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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 1
      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 2
      But ten years after the publication of The Organic Machine and Environmental Inequalities, the fields of environmental and labor history remain largely disconnected from each other.3 While it is true dozens of articles in Environmental History have explored topics about work and unions over the past decade and several new dissertations promise to transform the relationship between environmental and labor history, virtually no articles in Labor History or its new incarnation Labor have considered topics central to the heart of environmental history: nonhuman nature or the environment, however defined.4 There remains little "nature" in labor history and few working-class subjects in environmental history. Equally significant are the enduring analytical and methodological differences between the two fields. Holism—the attempt to discern patterns true throughout human societies—is distrusted by labor historians precisely for the ways it eclipses class relations, the conceptual heart of labor history. For many environmental historians, in turn, class analysis remains a peripheral topic, one that distracts or even prevents them from giving nature—meaning the non-human world rather than human labor—its long neglected historical agency. While environmental historians have done a fine job elucidating the evolution of geographies of capital, they have largely neglected the central role of class relations in shaping and creating structures of capital accumulation and environmental change.5 3
      In this essay, I offer my own reassessment of the possibilities and pitfalls of collaboration between labor and environmental history. I ask two questions: What kinds of common ground, if any, exist between environmental and labor history? And how might delineating an analytical common ground between studies of nature and labor transform the questions and narratives that environmental and labor historians construct, whether or not they are seeking to collaborate? I focus my essay on an arena where environmental and labor history have long intertwined and overlapped: the North American West.6 While new and old western historians disagree about the boundaries, definitions, and meanings of the West, most begin with a sense of its holistic importance to subjects of inquiry within its boundaries. As such, the West, whether defined as place or process, provides an ideal arena for exploring the historiographical and conceptual connections between labor and environmental history. Indeed, western labor and environmental historians both have highlighted the causal importance of material conditions and shaped their narratives around changes wrought by the growth and penetration of the market in North America. They have thus told complementary stories of declension, of worlds in nature and in labor lost at the hands of capitalists and capitalism.7 4
      Yet while the theme of alienation organizes a great many labor and environmental histories in the West, I argue that the concept means sharply different things to each subfield and represents an incomplete foundation for intellectual collaboration. Common ground between labor and environmental history does not exist in the literal terrain of the West or in the ideas of region or alienation. Rather, common ground is analytical in form, a concept I call a geography of labor. Comprising the spatial, material, and cultural connections between nature and labor, geographies of labor elucidate, I aim to show, both class formations and changes in the land simultaneously. Rather than simply mapping the ways nonhuman nature and human work have been alienated historically, I use the concept of a geography of labor to help recover the power of imagined visions of redeemed nature and labor and their impact on the material constellations of labor and nature we call home. I examine the conceptual foundations of a geography of labor by first looking at the fault lines and common ground between labor and environmental historians, exploring how each discipline has read and used each others' scholarship. I then consider the contributions of social theorists David Harvey and Heinrich Von Thunen to conceptualizing what a geography of labor is and how it provides a more productive starting for collaboration between labor and environmental history. In the final section, I briefly consider how the concept of a geography of labor helps illuminate overlooked connections between nature and labor in the origins of the British and American labor movements in the 1830s as well as among environmental activists in Austin Texas during the 1990s. 5
   

THE ENVIRONMENTS OF WESTERN LABOR HISTORY

 
IN 1844, KARL MARX described the relationship between wageworkers and nature in ways that would seem to provide an ideal starting point for integrating environmental and labor history. Wrote Marx, "That man's physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.... The alienation of labor estranges man's own body from him, as it does external nature."8 For Marx, nature was in both the human body and in the trees outside his dwelling. Wage labor alienated one from the nature in one's body and from nonhuman or "external" nature simultaneously. The key narratives of labor and environmental history were one whole. 6
      But Marx's insights have not produced a collaborative relationship between the fields for a variety of conceptual, methodological, and political reasons. First, alienation from nature and from labor, while certainly related topics for wage earners, have not historically coincided for all groups of people. To the contrary, they have frequently been at odds. Andrew Carnegie's capacity for returning to nature on Cumberland Island, Georgia, in the 1890s, for example, was based on the continuing alienation of his employees' labor power and the "nature" in their arms, backs, and brains at Homestead, Pennsylvania. Second, labor historians have focused most of their attention on the urban and industrial context of wage work. Here is where the notion of environment has had utility to labor historians: the politics of pollution and environmental hazards on the shop floor. But histories of industrial pollution, like most labor histories, typically ignore nonurban nature, along with the larger geographies of capital that created particular working-class environments.9 Focused on temporal transformations, Marx himself gave little attention to how class was spatially organized or to how nature, once alienated, continued to shape human history.10 7
      One striking exception to this pattern is the field of western labor history, where nature, the environment, and questions of geography and space have long occupied conspicuous places. Given their prominence, one might expect western labor to be on the cutting edge of revisionism within labor history as it struggles to incorporate the long-neglected dialectics of space. To understand why that has definitively not been the case, we need to consider the intellectual foundation of western labor's environmentalism: Frederick Jackson Turner. For Turner, the frontier and class relations were antithetical topics.11 Despite this, Turner had a profound influence on labor history, serving as a convenient way to understand the origins of American exceptionalism. Both John R. Commons and Werner Sombart, founders of U.S. labor history, believed, like Turner, that the western environment had created a "safety valve" of upward mobility and spatial dispersion, suppressing the growth of the U.S. labor movement in eastern cities. It was the western environment, among other factors, that explained why there was so little Socialism in the United States.12 8
      Western labor historians have long criticized Turner's individualism, but until recently few challenged the methodological nationalism that gave his ideas their narrative thunder. Indeed, nationalist assumptions about the western environment have pervaded both radical and conservative interpretations of western labor history. Cold warriors like Vernon Jensen claimed that " rough and ready frontier-like conditions... were highly formative," imbuing western workers with " freedom and independence" and job consciousness.13 New Left historians like Melvyn Dubofsky, by contrast, argued that western labor violence was not "the response of pioneer individualists," but rather the product of acute class conflict in "a citadel of American industrialism." The western environment created not individualism and job consciousness, Dubofsky argued, but the Wobblies and a class war fought with dynamite.14 But both Jensen and Dubofsky read the western environment in resolutely national terms: it was here that an indigenous American worker, whether exceptionally conservative or truly radical, was born. 9
      Nationalist renderings of the western environment have been extraordinarily difficult to recast within western labor history. Nearly all of the recent work in the field, including excellent monographs by David Emmons and Elizabeth Jameson, and my own transnational exploration of the politics of labor mobility, Reinventing Free Labor, explicitly eschew making the western worker metonymic for the nation and a homegrown working class.15 Yet when Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, J. Anthony Lukas recently considered the field, he turned to Turner to organize his narrative. In Big Trouble, a history of the celebrated trial of western radicals Big Bill Haywood, Charles Moyer, and Frank Pettibone, Lukas rooted their radicalism not in syndicalist ideology or any transnational context, but in the exceptional soil of the western frontier, noting that Haywood worked as a cowboy before becoming a labor leader.16 The enduring conflation of western environments with national identities perhaps explains why some of the best labor history in the region makes no mention of the West at all in its narratives or analyses. These omissions represent no failure on the part of historians like Dana Frank or Vicki Ruiz, but rather highlight the toll that nationalist approaches to the western environment have taken.17 Whether by design or unconscious reasoning, the search for an authentically American worker in the conservative or radical "soil" of the American West has centralized the experience of American-born, persistent, white male workers. 10
      Given the nationalistic legacies within western labor history, focusing on the western mining environment or the frontier hardly seems a useful method for redressing the field's enduring omissions. Indeed, it is the particular form of holism in the West—the way a single white male subject, usually a miner, represented the entire western working class—that is still, belatedly, being revised. Nonetheless, it is within the history of a celebrated mining community that we find the best integration of work and nature in the West. In Anaconda: Labor, Community, and Culture in Montana's Smelter City, Laura Mercier does not set out to write an environmental history, but her focus on the changing politics of "community unionism," what it meant and where it originated, enabled her to explore the powerful politics of nature in shaping the rise and fall of working-class politics in Montana's largest smelter community. By focusing on the second half of the twentieth century and thus avoiding a focus on the frontier, Mercier managed to demonstrate how workplace hazards such as " gases, dust, and other by-products" of smelting not only caused "irreparable damage to workers' health," but also stimulated and transformed workplace demands and militancy. In 1968, for example, Anaconda smelter worker's parent union, the United Steel Workers of America, called for a "national conference on air pollution," and led a national campaign to publicize the smelter's impact on workers' health, from contamination of workers' ground water and soil to rates of lung cancer two to three times the national average. Facing threats to shutdown the smelter a few years later, however, union leaders such as Natt Strizich turned their back on clean air, even opposing the passage of the 1972 Clean Air Act, asserting that "he had to worry about feeding his kids tomorrow, rather than what might happen to their health in 20 years."18 11
      By illuminating the cross-cutting nature of pollution on union politics, Mercier avoided romanticizing the relationship between nature and labor in the smelter city. The politics of working-class nature and working-class labor could and did pull at right angles to one another, helping Mercier explain how one of the most radical communities in the West during the early and middle years of the twentieth century became one of its most conservative by the early 1980s. Mercier's interest in the mining environment not only sensitized her to the importance of pollution to working-class politics, but also stimulated an expansive vision of class itself, one that moved beyond the arena of wage earning, so long dominated by men, to the unpaid work of smelter women and their domestic environments. Mercier did not need the category of nature or the environment to approach the history of work in Anaconda in holistic fashion: gender provided her a powerful tool for analyzing and expanding the terrain of masculinist working-class politics. But throughout Anaconda, it was the environment, both in the smelter and in worker's homes and communities, that helped Mercier link nature and labor, from the politics of working-class consumption to working-class production. In this regard, Mercier's book built on the accomplishments of another western mining drama, Salt of the Earth, that similarly featured working-class men and women linking gender and union politics to the working-class environments of mines and miners' homes.19 12
      But if Mercier successfully linked environmental and labor politics, her book nonetheless reflected the traditional limits of labor history's engagement with nature and environmental history: pollution and work-place hazards. Nonhuman nature beyond the shop floor or workers' homes remained largely absent from her story. Nature in Mercier's story was not a dynamic ecosystem or a set of relationships within the nonhuman world, but a thing, a commodity with toxic power. The story of nature, as of labor, was largely one of alienation and degradation. How nature continued to thrive outside human conventions in a mining camp, how nonhuman nature could be alive, with power and agency beyond market commodifications, were not entertained by Mercier or by any western labor historian. To see how environmental historians have investigated the nature of labor, by contrast, let us turn to the works of prominent western environmental historians. 13
   

