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Labor, Rematerialized: Putting Environments to Work in the Americas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2014

John Soluri
John Soluri*
Affiliation:
Carnegie Mellon University
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Extract

The late Guyanese historian and political activist Walter Rodney began his posthumously published A History of the Guyanese Working People 1881–1905 (1981) by analyzing the “physical environment and class interests” in coastal Guyana. Writing against narratives that privileged the roles played by European capital and technology, Rodney argued that working people made large contributions to the “humanization” of the Guyanese environment. He noted that a powerful planter class placed severe constraints on working people who were “in no position to control the available technology or to initiate environmental intervention.” Political power was important, but Rodney noted that the environment played “a determining role in limiting the activities of all sections of the population [original emphasis].” Writing an “intelligible narrative” of Guyana's history then, was “impossible” without an understanding of Guyana's environment.

Type
Review Essays
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 85 , Spring 2014 , pp. 162 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2014 

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References

NOTES

1. I presented a very preliminary version of this article on the Conference on Latin American History Roundtable, “A Social Turn in Latin American Environmental History?” Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, Chicago, January 7, 2012. Thanks to Kevin Brown, Tom Rogers, Kate Brown, and Tom Klubock for providing inspiration and helpful suggestions for clarifying my ideas.

2. Rodney, Walter, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905 (Baltimore, MD, 1981)Google Scholar, 3.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Rodney documented sugar planters’ preoccupation with controlling water—both seawater that threatened to inundate plantations and fresh water vital for irrigation. But he noted that “all classes and races” displayed a strong interest in sea defense since water control affected the livelihoods of wage-earning plantation workers, small-scale cultivators, and South Asian indentured laborers. Rodney concluded that the great expenses associated with polder agriculture “decreased the prospects” for small-scale farmers (A History of the Guyanese Working People, 9). Social division and conflict emerged in part due to the need to control a watery environment that imposed significant constraints on agricultural operations both large and small.

6. Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 220.

7. For earlier calls for greater integration, see Martinez-Alier, Juan, “Ecology and the Poor: A Neglected Dimension of Latin American History,” Journal of Latin American Studies 23 (1991): 621–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, Alan, “Unnatural Inequalities: Social and Environmental Histories,” Environmental History 4 (1996): 6–19 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McEvoy, Arthur, “Working Environments: An Ecological Approach to Industrial Health and Safety,” Technology and Culture 36, Special Supplement (1995): s145–s183 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Peck, Gunther, “The Nature of Labor: Fault Lines and Common Ground in Environmental and Labor History,” Environmental History 11 (2006): 212–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For influential critiques of strands of US environmentalism, see Guha, Ramachandra, “Radical American Environmentalism: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 71–83 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cronon, William, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. Cronon, William (New York, 1995), 69–90 Google Scholar; Richard White, “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?” in Uncommon Ground, 171–85.

8. Hurley, Andrew, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–1980 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995)Google Scholar; Dewey, Scott, “Working for the Environment: Organized Labor and the Origins of Environmentalism in the United States, 1948–1970,” Environmental History 3 (1998): 45–63 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gordon, Robert, “‘Shell No!’ OCAW and the Labor-Environmental Alliance,” Environmental History 3 (1998): 460–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Montrie, Chad, “Expedient Environmentalism. Opposition to Coal Surface Mining in Appalachia and the United Mine Workers of America, 1945–1975,” Environmental History 5 (2000): 75–98 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lipin, Lawrence M., Workers and the Wild: Conservation, Consumerism, and Labor in Oregon, 1910–1930 (Urbana, IL, 2007)Google Scholar.

9. Some notable works not discussed below include Filtzer, Donald, The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards, 1943–1953 (Cambridge, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mikhail, Alan, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shapiro, Judith, Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and White, Sam, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (New York, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. For example, scholars have begun to document important labor-environmental dynamics for mining in colonial Spanish America. Brown, Kendall, “Workers’ Health and Colonial Mercury Mining at Huancavelica, Peru,” The Americas, 57 (2001): 467–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Studnicki-Gizbert, Daviken and Schecter, David, “The Environmental Dynamics of a Colonial Fuel-Rush: Silver Mining and Deforestation in New Spain 1522 to 1810,” Environmental History 15 (2010): 94–119 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Robins, Nicholas A., Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes (Bloomington, IN, 2011)Google Scholar.

11. The debates within labor history, fueled in part by scholars of slavery and women's history, have arguably been more vigorous and heated than those within environmental history. Some of the scholarship that has influenced my thinking include Rose, Sonya O., “Class Formation and the Quintessential Worker,” in Reworking Class, ed. Hall, John (Ithaca, NY, 1997)Google Scholar; Scott, Joan W., “Experience,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Butler, Judith and Scott, Joan W. (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; Tomlins, Christopher, “Why Wait for Industrialism? Work, Legal Culture, and the Example of Early America—An Historiographical Argument,” Labor History 40 (1999): 5–52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boris, Eileen and Kleinberg, S. Jay, “Mothers and Other Workers: (Re)Conceiving Labor, Maternalism, and the State,” Journal of Women's History, 15 (2003): 90–117 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and van der Linden, Marcel, “The “Globalization of Labor and Working-Class History and its Consequences,” International Labor and Working Class History 65 (2004): 136–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. Consider the tens of thousands of data centers operated by the US government and companies like Google that require electricity to function. Industrial cooling systems are vital for maintaining a “healthy environment” for the servers (James Glanz, “Power, Pollution and the Internet” New York Times Sept. 22, 2012); Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Porter, Catherine (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar; and White, Richard, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.

