could help historians of, say, domestic workers or meatpackers in cities to imagine fruitful ways to integrate environmental dimensions into their work is to conceive of the environment in terms of energy flows, rather than landscapes. Human labor is, from an ecological perspective, a form of (renewable) energy. The replacement of energy generated by people, plants, and animals with that produced by fossil fuels and electricity has had far-reaching effects on work processes and workplace conditions in rural and urban areas during the twentieth century.
Among the most direct effects of this still-unfolding energy transition has been, as both Killing for Coal and The Ecology of Oil demonstrate, an increase in mining and drilling activities around the world during the past century. The massive expansion of hydropower during the Cold War has been equally significant in many parts of the world. All of these projects involved much human labor and environmental change to produce these resources. However, most workers arguably encountered energy not where it was produced, but rather in the form of electricity or refined liquid fuels. The availability of inexpensive electricity in urban areas beginning in the late nineteenth century led to significant changes for laborers involved in manufacturing, food processing, and transportation sectors. The subsequent diffusion of things like diesel-powered irrigation pumps, refrigeration, and, of course, automobiles, trucks, and planes altered nearly all work processes everywhere by the late twentieth century. In addition, electricity has transformed household life and the work invested to maintain it.
The increased use of fossil fuels and electricity has had multiple effects on labor. Electricity's near-magical ability to transform substances like coal, methane, or flowing water into a form of energy for use in everything from assembly lines to light bulbs has altered geographies of work. For example, the scale and wealth attained by Argentina's beef industry in the early twentieth century is explained in part by the fertility of the Pampas and a large immigrant labor pool seeking waged work in packing plants, but the arrival of refrigeration and steamships was also crucial.Footnote 39 More recently, a similar process has occurred in southern Chile, where the rise of large-scale, export-oriented aquaculture or “fish farming” is only imaginable in a world where refrigeration, airplanes, and large economic inequalities coexist. Thousands of men and women process fish in a work environment that requires an abundant supply of electricity and a “flexible” human labor force. Integrating energy and labor histories therefore requires going beyond coal and oil fields to the workspaces (including households) where, by the late twentieth century, fossil fuels became central to the labor and leisure of most working people in the Americas.Footnote 40
Finally, historians writing labor-environmental stories need to temper their apparent bias for labor-green alliances by considering instances where such alliances broke down, were appropriated by politicians, or were marked by ambivalence.Footnote 41 In the post-Second World War United States, union leadership and rank-and-file members at times supported environmental causes, but they also appear to have embraced—along with many environmentalists—a “consumers’ republic,” that fostered an appreciation for certain kinds of environments (e.g., those that made for good camping, fishing, or sunbathing) while simultaneously degrading others.Footnote 42 More work is needed therefore on the working- and middle-class roots of consumerism.
In sum, by calling attention to the materiality of stuff like coal, petroleum, fruit, or even electricity, labor-environmental histories help to “make strange” labor markets, commodities, and capital accumulation that paradoxically become “naturalized” by historical frameworks that privilege economic relations over ecological ones. Moreover, by approaching the commodification of life forms (including people!) as a contingent, contested, and incomplete process that can veer in unexpected directions, labor-environmental histories locate the dynamics of historical change in both human agency and nonhuman processes.
An integration of labor and environment invariably complicates the stories we tell and the models that we use to structure them. However, it seems to me that the growing number of historical dimensions (e.g., cultural, economic, social, political, and environmental) that scholars increasingly list as being worthy of consideration is admirably ecumenical but of unclear analytical utility. I hope that by experimenting with labor-environmental hybrids, historians will generate new syntheses that can help to rematerialize working people's struggles for dignity, justice, and control over their lives.