THE LABORS OF ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

 
UNTIL RECENTLY, ENVIRONMENTAL historians did not so much read or misread labor history as offer a critique of Marx's labor theory of value. William Cronon and Donald Worster sharply disagreed in 1990 over the place of social history within environmental history, but they agreed that nature rather than labor created wealth. By foregrounding nature in the history of wealth creation, both Cronon and Worster sought to make nature visible within histories of human society and politics. "The reorganization of nature, not merely of society," wrote Worster, " is what we must uncover." For Worster, that meant moving beyond the conceptual boundaries of both Marx and labor history. "The buying of labor is too narrow a feature to cover so broad, multifaceted, and changing a mode of production as capitalism."20 Cronon concurred, observing that "Marx's emphasis on class relations whereby one human group extracts surplus from another is less satisfactory in environmental terms, since it marginalizes the very processes that environmental historians wish to place at the center of their work."21 Put simply, class relations focused on alienations of human labor obscured the conceptual heart of environmental history: nonhuman nature and people's relations to it. 14
      But where precisely did these critiques of Marx's labor theory of value leave the history of human work? Was there room for class analysis within the broader conceptual frameworks that environmental historians adopted? Class differences certainly appeared in Worster's Dust Bowl, but they make little analytical or narrative impact. "The destruction of the land was a shared phenomenon," Worster wrote, "caused by a similar economic order." Alienation was central to his classic tale of declension, but it was from nature rather than from labor. "The ultimate explanation of the Dust Bowl," Worster wrote, was not class conflict but "the alienation of man from the land, its commercialization, and its consequent abuse."22 Cronon, for his part, forthrightly acknowledged in his book Nature's Metropolis that " I have little to say... about social conflicts among classes." And, as some reviewers have noted, Cronon did not spend much time analyzing how social groups helped create or shape the geography of nature and capital that is the heart of his dramatic story.23 But Cronon did suggest that class analysis and changes in the land were compatible topics in his coauthored essay "Becoming West: Toward a New Meaning for Western History." Unlike Turner, Cronon argued that class relations existed on the frontier and became "more multitiered and hierarchical as frontier areas aged and began to develop regional identities." Here, in the transition from frontier to western region, seemed to be a common ground for both environmental history and class analysis.24 15
      Yet Cronon also outlined a hierarchy of topical and analytical importance within western history in the same essay. "Species shifting" and "market making" were subjects at the top of his research agenda, while class relations, subsumed within "self shaping" fell near the bottom. By separating "market making" and "self shaping," moreover, Cronon potentially distorted the ways class relations shaped a number of historical processes on the frontier. Market making, for example, historically has proceeded quite differently among workers and nonhuman nature. When a Wisconsin white pine tree became lumber in 1870, the commodification of first nature into second was complete and irreversible. When a miner in Virginia City, Nevada, sold his labor power for four dollars a day in 1868, by contrast, the alienation remained tenuous and subject to change. Indeed, Virginia City's miners frequently reversed the commodification of their labor and repossessed the nature in their bodies, known more conventionally as going on strike. These relations did not signify the end of the mining frontier, but rather helped create it and the western labor movement simultaneously. Cronon's ambitious model for western history, then, made more space for class relations than did Worster or Turner, but obscured the complex ways class shaped and created frontier history.25 16
      The most successful bridges between environmental and labor history have been built by Richard White, who made no mention of Turner or the frontier in his important book The Organic Machine. Rather than ignore alienations from labor or conflate them with alienations from nature, White located all human work within nature. "Human labor is energy," wrote White, and "so are the calories stored as fat by salmon for their journey upstream." Consequently, there could be no real separation of work from nature, even if people felt alienated from both. White used this starting point to make two important contributions: first, he criticized both environmentalists and environmental historians for "equating productive work in nature with destruction" and for ignoring the means by which most people have historically known nature: through labor. Second, by defining work as energy, White greatly expanded the boundaries of labor history, from a story of human wage work to all work, human and nonhuman. In so doing, White did not lose sight of class relations, but made them central to his narrative and analysis of changes in the Columbia River. White showed how Rudyard Kipling exemplified a middle-class white man's relation to the river, for example, while also examining how working-class fisherman using gilnets to capture salmon and working-class rhetoric to denounce their opponents "as capitalists who ruined and degraded both labor and nature." Yet unlike gilnetters, White did not conflate alienation from work and alienation from nature. As White suggests, gilnetters played a key role in the collapse of the Columbia's fish stocks. There was no easy romanticism in White's work precisely because of his sympathies for both people and nonhuman nature.26 17
      And yet White's energy-based definition of human labor left many of the complex politics of human work obscure. In one of his most provocative examples, White claimed "It is foolish to think that the danger and exhilaration of a man dangling from a cliff with a jackhammer somehow differs from that of rock climbers who also dangle from cliffs." By questioning the boundaries between work and play, White further expanded the boundaries of human "work," whether on a computer, on skis, or in a factory. But in so doing he also erased important political differences between work and play. For both rock climbers and dam builders, starting points mattered. Dangling from a dam may have been thrilling for some of Hoover dam's builders in the 1930s, but such thrills reflected necessities of work not choices. The dam builder's choice between working (and falling) or quitting (and starving) was not exactly equivalent to those of corporate-employed rock climbers, who might choose bungee jumping next week if rock climbing disappoints this week.27 18
      Starting points in nature and labor are central to Kathryn Morse's new environmental history of the Klondike Gold rush, The Nature of Gold, the most sophisticated effort yet by an environmental historian to make human labor central to her narrative and analysis. Morse examined the movement of men, women, food, animals, and minerals to and from Alaska during the late 1890s, weaving together a rich tapestry of human and nonhuman actors. Like White, Morse paid careful attention to the varied ways Klondike miners "knew nature" through their labor and forged connections to far off landscapes in the process. Morse paid particular attention to the movements of people and nature beyond one river's watershed that made the Klondike Gold rush possible, from the use of dogs to carry miners and their gear over the Chillkoot Trail, to the creation of steamship lines carrying miners from Seattle to the Yukon River, to the importation of canned foodstuffs throughout the trails that miners forged. In tracing the movements of nature and labor to and from the Klondike, Morse relied on the work of geographer David Harvey to map the many ways the mobility of miners' bodies, food, shelter, transport, and gold transformed both human and nonhuman actors in the Klondike.28 19
      Morse conceived of her story as one of forged connections between nature and labor, rather than a history of alienation. Virtually all of the spatialized markets that Morse investigated and mapped—whether for canned food, transport up rivers, shelter, or for gold itself—created connections to nature rather than alienation. Miners' "consumption of food and supplies connected them to nature along the Yukon creeks and to far distant natural places through a rapidly growing industrial economy." But Morse, like White, spent less time investigating how market connections also fomented moments of class conflict between human actors. While successfully mapping the importance of market connections, Morse nonetheless sidestepped the more challenging questions of how profits were generated from the commerce of migration and what kinds of class relations developed within it.29 20
      For both Morse and White, then, the political meanings of human work were defined primarily in relation to nonhuman nature rather than to class relations and class conflicts. "My bodily movement becomes electrical signals where my fingers intersect with a machine," wrote White of his work on a computer. "The lights on the screen need electricity, and this particular electricity comes from dams on the Skagit or the Columbia. Those dams kill fish.... Nature, altered and changed, is in my room."30 By making nature visible—even in his computer—White combatted a singular feature of middle-class office work: the sense of alienation from nature. But White nonetheless neglected a host of other environments that defined the political "nature" of his labor on a computer. As a tenured professor, White defined the contours of his writing—where, when, and for how long. White is also a remarkably skilled wordsmith, an intellectual whose reputation has been defined by the collaborative and competitive context in which his words have been read and debated. The nature of his computer work extends beyond the marketplace of ideas, moreover, to the local environments of our intellectual labors in the university. I write these words at home, where for six hours a day school teachers instruct and nurture my growing boys, while I and my partner, also a writer, compose our sentences and paragraphs, hoping the other will do the dishes or fold the laundry first. If I were writing these words in my office at the university, not only would my work be dependent on the labors of African-American women janitors, who empty the trash in my office and vacuum its floors, but also on a host of departmental staff who keep the work of teaching and advising smoothly functioning. Because I teach at a research institution and have tenure, moreover, graduate students perform much of the grading in my large lecture classes, enabling me to focus my energy on writing and thinking about history. Adjunct faculty teach courses that departed and retired colleagues no longer teach for one sixth the cost or less. White recognized that the meanings of work are created by both nature and culture. Work "links us to each other," he wrote, "and it links us to nature." But work also divides people from each other, sometimes along lines of class, but also along lines of gender and race. It is these fault lines, not simply the nonhuman nature in my computer, that define the nature of our intellectual labors.31 21
      Is there, then, much common ground in how environmental and labor historians think of the nature of labor? So far, the answer would seem to be decidedly mixed at best. While some North American environmental historians have begun examining the topic of labor, either in institutional terms or as a commodity—a kind of second nature—that has obvious significance for the natural world, rarely have they fully embraced class analysis in their narratives of environmental and social change.32 Yet as my preceding analysis of the "nature" of computer work suggests, there is analytical common ground between the two fields. The nature of that labor becomes visible not only with a holistic approach to work as White suggests, but by asking questions that link nature and work in particular places and through space simultaneously as Morse has done in The Nature of Gold. To amplify what I mean by the nature of labor beyond a middle-class professor's office, let me briefly return to the work of Richard White. 22
   

