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the nature of labor: FAULT LINES AND COMMON GROUND IN ENVIRONMENTAL AND LABOR HISTORY
GUNTHER PECK
ABSTRACT
Recent efforts to build bridges between environmental and labor history have relied primarily on the idea of alienation, a concept that means sharply different things to each subfield and which represents an incomplete foundation for collaboration. Instead, historians need to analyze and historicize geographies of labor. Comprising the spatial, material, and cultural connections between nature and labor, geographies of labor elucidate not only how nonhuman nature and human work have historically become alienated, but also how they have inspired mutually defining visions of redeemed nature and labor, from the 1830s to the present.
| EVEN BEFORE THE tear gas had dispersed from the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in December 1999, writers across the political spectrum were heralding the emergence of a newly energized social movement in the United States, one that combined historically divided members of the Left in America: a powerful environmentalist block and a reinvigorated labor movement. The alliance of workers and environmentalists in Seattle kindled both hopes and fears of a working-class green coalition in the United States, one reminiscent of the German Green Party of the 1980s or even of the American Populists of the 1890s, who also created an urban-rural alliance of middling Americans against corporate monopolies and their "unnatural" profits. Yet to many, such utopian hopes now seem naive as a more familiar story of conflict and fragmentation between environmental and labor activists has reasserted itself. In the wake of the World Trade Center bombings, conservative labor unions such as the Teamsters have signed onto President George Bush's energy policy and supported drilling for oil in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, while the activists who briefly held sway in Seattle's streets have seemingly melted back into the woodwork. Utopian hopes have been followed by skeptical reassessments of the relationship between workers and the environment.1 |
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Utopian hopes followed by sober reassessments have their parallel in the fields of labor and environmental history. In 1990, after a decade of spectacular growth in the environmental movement, historian William Cronon announced that "the time has come to build better bridges to our colleagues in other fields of history." For Cronon, finding common ground with social and cultural history was not only morally warranted, but an opportunity that promised to make environmental history a field of inquiry that no North American historian, whatever his or her specialty, could safely ignore. Despite fears that Cronon's call might "reduce environmental history to social history," environmental historians proved themselves remarkably skilled in reaching out to other fields over the ensuing years. Some of their most innovative work, by historians like Richard White and Andrew Hurley, built bridges to labor history and made class a central category of their analyses of the environment.2 |
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