From: "Nate Holdren" <nateholdren-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: ecology work? ecology workers?
Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2002 12:22:36 -0400


Hi Michael-
You're not from Gary, Indiana by any chance are you?

Your post is very interesting and suggestive.
Can you clarify for me what you mean by 'social work' when you say that 
'ecological work is a type of social work'? I'm not clear on that.

Let me ramble at you for a bit...

Your laying out of the situation of ecological workers fits w/ my 
experience. I've got a number of friends earning little to know money in 
eco-oriented jobs and working long hours, either in the direct 
human-environment interface (organic farming, plant biology) or the more 
human-to-human eco oriented work (campaigning, recycling collection and 
education). Almost all of them are partially kept in the job by the 'make a 
difference, live lightly on the earth' mentality, which while I think valid 
is very much used against them by management ("you're bringing down the 
movement!" if you make trouble on the job by calling attention to your own 
needs and wants as relates to the labor process). All of these friends are 
in terribly precarious positions, with short term or temp contracts and no 
job security. They do have a fair amount of autonomy in the workplace 
(ability to goof off, steal food they grow, use work resource for personal 
use, etc).

Regarding you specific questions, I don't have answers, but here's my 
responses to some of them...

on environmental and healthcare concerns, I'm not totally sure what you mean 
by there being a 'continuum of biological knowledge' is. A friend of mine 
works on a campaign called Healthcare Without Harm, which aims to reduce the 
ecological impact of the healthcare industry through things like pressure on 
medical waste processing companies (and their client hospitals) to close 
incinerators, end use of dioxins and other toxins, etc.
My friend's part is a pilot project trying to build links between these 
community based and political campaign projects and organized labor. She's 
done some work helping build up health and safety committees in medical 
workplaces, to address problems like accidental needle sticks, health care 
concerns around handling material made with dioxin, the handling of medical 
waste, etc. The idea is to try to link these workplace and trade union 
committees to other groups targeting the employer or other places in the 
circulation of medical products/waste, like community groups trying to close 
incinerators, and so on.

Regarding the local-ness of ecological knowledge and the abstraction of the 
concept of ecology - Another friend works at the national park in northwest 
Indiana on a recurring short term contract, renewed periodically depending 
on the availability of government and foundation funding. She does plant 
identification research and conservation work.
Many of her friends and co-workers do six month stints working at different 
sites all over the country, working long hours for low pay in doing various 
contracted 'green' work. This circulation of eco-workers means that the low 
level workers (the folks who carry out management's orders) at any given 
site may not be intimately aware of the specifics of the local ecology, 
certainly not initially. The more permanent researcher/project director 
management types (the order givers) tend to know more about the specifics of 
the local ecology (and of the organization) and use that knowledge to 
formulate work goals for the project as a whole and direct the work of 
others. These managers being higher paid and in charge have more power and 
security on the one hand, but on the other the specificity of their work 
(ie, knowing a lot about the Dunes ecosystem in northwest indiana) makes 
them less transferable to other work sites and thus also precarious in the 
face of fickle funding.
This doesn't really get at your concern about growing ecological 
consciousness being part of the abstraction of the concept of ecology. I 
don't really have an opinion on that.