GEOGRAPHIES OF LABOR IN THE AMERICAN WEST

 
FOR WHITE, THE nature of labor on the Columbia River was truly holistic, a "geography of labor" that comprised a holistic map of all energy and work on the river, human and nonhuman.33 But how might one compare or link the Columbia River to other geographies of nature and work? What, for example, is the relationship between the Columbia River and configurations of capital that link city and countryside, as Cronon suggested in Nature's Metropolis? How, in more abstract terms, might analyzing a geography of labor link nature and work in particular local places and across transnational space simultaneously?34 23
      To better conceptualize the relationship between nature and labor, I turn to the work of geographer David Harvey, whose recent book Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference explicitly sets out to link analyses of social and ecological change. Like Marx, Harvey began with the important assumption that "all socio-political projects are ecological projects and vice versa."35 Put another way, alienations from labor and the social struggles they foment invariably involve struggles over nature and its transformation. Wrote Harvey, "the intertwining of social and ecological projects in daily practices as well as in realms of ideology... make every social project a project about nature, environment, and ecosystem."36 Labor and nature have been linked, Harvey claimed, not only in particular natural settings but also by the many faces of transnational capitalism that have relentlessly reorganized social and ecological relations across vast distances. For Harvey, nature was not a unitary or sublime thing, but like capitalism itself, "in a state of constant transformation." Nature was not confined to landscapes outside the city, moreover, but included them and the commodities that create and sustain them. "Money flows and commodity movements," wrote Harvey, "have to be regarded as fundamental to contemporary ecosystems... because these flows formed... a coordinating network that keeps contemporary ecological habitats reproducing and changing in the particular way they do." Like Cronon, Harvey described commodities and capital as important components of nature, but unlike him he made class relations central to any analysis of ecology and the complex relationships between city and countryside. For Harvey there could be no analysis of ecology without labor for it was class relations rather than capital alone that transformed and was transformed by nature.37 24
      Harvey not only linked nature, labor, and capital in abstract terms, but paid careful attention to the geographical contexts which defined those interactions.38 For Harvey, space was not so much a particular thing—a place in nature like the Columbia River watershed or an imagined cultural place like the nation—as a social relationship between people in nature, one defined by the movement of people and nature between particular places.39 The speed and cost by which people and nature have moved, Harvey realized, has been relentlessly revolutionized under capitalism. Railroads, steamships, airplanes, and the Internet have all contributed to what Marx described as the annihilation of space by time, as the time of travel and cost of distance have plummeted. But unlike Marx, Harvey analyzed why space still matters, how class relations and conflicts have been spatially organized under capitalism, creating geographies of tremendous wealth and poverty in uneven landscapes around the globe. To understand how labor, capital, and nature interacted in any particular landscape, Harvey contended, one had to consider the broader geographic structures of capital accumulation that moved people, nature, and money through local environments, enriching some people and certain landscapes while impoverishing others. 25
      Harvey's insights, then, suggest three starting points for analyzing geographies of labor. First, Harvey recognized that the relationship between human work and nature, whether located in the human body, or outside it in fields, mines, or factories, has been dialectical and mutually defining. "To engage with and transform nature through work," Harvey wrote, "is to transform ourselves."40 Reciprocal relations between nature and labor have not been confined to the countryside or to first nature, moreover, but extend throughout urban environments no longer seen as natural. Second, Harvey recognized that investigating the nature of labor meant examining human work in holistic fashion, exploring the relationships between different forms of human work—wage work and unpaid domestic labor, productive and reproductive labor, slave labor and artisanal work, intellectual and manual labor, masculine and feminine work, racialized and unmarked labor—within their broader contexts of capital accumulation. The nature of labor should not be confined to analyses of wage labor, but should consider how human labors have been dialectically shaped in relation to each other and to capital.41 Finally, Harvey recognized that the nature of labor must be situated within space and its continual transformation under capitalism. To understand the nature of labor, one had to recognize the geography of labor, the movements of people and things beyond the borders of local communities, natural watersheds, regions, and nations. Geographies of labor are, like today's illegal migrants and multinational corporations, dynamic and transnational, only partially contained by particular landscapes. 26
      Yet despite Harvey's brilliance in linking nature and labor under capitalism in theory, he provided few illustrations of how nonhuman nature and labor had been linked in either the present or the past. Harvey understood that conceptualizing maps of commodified human labor and nature did not necessarily illuminate the social relationships that created a given landscape under capitalism. Maps, for all their virtues, could be, as Harvey explained "typically totalizing and very undialectical devices," obscuring the very social relations they seek to illuminate. Simply knowing where a commodity in a Western mining town came from, for example, tells us little about who produced it or the broader world of nonhuman nature from which it came. As Harvey put it, "the grapes that sit upon the supermarket shelves are mute."42 But the reason nonhuman nature remained inert—and mute—in Harvey's analysis was that his discussion of nature focused almost entirely upon commodities, upon pieces of nature that had become things within a spatially expansive capitalist economy. Alienation was the beginning and the end of his analysis, a fact that left him little capacity for seeing or theorizing nature's agency, except as a piece of capital. While Harvey claimed all social movements were ecological, simply naming them as such did little to address how nature and labor have politicized each other historically. 27
      We return to what appears an impasse. While commodification and alienation seem shared starting points for analysis, labor and environmental historians differ sharply over which part of nature or labor retains agency and which possesses the capacity for political recovery. Focusing on alienation as the starting point for collaboration consequently obscures the complex ways nature and labor have dialectically shaped each other's histories as well as inspired intertwined narratives of recovery. But what if the geography of labor comprised more than the movements of commodified labor and nature under a totalizing capitalism? How might ideas about the recovery and redemption of labor and nature be incorporated into our concept of a geography of labor?43 What role have utopian visions of nature and labor historically played in shaping and transforming the geographies of labor and second nature that Harvey's keen analysis theorized? 28
   

