Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States

Conclusion

Conclusion In its most basic form work is the transformation of nature. To produce both food and shelter, as well as countless other goods and amenities as needs and wants evolve over time, human beings must change parts of the natural world around them. This continuous use of the physical and organic environment, and the remaking of self and communities that it necessarily entails, is the core element of human history, a materialist basis for change and continuity in the past. It conditions and is in turn a√ected by the evolution of social relations, technological innovations, demographic variation, and geographic mobility. ‘‘By producing their means of subsistence,’’ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explained in The German Ideology, ‘‘men [and presumably they would now include women] are indirectly producing their actual material life.’’ They are also, in early stages of social development, making the many diverse elements of culture. ‘‘The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness,’’ the two philosophers continued, ‘‘is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life.’’∞ Yet what implications do these fundamental truths have for understanding people’s relationship with nature? In the early nineteenth century, Henry David Thoreau had his own answer. ‘‘Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others,’’ he wrote in Walden, ‘‘spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation.’’ By their work they were in a privileged position to know the streams and woods and their other inhabitants. ‘‘We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively,’’ Thoreau claimed, ‘‘for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.’’≤ In these and other similar musings, Concord’s famous eccentric might not 130 Conclusion have stated an absolute fact, but the underlying motive for his remarks was consistent and sound. The mills and factories appearing along the waterways of New England, and concurrent, related changes in farming, were transforming the ways his neighbors and distant countrymen knew and used the environment. Thoreau was very much worried about this, and it inclined him to idealize other ways of making a living, holding them up as a foil to condemn how the countryside, its inhabitants, and intercourse between the two were being altered. ‘‘By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, or regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly,’’ he wrote elsewhere in Walden, ‘‘the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.’’≥ The trends that inspired Henry David Thoreau to wax eloquent only intensified in the decades and century to follow. The transformation of labor power into a commodity, and sustained e√orts to turn all of nature into the same, profoundly and adversely a√ected the content and purpose of various people’s work as well as their relationship with the land, water, and air around them. This happened, of course, by twists and turns. Whatever the limitations of wage work and sharecropping, the lives of African Americans in the Mississippi Delta were certainly improved by emancipation from slavery. Homesteader women in Kansas and Nebraska, to cite another example, started the settlement process with generally antagonistic attitudes about the ‘‘wild’’ grasslands and did not fully develop a sense of connection to that landscape until they acquired the trappings of modern life and industrial notions about domestic economy. In many if not most cases, however, and perhaps even more so over the long run, industrial capitalism caused workers to su√er both economic exploitation and estrangement from the natural world. As the nineteenth and twentieth centuries progressed, many also found themselves living in environments polluted and poisoned by the very industries that gave them their jobs. Through it all, textile mill operatives, coal miners, migrant field hands, and others devised means of accommodation and resistance, drawing on inherited traditions, values, and beliefs as well as developing new ones. Working-class literary romanticism gave expression to operatives’ complicated longings for rural homesteads and soothed their dissatisfaction with the urban-industrial environment of Lowell and other antebellum factory towns. Hunting and fishing retained its social significance for freedpeople in the Delta and coal miners...