13. Arthur McEvoy, “Working Environments”; Sellers, Christopher C., Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997)Google Scholar.

14. Scholars interested in reproductive labor have similarly failed to integrate environmental history. See for example, Olcott, Jocelyn, “Introduction: Researching and Rethinking the Labors of Love,” Hispanic American Historical Review 91 (2011): 1–27 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. For a socialist example, see Harsch, Donna, Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic (Princeton, NJ, 2008)Google Scholar.

16. Although not explicitly focused on reproductive labor, Langston's, Nancy Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES (New Haven, CT, 2010)Google Scholar provides a concrete example of how environmental change was detrimental to women's bodies.

17. One labor historian of Latin America has recently cautioned against definitions of labor that are too broad to be meaningful. Brennan, James, “Latin American Labor History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History, ed. Moya, José C., 342–66 (New York, 2011)Google Scholar.

18. Santiago, Myrna, The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution 1900–1938 (Cambridge, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 4.

19. Ibid., 64–202.

20. Ibid., 256–90.

21. Andrews, Thomas, Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, 2008)Google Scholar, 16.

22. Ibid., 123–25.

23. Ibid., 176–79.

24. Ibid., 196–232. For another example of class and gender politics in a mining town, see Klubock, Thomas, Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile's El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904–1951 (Durham, NC, 1998)Google Scholar.

25. Soluri, John, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin, TX, 2005)Google Scholar.

26. Mandela, Elias, Work and Control in a Peasant Economy: A History of the Lower Tchiri Valley in Malawi, 1859–1960 (Madison, WI, 1990)Google Scholar.

27. On capital's capacity to turn ecological obstacles into an advantage, see Boyd, William, Prudham, Scott, and Schurman, Rachel, “Industrial Dynamics and the Problem of Nature,” Society and Natural Resources 14 (2001): 555–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28. Marquardt, Steve, “Green Havoc”: Panama Disease, Environmental Change, and Labor Process in the Central American Banana Industry,” American Historical Review 106 (2001): 49–80 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

29. Marquardt, Steve, “Pesticides, Parakeets, and Unions in the Costa Rican Banana Industry, 1938–1962,” Latin American Research Review 37 (2001): 3–36 Google Scholar; and Soluri, Banana Cultures.

30. Rogers, Thomas, The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31. Amador, Ramón Amaya, Prisión Verde. Tegucigalpa: Editorial Universitaria, 1990. [Note: No English translation exists of this book]Google Scholar.

32. Rogers, Ibid., 207.

33. Rogers, Ibid., 140.

34. Nash, Linda, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley, CA, 2006)Google Scholar. Also see, Sackman, Douglas C., “Nature's Workshop”: The Work Environment and Workers' Bodies in the California Citrus Industry 1900–1940,” Environmental History 5 (2000): 27–53 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

35. Nash, Inescapable Ecologies, 127–69.

36. Boehme, Susanna, “Pesticide Regulation, Citizen Action, and Toxic Trade,” in Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing World, ed. Melling, Joseph and Sellers, Christopher (Philadelphia, PA, 2012), 168–80Google Scholar.

37. The use of “radical” to describe on-the-Left critics of capitalism can inadvertently overlook the “radicalness” of the changes proposed by advocates of relentless commodification, a point made long ago by Weinstein, Barbara, The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850–1920 (Stanford, CA, 1983)Google Scholar.

38. For a recent, provocative example of this approach, see Melillo, Edward D., “The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840–1930,” American Historical Review 117 (2012): 1028–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39. A similar story could be told for New Zealand's lamb industry. See Rebecca Woods, “The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800–1900,” PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013.

40. For example, the arrival of streetcars to urban areas in the Americas often sparked labor conflict. See, for example, Rosenthal, Anton, “Streetcar Workers and the Transformation of Montevideo: The General Strike of May 1911,” The Americas 51 (1995): 471–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41. Some partial exceptions to this trend include Montrie, Chad, “Expedient Environmentalism: Opposition to Coal Surface Mining in Appalachia and the United Mine Workers of America, 1945–1975,” Environmental History 5 (2000): 75–98 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Auyero, Javier and Swistun, Débora Alejandra, Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown (New York, 2009)Google Scholar.

42. Glickman, Lawrence B., A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca, NY, 1997)Google Scholar; and Cohen, Lizbeth, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Post-war America (Cambridge, 2003)Google Scholar.