GEOGRAPHIES OF ALIENATION AND RECOVERY

 
FOR HELP ANSWERING these questions, I turn to Heinrich Von Thunen, the urban-place theorist whose book The Isolated State William Cronon used to elucidate the spatial and environmental connections between cities and countryside in Nature's Metropolis. Von Thunen also published a treatise entitled The Natural Wage in 1844 that explored the theoretical relationship between wage labor, nature, and space in the isolated state, a hypothetical landscape in which "a single city sat in the midst of an endless and uniformly fertile plain."44 Von Thunen argued that two factors in nature determined the value of the "frontier" or natural wage. The first was the distance between the laborer and the city, with the value of the natural wage falling as one moved farther from the city. The reason for this, Von Thunen theorized, was that real wages were determined by the value of the commodities in nature that labor created, values that decreased as transportation costs to the market increased. But the value of the natural wage was also shaped by the abundance of nonhuman nature on the frontier or the commons, factors which, depending on the geographic pattern of nature's windfalls, might increase the value of nature's wage at a remote location. Von Thunen imagined soil fertility, clean air, and abundant water to be even throughout the isolated state, making the natural wage in the West a kind of panacea to working-class alienation, a place where all workers could, because of the commons, transcend market wages and become masters of their labor and property. 29
      Like White and Harvey, Von Thunen highlighted several analytical components of a geography of labor. First, Von Thunen approached work holistically, expanding the conceptual boundaries of work beyond wage labor. The Natural Wage included all forms of productive work—commodified and unpaid—and spotlighted relationships essential to the nature of labor in any context. What are the nonwaged meanings and benefits of work? What are the connections between paid and unpaid labor, between work outside the home and work within it? Second, Von Thunen understood that nonhuman nature was central in transforming the contours and politics of all human labor, whether paid or unpaid. While Von Thunen's assumption about the abundance of soil fertility, clean air, and water in the isolated state was historically inaccurate in the arid West, these "gifts" within nature did profoundly shape the history of western waged, domestic, and agricultural work. When valuable ore was periodically discovered in the intermountain West during the 1860s and 1870s, for example, men left other wage earning and/or their farms to become miners, while women expanded their roles in managing and creating the farm's production. A scarcity of miners produced both higher wages for white workers and the importation of racially stigmatized and segmented nonwhite workers. "Free land"—meaning gifts in nonhuman nature—created both free and unfree labor relations in the West. Farms and factories, family labor and wage labor, were never isolated systems, even if the landscapes that represent them—pastoral family farms and the urban jungles of a meatpacking plant—functioned at opposite ends of the nature-city divide. To the contrary, nature and wage work shaped each other's historical evolution throughout the West's urban and rural landscapes. 30
      Von Thunen also recognized the importance of the mobility of both nature and labor, as the natural wage was part of a larger matrix of urban-rural connections, a geography far larger than a particular watershed or natural landscape. Von Thunen recognized that distance and mobility between city and countryside redefined labor scarcity and abundance in both regions. Workers' geographic isolation in scattered industrial sites across the North American West both empowered and handicapped them. On the one hand, labor scarcity placed a premium on the value of wageworkers' alienated labor, as employers struggled to assemble work forces in remote regions. But isolation also exacted costs: employers charged their workers exorbitant prices for imported foodstuffs, recouping their high wages at the company store or the commissary. And if a worker sought to improve her or his position by quitting, where would he or she go after quitting? For many western railroad workers, quitting meant being stranded hundreds of miles from the nearest town or train station, a predicament experienced continuously by hundreds of "trafficked" immigrants in the West today as well. The politics of labor mobility and the landscapes in nature that shaped them both helped define the contours of class formation and environmental change in the West. 31
      But if Von Thunen's essay anticipated many of the insights that Harvey recently articulated, what specific advantages does his work provide? First, Von Thunen highlighted the power of the commons, of uncommodified nature, to shape and transform human experience and consciousness. The relationship between nature and labor in Von Thunen's isolated state was reciprocal and mutually defining. While Harvey asserted that all social movements were ecological, his analysis of nature and labor were largely unidirectional: nature was a commodity, a thing acted upon by people. Nature's power to shape, change, or affect human history existed primarily in terms of commodity flows, rather than within a set of mutually dependent relationships known as an ecosystem. How a commons in nature—whether described as a frontier by Von Thunen or variously as air, water, and the webs of life that constitute natural environments—shaped the history of human work remained unclear in Harvey's theory and his examples. For Von Thunen, by contrast, the western commons acted as a brake against capitalism and the commodification of nature and labor. While his utopian expectations of the West were never realized, his analysis pointed toward the enduring power and importance of commons resources in shaping the lives and aspirations of laboring men and women. 32
      Von Thunen's essay also highlighted the importance of utopian imaginings in the fashioning of both environmental and labor activism. To his contemporary critics, Von Thunen's utopian sensibilities weakened his analytical insights and utility. Indeed, Karl Marx deemed Von Thunen's idealism and attention to "inner connections" between wages and nature to be "childish."45 Marx was particularly offended by Von Thunen's Christian transcendentalism, a theme in The Natural Wage that perhaps explains the text's contemporary obscurity, except among some Jesuit economists. Speaking of workers laboring in the isolated state, Von Thunen wrote "Workers, through striving for well being, are led to the attainment of a great good. Then, we peer into a mysterious darkness, but a darkness full of joyful hope. The great hidden lawgiver becomes visible: God!" Here was a sublimity in nature that landscape artist Frederick Church might have admired, but which the increasingly anti-religious Marx found appalling by the 1850s.46 But before writing Von Thunen's utopianism off as some prototype of reactionary New Age spiritualism—and replicating intellectual tensions that have long divided environmental and labor history—consider that Von Thunen's idealistic view of the North American commons sharpened rather than weakened his critique of existing labor relations in Europe. Speaking of the dependence of European farmers and peasant laborers, Von Thunen asked this scorching question in The Natural Wage: "How could the worker from the master of capital, as the creator of it, become the slave of capital?"47 So pithy was Von Thunen's indictment of capitalist social relations, that Marx quoted him in the first volume of Capital. Marx's appropriation of Von Thunen's question reflected an understanding by Marx of nature and its significance that few scholars have recognized. As Karl Jacoby's research makes clear, however, Marx was, as a younger man, enamored of the Black Forest in Germany and wrote about it, even as he was developing his seminal arguments about the alienation of wage labor.48 Like Von Thunen, Marx's dystopian analysis of wage slavery was stimulated by his engagement with romantic notions about the power of nonhuman nature to redeem human labor. Marx's dialogue with Von Thunen suggests that alienation, so foundational to Marx and Harvey's analysis of labor, needs to be conceptualized in relation to utopian visions of redeemed nature and labor, for it was that vision that inspired both Von Thunen and Marx to critique capitalist social organization and inequality in the 1840s. 33
