Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States

by Chad Montrie

In an innovative fusion of labor and environmental history, Making a Living examines work as a central part of Americans' evolving relationship with nature, revealing the unexpected connections between the fight for workers' rights and the rise of the modern environmental movement. Chad Montrie offers six case textile "mill girls" in antebellum New England, plantation slaves and newly freed sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, homesteading women in the Kansas and Nebraska grasslands, native-born coal miners in southern Appalachia, autoworkers in Detroit, and Mexican and Mexican American farm workers in southern California. Montrie shows how increasingly organized and mechanized production drove a wedge between workers and nature-and how workers fought back. Workers' resistance not only addressed wages and conditions, he argues, but also planted the seeds of environmental reform and environmental justice activism. Workers played a critical role in raising popular consciousness, pioneering strategies for enacting environmental regulatory policy, and initiating militant local protest. Filled with poignant and illuminating vignettes, Making a Living provides new insights into the intersection of the labor movement and environmentalism in America.

190 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2008

Reviews

[Empanadani · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provided the answer that I was looking for. It’s difficult not to look towards the mainstream environmental movement and not see it as elitist and white. Reading Montrie’s book, though, offered me a historical perspective for a vision of an alternative future in the environment. This environmental movement has always been present, but I overlooked it. It is inseparable from the history of unions and labor in the USA and deeply intertwined in the lives of young women from Massachusetts in the antebellum period; Mexican/Mexican-American farm workers; slaves and freedmen from the Mississippi Delta; Michigan autoworkers; women and families in the prairies of Nebraska and Kansas; and coal miners in the Appalachia. Reading the interactions between people from these case studies and Nature is a better definition of Nature than anything I have read by Cronon. This book also repeats the story from The Industrialization of Mexico (?) and Marx of the estrangement of a person’s labor to their environment due to the industrialization process occurring nationwide. It also delineates the fact that hunting and other similar activities are neither ethically immoral nor at odds with environmental work.