all the best,
Nate


>From: Michael_E_Jackson-AT-brown.edu
>Reply-To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject: AUT: ecology work? ecology workers?
>Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 0:30:07 -0400
>
>I was wondering if anyone can help direct me towards useful ideas/resources 
>on a project I've been curious about these last few days.
>
>First, the requisite intro to the list: as indicated by my email account, 
>yes, I am an undergrad at an actual Ivy League School, which according to 
>the recent discussion almost definitely qualifies me as actively, currently 
>capitalist-class... though I work for wages 20-30 hrs in a given week on 
>top of my classes and thesis work, and though I'll have loans to pay and 
>not much of a practical headstart in any job market when I get out of here. 
>Disclaimer disclaimer, believe what you must, etc, but I'm in this for the 
>long haul (as far as I can tell at age 20).
>
>Right now I'm attempting to finish concentration work on crisis theory and 
>flexible accumulation and stuff; I'm becoming increasingly interested in 
>autonomia; reading this list daily for the past few months has been 
>helpful. (And, in case you're cynically wondering, my interest began with 
>Midnight Notes and Harry Cleaver, not Hardt/Negri.) On to my question...
>
>I've been trying to assemble the elements of a useful description of the 
>"ecology worker." The two major approaches to ecological struggle, at least 
>in North America, have been deeply problematic. On the one hand, there is 
>an "environmentalist" faction of the ruling class that advocates a more 
>total ecological management, usually on the part of the state as collective 
>capitalist but more recently in a recuperative push towards "green 
>capitalism" amongst private industrialists. On the other, there is 
>increasingly a movement of "environmental justice"-minded people who share 
>some level of awareness that capital unevenly externalizes environmental 
>costs. For the most part (in NA at least) these folks seem to either submit 
>themselves to exploitation in the nonprofit sector, or adopt a partially 
>declassed (?) scavenger lifestyle as a vangaurd representing the interests 
>of "nature" (and even those people viewed as "closer" to it) against 
>capital as a whole. (Some are against industry or "civilization" too.)
>
>The situation is enough to send anyone with a strong class analysis 
>skittering away from action around environmental concerns--myself included. 
>I was wondering, though, if it would be possible to understand "ecology 
>work" as an aspect of social work. This would encompass all work (except 
>managerial?) performed on the basis of ecological knowledge (of any degree 
>of formality and particularity) and with the intended consequence of 
>maintaining a biological environment which fosters social reproduction.
>
>Ecology workers would therefore be, variously, (a) those whose wage (or 
>other form of compensation from capital) is formally linked to ecological 
>performance; (b) those whose wage ('') is linked to productivity which 
>happens to depend on ecological performance; and (c) those whose ecological 
>performance does not determine their wage ('') but is nevertheless carried 
>out and is imposed by capital (for example, if it counteracts the material 
>side-effects of capitalist production on their own well-being).
>
>Ecology work would encompass: much "housework" (food selection, cleaning); 
>jobs in sanitation and waste disposal; tasks within most workdays that 
>involve cleaning and disposal; agricultural labor; street-bureaucratic work 
>around health and urban pollution issues; voluntary direct defense of biota 
>*perhaps* (but certainly not conservationist real-estate accumulation); 
>grassroots community activism against toxic dumping; work in construction 
>and landscaping; and possibly certain types of intellectual labor that 
>pertain directly to this work as such.
>
>The key elements of this project would be:
>--to uncover the diverse forms of ecological knowledge that most of us (as 
>ecology workers) have developed; but
>--to understand how this knowledge is developed to fulfill work that is 
>created and imposed by capital; and
>--to recognize that ecology work is inherently social work.
>
>The goal, finally, would be to understand ecology work as a category of 
>work under capital, in a way that allows for workers to make ecological 
>demands directly in the context of a more general circulation of struggles.
>
>That's the gist of it.
>
>Some immediate concerns:
>1) Where is the line between ecology work and work in healthcare? There is 
>a continuum of relevant biological knowledge.
>2) Are owner-managers of small farms ecology workers?
>3) Ecological knowledge on a small scale is highly diverse and specific, 
>tending to vary with locality. Would increasingly succesful circulation of 
>consciousness about ecology work tend to correspond with an increasingly 
>abstract conception of "ecology" itself? Would this more closely mirror the 
>("instrumental") capitalist perspective on environmental dynamics (and 
>hence be more susceptible to recuperation by capital/the state)?
>4) Could unified struggles based on "ecology work" really circulate between 
>urban and rural populations? Or does capital impose qualitatively different 
>types of strain on urban environments and rural ecosystems?
>
>That's about the extent of my musings. If anyone can offer a 
>critique--specifically either to shoot down the endeavor entirely, or to 
>push it towards coherence--I'd really appreciate it. I'm new at this stuff, 
>and if this is a topic that's long since been settled on I'd love to know.
>
>Also, I realize that variations on this analysis have already been put 
>forth: the better ecofeminists have discussed the uneven imposition of 
>ecology work, in terms of the "externalization of costs" disproportionately 
>onto oppressed strata; and the "social ecology" tendency suggests that one 
>of the benefits of radically participatory control over production will be 
>the incorporation of all these special ecological demands into the 
>decision-making process (the end of ecology work as a separate sphere?). 
>But I'm more interested in the autonomous activity of ecology workers, in a 
>manner that fosters c. of s.'s with other (overlapping) sectors of the w.c. 
>Any suggestions? (If anyone just points me to Engels, I'll scream.)
>
>Thanks,
>MJ
>
>
>
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