      Connections between utopian imaginings of nature and critiques of working-class injustice were prevalent throughout Europe and North America in the 1840s and 1850s. While Marx was convinced that Von Thunen's utopianism weakened his analysis of labor, many of his contemporaries in the British and North American labor movements harnessed utopian visions of nature to make radical critiques of capitalism, landlordism, and slavery. The Chartists of the British isles, for example, made land reform central to their radicalism throughout Britain and Ireland in the 1840s. As Jamie Bronstein has demonstrated, privatizing the commons not only displaced thousands of British, Irish, and Scottish peasants in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but provided Chartist organizers one of their most potent political issues among both tenant farmers and their former cohorts working in British textile factories and coal mines. Commons nature was considered a birthright to these proletarianized citizens and land reform was deemed vital to the recovery of both nature and labor in the British isles in the 1840s.49 Similar connections between land reform and labor radicalism were prominent in the United States, and not only in the countryside, where anti-rent agitations from New York to Delaware produced pitched battles between tenant farmers and their landlords, as Reeve Huston has expertly recounted. Agrarian radicalism also influenced the nation's incipient workingman's political parties and the broader labor movement.50 34
      Synergies between the politics of nature and labor in North America were especially prominent in the writings of American labor radical George Henry Evans, whose newspaper, The Workingman's Advocate, became the nation's first widely distributed working-class newspaper in the 1830s and 1840s. When setbacks to worker's mobilizations and an economic depression curtailed subscriptions for his paper in the mid 1830s, Evans did what many on the American Left have long done: he dropped out and returned to nature, moving to a farm in New Jersey where he raised melons and wrote for nearly a decade.51 When Evans returned to the world of labor activism and newspaper publishing in 1844, his politics had been transformed by his labors in nature, one manifest in the very first new issue of The Workingman's Advocate in 1844. The lead editorial was entitled "Equal Right to Land" and laid out an ambitious proposition for opening up the North American commons to any and all workers who would improve it, with a few important caveats. While Evans called for land to be "free to actual settlers," he also called on the government to abolish the selling or alienation of land by its settlers. "We simply propose that Government shall no longer traffic or permit traffic in that which is the property of no man or government; that the Land shall be left, as Nature dictates, free to those who choose to bestow their labor upon it." Laborers in nature did have the right, Evans claimed, to sell their "improvements, at any time, to any one." But in order to prevent the unequal accumulation of wealth and the creation of land monopolies, laborers in nature could only sell their improvements to someone "not possessed of other land." The traffic in improvements, could only exist between the landed and the landless.52 35
      Evans's utopian vision of land reform drew energy from the anti-rent campaigns of tenant farmers and the anger of journeymen apprentices and mechanics, who alike condemned the ways that powerful landlords were allegedly plundering the public domain. "The Public lands shall no longer be sold," wrote one "mechanic" to Evans in 1844, but should instead "be laid out in farms and Lots (equivalent in value) for the free and exclusive use of actual settlers."53 Evans's agrarian solution involved not only curtailing and regulating the real estate market, but also the planning of townships in the national commons, six miles square, which would each contain 160 farming families and which would also possess a "Public Square" at their heart, "where all public business should be transacted, and where all meetings might be held."54 Evans's vision of a prosperous republic of labor in nature closely resembled aspects of Von Thunen's model of the natural wage in the isolated state. The central place was not the marketplace of the city, however, but the public square itself, where all matters of politics, economy, and ethics could be debated, discussed, and resolved on the basis of fairness and equality. 36
      Evans's vision of a redeemed republic of labor was part of a broader utopianism in American culture in 1844 that permeated a variety of reform and religious movements, from idealists at Brook Farm to Mennonites and religious communities at Oneida, New York.55 These socialist experiments looked to nature for labor's redemption, but not all sought an escape from capitalism and slavery or proposed violent means to accomplish ostensibly just ends. To the contrary, Evans used his utopian vision to support a remarkably diverse set of radical protesters in North America in the 1840s, many of them critical of the abuses of centralized state authority. Not only did he lend support to the efforts of coal miners, factory operatives, and seamstresses to form labor unions and win strikes, but he also chided abolitionists for ignoring economic coercion in the North, even while strongly supporting their efforts to emancipate African American chattel slaves. He praised and publicized the efforts of agrarian radicals to achieve land reform from New York to Great Britain and condemned the confiscation of Indian lands in the North, South, and West, while making room for Native peoples in his vision of a national commons that would redeem nature and labor. And Evans located each of these struggles within their international contexts, linking North American struggles to those among factory workers and agricultural laborers in Britain, Ireland, Prussia, and France.56 In all of Evans's wide-ranging polemics against economic and political injustice, there remained an argument not simply about the alienation of labor, but one about its redemption in nature and land. "The black as well as the white must," Evans wrote on the Fourth of July, 1844, "have his right to land restored to him before he can be free."57 For Evans, the geography of labor in North America comprised a holistic map of alienated labor, whether enslaved or waged, white or black, female or male, and a vision of every worker's redemption in nature. 37
   

