Taking the long view, this article analyzes how the expanding power of Egyptian elites, and the emergent commercial agriculture they sponsored, forever changed the rural labor practices of peasant cultivators and their relationships to environmental resources. From the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517 until the second half of the eighteenth century, Egyptian farmers initiated and oversaw the construction and repair of small-scale irrigation and other infrastructural works in their local environments. They controlled how and when their labor was used. At the end of the eighteenth century, rural labor in Egypt dramatically changed. It became coerced, required the large-scale movement of peasant laborers, resulted in enormous environmental manipulation, and was often deadly. This article thus explains how forced labor, deleterious environmental exploitation, extractive economics, and population movements emerged at the end of the eighteenth century and how they have come to characterize the relationship between work and the environment in rural Egypt from that period until today.

The first known grassroots protest against nuclear power was organized by industrial unions: the United Auto Workers, the International Union of Electrical Workers, and the United Papermakers and Paperworkers. In Power Reactor, a landmark case begun in 1956 and pursued all the way to the Supreme Court (where it was lost in 1961), these unions tried to prevent construction of the Enrico Fermi Atomic Power Plant, a fast breeder reactor, outside Detroit. However, their action has been interpreted as not truly environmental at all, but rather as merely a smokescreen for their opposition to commercially developed atomic power; at that time they were identified with support for public power, which was under assault by the Republican party. Attending to union discourses of nature reveals the case to have marked a pioneering turn from a conservation to environmental discourse of nature.

This article describes a form of agricultural labor intensification common in the postwar Soviet Union that shares some important similarities to Clifford Geertz's notion of agricultural involution, first devised to describe Javanese wet rice agriculture. Using the examples of hog farming and cotton production, this paper describes the phenomenon of postwar agricultural involution, and explores its limits and possibilities. The most important divergence from Geertz's original model is that in the Soviet cases, agricultural involution did not attain any form of environmental equilibrium; in fact, because of agricultural involution, the Soviet Union was forced to confront the environmental limits of agricultural intensification. The concept of agricultural involution provides a way of thinking about the relative flexibility or rigidity of agroecological health in the face of labor intensification. This quality—how much additional labor and how many extra humans an agricultural ecosystem is able to support—is critical in evaluating how robust or fragile a landscape is.

Household subsistence food production did not disappear under capitalism; instead, it functioned within the circulation of capital. British lords and American mining company managers realized that the same practices that once resulted in autonomy for peasants and mountain-dwelling households could be absorbed, “captured,” to subsidize wages. This article considers the captured garden in two forms. The first resulted in capital accumulation, while the second sustained the unemployed without public assistance. Both appeared in West Virginia between the 1880s and the 1930s. Gardens moved into the coal camps, encouraged and compelled by the companies. During the Great Depression the Roosevelt administration established the Division of Subsistence Homesteads, combining gardens and factory wages as a relief program. Both forms illustrate the paradox of subsistence production under capitalism: A practice that for centuries created no surplus value could be made to do just that; an institution once the stronghold of the household could cause dependency and immiseration.

This article focuses on the tens of thousands of itinerant workers, also known as tramps or hoboes, who provided the primary labor force for the natural resource extraction industries of the American West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Itinerant workers' visceral encounters with nature differed from the experiences of most urban residents in this era of city growth and related anxiety about Americans' loss of contact with the natural world. This article argues that some hoboes embraced time spent in “wild” nature as an escape from work, and they consciously asserted their ability to appreciate nature in the face of claims that such appreciation was class-specific. As workers and as travelers, itinerant laborers experienced and knew nature in ways that reflected both their distinct circumstances as mobile industrial wage workers and the cultural context of a national obsession with nonhuman nature.

Despite the prominence of both migrant workers and “global commons” as protagonists in recent meetings of the World Social Forum, few activists or scholars have successfully linked their historical agency or significance. In the following essay, I locate conceptual starting points for linking migrant workers and global commons by analyzing the work of the transnational and the commons in political conversation at the WSF and in the historiographies of immigration and the environment in North America. I argue that the transnational and global commons are best understood as analytical vantages rather than as utopian visions of nation-state transcendence. Using research into the history of human trafficking, I explore the analytical advantages of linking migrant workers to global commons. As inevitable trespassers of both national sovereignty and property claims, migrant workers' journeys help reveal a global commons that is, like them, migratory, fleeting, and often illegible to the state authorities. Such commons are not pristine wildernesses, but polyglots of weedy hybrids. Migrant workers' transnational vantages illuminate the limits of enclosure and the enduring adaptability of nonhuman nature across national boundaries.

Rural sugarcane workers in the Brazilian Northeast negotiated with planters in 1963 to establish guidelines for measuring jobs, producing a document they called the Task Table. This article situates the Table in historical context, placing it in a long-term process of agricultural rationalization that generated struggles over flexibility, control, and freedom on the job. The Table emerged at one moment in these battles and since conflicts like these over productivity, efficiency, and control are common to industrial and agricultural work alike, analyzing the Table offers insight into a broad struggle between workers and employers over the conditions and regulation of labor. For a region of hundreds of thousands of sugarcane workers, the Task Table reflected and facilitated the transformation of labor relationships, views of the working environment, and worker consciousness.

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.

Nogales is the shared name of two towns in North America that have grown up in the Sonoran desert; they are separated and united by the international border between the United States and Mexico. Until the early twentieth century, people who frequented Brickwood's Saloon in Nogales, Arizona would literally be standing on the border if they moved close to its south wall (it had to be knocked out to make room for a border marker put up in 1894). A lot of alcohol flowed north over the borderline at Nogales during prohibition. Much illicit traffic in people and goods continues to flow through Ambos Nogales (as the two towns are collectively known). Yet there is also a tremendous amount of licit traffic that goes through America's Port of Entry at Nogales—$2.5 billion worth of fresh produce—tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, peppers, eggplant, mangoes and more, much of it organically grown. These goods came over the border in Mexican trucks in 2011, supplying a healthy dose of fruits and vegetables to American consumers in the winter months. Meanwhile, Mexican workers from places like Oaxaca make a perilous passage through the desert to enter the United States, heading to fields and groves in California or Georgia or Washington or countless other places to harvest fruits and vegetables for Americans or perform other work vital to the so-called American way of life. Over 6,000 migrants, lost or left behind by coyotes, have perished of dehydration in the crossing in the last decade trying to make it to America's fields and other opportunities for work, as other less environmentally punishing border zones in California and Texas have been hardened with walls and intensive surveillance regimes.

Latin American political movements linking traditional peasant values of subsistence with a leftist critique of imperialism are contributing to new forms of environmentalism there. While in the United States labor and environmental movements tend to operate within mainstream political and economic models based on privileging high levels of consumption and economic growth, Latin American voices are challenging both the global economic order and traditional concepts of economic development. From indigenous and peasant movements to leftist labor unions to political leaders, Latin Americans are calling for economic development that privileges the rights of rural peoples and their environments, and redistribution of resources domestically and globally. Yet they remain imbedded in an international economy based on extractivism and economic growth, which poses significant challenges to any alternative paths.

The article is a first hand account of the reunion of the survivors of the Zhili Factory Fire in January 2013 nearly twenty years after the fire took place in 2003 in Shenzhen China and killed more than eighty-eight workers. The article highlights how one of the survivors has transformed from a helpless victim to an active organizer. In rapidly changing China, where millions of workers face new challenges especially due to exposure to hazardous substances, this article depicts how leadership from victims is driving change.