THE GEOGRAPHY OF LABOR IN AUSTIN, TEXAS

 
EVANS AND VON Thunen underscored the importance of commons landscapes to the fomenting of labor radicalism, but what relevance do their ideas have beyond the temporal and regional confines of the North American commons in the mid-nineteenth century? Recent work by historians Thomas Klubock on Chilean peasants in the 1970s, Steve Marquadt on Costa Rican banana workers, and John Soluri on banana workers throughout Latin America highlight the centrality of nature and workers' knowledge of it to labor conflict and politics throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American history.58 Synergies between land reform and labor radicalism, moreover, have long pervaded Latin American history in the twentieth century, though few historians of Latin American labor examine human work beyond points of reproduction or in truly holistic fashion. But while such scholarship broadens the temporal and geographic boundaries within which we might think about geographies of labor, it does not directly link us to the highly urbanized landscapes that most of us live within today. The connections between nature and labor remain conceptually embedded in extractive mining and agricultural contexts, but more obscure elsewhere, despite the obvious and ever more artful commingling of nature and labor in urban environments the world over. 38
      How, then, might attention to geographies of labor transform the ways historians perceive the relationships between nature and labor in contemporary urban contexts? For possible answers, I use the concept of a geography of labor in the remainder of the essay to illuminate the intertwined politics of urban nature and labor in Austin, Texas, during the 1990s. Instead of creating a holistic map of the labor within the University of Texas, where I taught environmental and labor history between 1994 and 2001, let me first briefly describe the class- and race-based geography of labor in Austin during the 1990s. Like many American cities, Austin's neighborhoods express with their changing physical nature a complex patchwork of class differences, many of them linked to cultural and racial differences among Austinites. The central dividing line in Austin in 1995 remained its transportation corridor, Interstate 35, which separated a wealthier, largely white population living in west Austin from poorer Hispanic and African American communities in east Austin. Near that corridor and near the University of Texas a few neighborhoods with economic and racial diversity emerged, though even in central Austin gentrification had transformed once diverse African-American areas like Clarksville into upper-middle class white neighborhoods. As in many cities, commons resources varied sharply across the city's class divides. West Austin possessed numerous public parks, public swimming facilities, and clean air, while east Austin's local creeks were heavily polluted, and public parks and green spaces were scattered and smaller. Perhaps most important, east Austin's air was more polluted, not only because smog from Austin's expressways blew east but also because of the siting of several industrial facilities within its neighborhoods. Mobility likewise fueled and reflected inequalities within this geography of nature and labor. East Austinites, many of them recently arrived immigrants from Central and South America, frequently traveled to workplaces and homes in west Austin to tend gardens, or to sweep floors in corporate and university facilities. West Austinites, by contrast, rarely traveled east of I-35, except when going to the airport or leaving town altogether.59 39
      How visible these inequalities of nature and labor were to Austin's residents in the 1990s is another question. As in many cities, it took a crisis, as Hurricane Katrina has done in New Orleans, to make class and racial differences visible in the built and natural environments. In Austin, it was not a hurricane but explosive economic growth and two political campaigns in the early 1990s that exposed fault lines and common ground in the city's geography of labor. Beginning in 1991, a group of east Austin residents launched a remarkable campaign to force Shell Oil Company to move two massive, polluting oil tanks out of a poor and largely Hispanic working-class neighborhood.60 Known as PODER, or People Organized in Defense of the Earth's Resources, the Latina-led organization not only used neglected state records to demonstrate that Shell had consistently violated the Clean Air Act, but also teamed up with a "mainstream" environmental group, Save our Springs (SOS), to put legal pressure on Shell to move its facilities out of the neighborhood.61 While PODER's efforts highlighted the existence of "environmental racism" in east Austin, the group succeeded in part by teaming up with white, middle-class environmentalists. Common ground between nature and labor flourished on many levels in Austin: first within PODER as they succeeded in linking a fight against environmental pollution to the larger class and racial inequalities that created them, and second between PODER and SOS, as citizens across class and neighborhood lines closed ranks to protect commons nature in the city. While partially a marriage of convenience, cooperation between SOS and PODER grew from a shared desire to redeem nature and people's relationship to it in the city. That sensibility not only spurred efforts to clean up the air of east Austin but also to protect a commons of clean water and recreation in the city from development, preserving the Barton Springs, which not only supplied the city's drinking water but also served as a spectacular public pool enjoyed by rich and poor Austinites alike. In 1992 and again in 1995, east and west Austinites joined ranks and passed laws by a two-to-one margin restricting development in the Barton Creek watershed. An unlikely working-class green coalition not only had worked together in Austin, but had won. 40
      Yet these moments of common ground did not eclipse profound environmental and class differences within the city's limits. To the contrary, they simmered throughout the 1990s and at several points threatened to pull the coalition apart. Those tensions spilled into public view when PODER adopted a new target for grass-roots mobilization in 1995: the recycling plant in east Austin, where thousands of empty cans and bottles, consumed and recycled by west Austin's wealthier residents, had become temporary homes to a proliferating population of rats and other public health nuisances. Here, a commons of a different kind—a burgeoning animal community—was compromising the health and living environment of east Austin's poorer residents, as neighbors complained of rats spreading garbage, eating through walls, roofs, and floorboards, invading kitchens, and spreading ticks and fleas throughout homes and yards. The mobility of second nature—here in the constant arrival of new loads of empty cans, bottles, and plastic jugs—literally fueled an invading army of rats, which sought food and refuge in neighborhood homes when displaced from their piles of recycled cans and bottles. PODER organizers made it clear they were not opposed to recycling the earth's resources, only protesting the unequal burdens that recycling had created among Austin's residents. PODER's solution—the removal of the city's recycling plant out of town or into smaller plants distributed fairly across the city's wealthy and poor neighborhoods—led to the removal of the recycling plant from east Austin in 1997, but cooperation between PODER and SOS has faded.62 The common ground between Austin's wealthier green residents and its urban poor has withered apace, much to the delight of developers who seek to overturn the city's building restrictions in the Barton Springs watershed. 41
      Whether fault lines or common ground will prevail within Austin remains an open question. Answering that question will depend not simply on the material geography of alienated nature and labor within Austin's neighborhoods or the mobility of nature and labor within and beyond the city's limits, but on the power of imagined visions of redeemed nature and labor. For labor and environmental historians, our questions should not focus exclusively on declension and people's alienation from nature and labor, for alienation fails to capture what most strongly motivated Austin's diverse actors. Rather than considering what is false about PODER and SOS's alliance or misleading in their utopian visions, we might consider how and why redemptive visions of nature and labor have enhanced each other at one moment and undercut each other the next. Visions of redeemed nature and labor, whether in the writings of Heinrich Von Thunen and Karl Marx or in the relationship between PODER and SOS, have repeatedly shaped each other's evolution and articulation, transforming the material relationships between "nature" and "labor" in the process. 42
   

CONCLUSION

 
WHAT, THEN, DOES the concept of a geography of labor offer labor and environmental historians? For historians of work, studying geographies of labor offers new energy for considering the manifold ways class identities have been forged beyond points of production, in the natural and built environments that have created and nurtured working-class people. To be sure, pollution on the shop floor and in the bodies of workers are immensely important topics that are important components of any geography of labor. But the relationship between nature and class extends far beyond the shop floor to the neighborhoods and domestic labors that create them, and to the common resources that define the quality of life within them. Focusing on the material relationships between work and nature not only makes air and water important topics for labor historians, but also provides fresh energy for rethinking relationships between different kinds of labor in nature: between paid and unpaid labor and productive and reproductive labor, as feminist historians have long called for; between "free" and varied forms of unfree labor that continue to characterize modern capitalism; and between privileged and degraded forms of racialized and gendered labor that have long sustained capitalist hierarchies. 43
      For some labor historians, any call that decenters the shop floor and industrial wage earning represents a kind of heresy, a descent into either discourse or muddled ideas of cultural "difference" that occlude the historical importance of wage earning and class analysis. Holistic approaches to work and nature are equated with conservative ideologies that have long occluded the study of class relations. Certainly there are numerous historical examples in the West of that tendency. When miners on the Comstock Lode of Virginia City, Nevada, organized the West's first industrial labor union in 1869, for example, capitalist mine owner William Sharon used an image of nature to challenge them: "Would you kill the goose that lays the golden egg?" Today's holistic-minded capitalists make similar appeals to nature to control their employees. John Mackey, founder of the Whole Foods Corporation in Austin, Texas, promises his employees more natural connections to each other and to the nature in their stomachs in a pamphlet entitled "Beyond Unions," while simultaneously denying them grievance procedures and collective bargaining rights. 44
      But conflating holism with conservatism dismisses the importance of nature to working-class formation and working-class politics. Indeed, working men and women have long used holism and politicized pieces of nature—whether boycotting California-grown grapes or protesting oil drums and recycling plants in Austin—to claim rights, power, and a measure of justice. PODER, like the United Farm Workers a generation earlier, built a social movement not as a special interest but by nurturing a holistic vision of the commons, "defending the earth's resources." Rather than eclipsing class divisions within Austin, PODER's holism and sense of moral universality provoked them to expose class differences within the city's environmental movements and its built environment. Those fault lines were expressed not only in the city's rich and poor neighborhoods, but by the circulation of people and nature that shaped and constituted Austin's larger geography of labor. Perhaps most important, class differences have not prevented Austin's diverse environmentalists from finding common ground in protecting common resources or in imagining visions of redeemed nature and labor that bridge rather than occlude class differences. The nature of labor in Austin contains both common ground and fault lines, material and mental landscapes that comprise the landscapes of capital, labor, and nature that Austinites call home. 45
      What, in turn, does a geography of labor offer environmental historians? First, by making human work relations central to narratives of environmental change, a geography of labor introduces a much-needed sense of historical contingency to environmental histories. For all their insights, passion, and skill as story-tellers, environmental historians illuminate few alternatives in their declensionist narratives. Declensionism may work best when at its bleakest, but it also risks dissuading people from working to protect environments they care about. Studying geographies of labor will not eliminate stories of environmental destruction, nor should it. But attention to geographies of labor can help redress one of environmental history's most enduring and pressing problems: namely who it represents. Like the environmental movement that it draws its energy from, many environmental histories exemplify rather than explain middle-class assumptions about nature, labor, and work, despite simmering differences between many environmentalists and some environmental historians. If environmentalism is to expand its primary constituencies, environmental historians need to grapple not only with labor as a commodity or form of energy, but also with the dialectical social relations and utopian imaginings that have defined the complexities of working-class experiences with nature. 46
      Some environmental historians, like their counterparts in the field of labor history, no doubt will reject the call to make class analysis a central or primary subject of inquiry in environmental history. Studying geographies of labor does not, after all, directly illuminate first nature's "agency," nor will it create a unified working-class green alliance in North American cities or countryside. But these objections exemplify the unrealistic expectations of collaboration between environmental and labor history. The challenge for historians of nature and labor should not be to find identical or overlapping stories of declension or alienation, but to understand the many seams and dialectics between nature and labor that geographies of labor bring to light. The stories that environmental and labor historians tell will not and should not be the same. Nor should this be surprising, for geographies of labor map abundant material and cultural fault lines between nature and labor. Geographies of labor also map starting points for collaboration, starting points that PODER activists have shared with thinkers like George Henry Evans, Heinrich Von Thunen, and the young Karl Marx a century and half earlier. If conflicts and connections between environmental preservation and environmental justice, politics at points of production and consumption, the interests of humanity and the needs of the nonhuman world are to be seen and analyzed, shared hopes and visions will help, but common questions will be the foundation for mutual understanding, coalition building, and progressive change. 47


Gunther Peck is an associate professor who teaches labor and environmental history in the Department of History and the Terry Sanford Institute for Public Policy Studies at Duke University. He received his PhD in history from Yale University in 1995 and taught at the University of Texas at Austin for seven years. His first book, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, 2000), received the Ray Allen Billington prize for best book in frontier history and the Taft prize for best book in North American labor history. He is currently on sabbatical with an ACLS fellowship, writing a book on the history of "white slavery" in North America and Europe from 1780 to 1930.



NOTES

I would like to thank the following people for providing extremely helpful criticism and comments on drafts of this essay. They bear no responsibility for its flaws: Ryan Carey, William Cronon, Leon Fink, William Forbath, Faulkner Fox, John French, Seth Garfield, Karl Jacoby, Daniel James, Elizabeth Jameson, Susan Johnson, Kevin Kinney, Thomas Klubock, John Richards, Thomas Rogers, Douglas Sackman, Richard White, and two anonymous reviewers from Environmental History.

1. On the hoped-for emergence of a working-class green coalition, see Solidarity, May 2000, 16–17; 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; and Roger Keil, "The Green Worker Alliance," Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 6 (1995): 63–76. On the teamsters, see Phil Magers, "Arctic Drilling Said Critical to Security," United Press International press release, April 2, 2002; and Elysian Hunter, "Pacts with the Devil: 'Organized Labor' Is Nobody's Friend," Ether Zone, May 1, 2002, at www.etherzone.com/2002/hunt050102.shtml..

2. William Cronon, "Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History," The Journal of American History 77 (Winter 1990): 1,131; Donald Worster, "Seeing Beyond Culture," The Journal of American History 77 (Winter 1990): 1, 144; Richard White The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: hill and Wang, 1995); 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): 171–86; Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–1990 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

3. 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; and Giovanna di Chiro, "Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environment and Social Justice," in Uncommon Ground, ed. Cronon, 298–320.

4. 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; 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; and Robert Gordon, "'Shell No!' OCAW and the Labor-Environmental Alliance," Environmental History 3 (October 1998): 460–87. 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; and Christopher Sellers, "Thoreau's Body: Towards an Embodied Environmental History," Environmental History 4 (October 1999): 486–514. 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; and Karl Jacoby, "Class and Environmental History," Environmental History 2 (June 1997): 336. 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); and Matthew Klingle, "Urban By Nature: An Environmental History of Seattle, 1880–1970" (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2001).

5. White, The Organic Machine; and Hurley, Environmental Inequalities. 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. 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. 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."

6. On the challenges and history of bounding western history, see Patricia Limerick, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987). 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. On the relationship between western and labor history, see Gunther Peck, "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.

7. 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). For western declension and alienation, see Donald Worster, The Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

8. Karl Marx, Capital vol. I, chap. 7, 344ff, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978). Also cited in Sackman, "Nature's Workshop," 27.

9. On the politics of environmental pollution among working-class people, see Hurley, Environmental Inequalities; 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). 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); 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.

10. 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; and Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989).

11. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920); On Turner's ideas and their historical context, see Cronon, "Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier"; 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; and John Mack Faragher, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: 'The Significance of the Frontier in American History' and Other Essays (New York: Henry Holt, 1994).

12. 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; 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). 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.

13. Vernon Jensen, Heritage of Conflict: Labor Relations in the Nonferous Metals Industry Up to 1930 (Ithaca: Cornell Unoversity Press, 1950), ix, 1, 2.

14. Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 138–39. 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). 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; James C. Foster, "Quantification and the Western Federation," Historical Methods Newsletter, 10 (Fall 1977): 141–48; Ronald C. Brown, Hard-Rock Miners: The Intermountain West, 1860–1920 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1979); Mark Wyman, Hard Rock Epic: Western Miners and the Industrial Revolution, 1860–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); and David Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). On those who maintain that the West made its workers more radical, see Richard Lingenfelter, The Hardrock Miners: A History of the Mining labor Movement in the American West, 1863–1893 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); David Brundage, The Making of Western Labor Radicalism: Denver's Organized Workers, 1878–1905 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Elizabeth Jameson, All that Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); and Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

15. Emmons, The Butte Irish, 180–220; Jameson, All That Glitters, 195–97; Peck, Reinventing Free Labor, 204–07.

16. 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.

17. Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–50 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987); Dana Frank, Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994). 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).

18. Laura Mercier, Anaconda: Labor, Community. and Culture in Montana's Smelter City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 3, 33, 197.

19. Mercier, Anaconda, 202; Salt of the Earth, DVD, directed by Herbert Biberman (Los Angeles: Independent Production Corporation / International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, 1954).

20. Donald Worster, "Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective on History," Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1, 100.

21. Cronon, "Modes of Prophecy and Production," 1, 125.

22. Worster, The Dust Bowl, 4–5, 58–59, 62.

23. Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, xv. For critiques of Cronon, see the journal Antipode 26 (1994): 113–65, and Cronon's response, 166–76.

24. 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.

25. Cronon, Gitlin, and Miles, "Becoming West," 18; 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.

26. White, Organic Machine ix, 44, 46; White, "Are you an Environmentalist," 171.

27. White, Organic Machine, 61. 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. 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. 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; Connie Y. Chiang, "Monterey-by-the-Smell: Odors and Social Conflict on the California Coastline," Pacific Historical Review 73 (May 2004): 183–214; and Brian Page, "Labor and the Landscape of American Gothic," Labor History 44(2003): 95–110.

28. Morse, The Nature of Gold, 48–50, 65.

29. Ibid., 137.

30. White, "Are You an Environmentalist?" 184.

31. Ibid., 185.

32. 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; Victor Silverman, "Sustainable Alliances: The Origins of International Labor Environmentalism," International Labor and Working-Class History 66 (October 2004): 118–35.

33. White, Organic Machine, 9.

34. 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; Andrew Herod, Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism (New York: Guilford Press, 2001); Donald Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (Minneapolis, 1996) and Don Mitchell, Cultural Geography: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
      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.

35. David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (London: Blackwell, 1998), 174.

36. Ibid., 189.

37. Ibid., 147, 187.

38. In his earlier work, Harvey focused on the spatial dialectics of capitalism and urbanization. See Harvey, The Urbanization of Capital, and David Harvey The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (London: Blackwell 1989). Others have also asserted the importance of space in social theory, especially Soja, Postmodern Geographies, and Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. David Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991). 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; and Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 80–81, 90–93.

39. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 203–07; Lefebvre, Production of Space, 73–76.

40. Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, 198.

41. 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); and Eileen Boris and Cynthia Daniels, eds., Homework: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Paid Labor at Home (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). 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). 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); 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); Robert Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: ?Cambridge University Press, 2001); Jonathan Glickstein, American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety: Wages, Competition, and Degraded Labor in the Antebellum United States (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); 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.

42. Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, 4, 232.

43. 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.

44. 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), republished in Bernard W. Dempsey, The Frontier Wage: The Economic Organization of Free Agents (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1960), 48.

45. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, ch. 25, sec. 2. Cited in Modern Library Books, (New York: Random House, 1953), 681.

46. Dempsey, Frontier Wage, 336.

47. Marx, Capital, vol. I, ch. 25, sec. 2, 681.

48. 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.

49. Jamie Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800–1862 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999).

50. Reeve Huston Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Part Politics in Antebellum New York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 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).

51. For more details on Evans's life, see Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 17–47.

52. The Workingman's Advocate March 16, 1844, 2.

53. Ibid., March 30, 1844, 3.

54. Ibid., March 16, 1844, 2.

55. Sterling F. Delano, Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Richard Francis, Transcendental Utopias: Individual and Community at Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); George Wallingford Noyes, Free Love in Utopia: John Humphrey Noyes and the Origin of the Oneida Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001): John Humphrey Noyes, The History of American Socialisms (Philadelphia: J.B> Lippincott, 1870).

56. 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.

57. Ibid., July 6, 1844, 3.

58. See Thomas Klubock's essay in Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973–2002, ed. Peter Winn (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). See also unpublished papers by Steve Marquadt, "Pesticides, Parakeets, and Unions in the Costa Rican Banana Industry, 1938–1962"; and John Soluri, "Banana Cultures in Comparative Perspective." 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.

59. 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. For an excellent environmental analysis of an urban social landscape, see Klingle, "Urban by Nature," 295–365.

60. Austin American-Statesman, March 1, 1992, A1; June 7, 1992, A1.

61. Austin American Statesman, January 4, 1993, A1. See also Dahmus, 'Finding Common Ground," 31–32.

62. For coverage of PODER's campaign against the recycling plant, see Kate Van Scoy, "Eastsiders Decry BFI," Austin Chronicle, May 30, 1997. See also, Dahmus, "Finding Common Ground," 42–43.

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