Chad Montrie, Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States.(Book review)

Chad Montrie, Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2008)

HISTORY IS fundamentally the story of humans transforming the natural world through their labours. And yet, despite the deep connections between human work and the natural environment, this relationship--"the core element of human history," in Chad Montrie's opinion--has largely been neglected by modern historians. (129) The specialization of academic subfields has meant that labour historians have focused primarily upon labourers and the labour movement while environmental historians have focused primarily upon the environment and the environmental movement. Never the twain shall meet. Montrie's Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States seeks to bridge this historiographical gap and "tell a story that should resonate with scholars working in both environmental and labor history." (8)

In six short essays examining textile mill girls in Lowell, slaves and sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, female homesteaders in Kansas and Nebraska, coal miners in Appalachia, autoworkers in Detroit, and Hispanic farm workers in southern California, Montrie attempts to reveal how workers resisted, with varying degrees of success, the labour processes that alienated them from both work and nature. Central to this task is the author's "common theory" of alienation. Labour historians have understandably directed their attentions to the exploitation of labour by capital and the alienation of industrial workers from the labour process. Environmental historians have understandably focused on a different consequence of the Industrial Revolution: the exploitation of nature and the alienation of humans from the natural world. Montrie suggests, quite sensibly, that these two processes of alienation were connected: "the exploitation of American workers intensified while their sense of separation from the natural world became more acute." (8)

Also significant is Montrie's ambitious and revisionist claim that some workers, in the process of resisting their estrangement from both work and nature, "also helped forge a robust environmental movement." (91) It has long been a truism among environmental historians that the origins of the "environmental movement" were distinctly middle-class. Montrie argues, to the contrary, that autoworkers "pioneered a working-class environmentalism, an important but somewhat forgotten foundation for the mainstream concern that blossomed across the country." (92)

Montrie's claims that workers, rather than elites, played a crucial role in forging environmentalism as well as his emphasis on coupling labour and environmental history should serve as a wake-up call to specialists in both fields. He makes a compelling case that work and nature cannot be studied apart from each other: "Paying attention to workers' relationship with the natural world through their work can and will alter the way we think about their experiences during industrialization, their changing identities, their varied and evolving culture and values, their efforts to create and maintain unions and other social organizations, as well as their role in politics." (6)

Making a Living is therefore stimulating, insightful, and relevant. However, the book seems only to add a new historiographical gloss on an old story that has been told by hundreds of social historians over the last fifty years. That story, in short, is the estrangement of artisans and farmers as holistic, rewarding, and productive labours gave way to fragmented, routinized, and oppressive industrial work regimes, followed by the valiant, but ultimately futile, resistance of these workers to such conditions. Montrie introduces the storyline in these terms: "Under capitalism, the power of living beings for creative productive activity is largely reduced to a mere means to satisfy animal needs, when they are forced to sell their labour power for a wage and give up claim to the products of their labour. This severs most of their remaining organic connections to nature and thereby compounds an actual and sensed estrangement from self, although it is not complete. Workers are not entirely bereft of ways to respond and resist, and they certainly do so, a fact that Making a Living attempts to reveal and explain." (7)

Sentences like this one provide a kind of historiographical deja vu--is it the 1970s again? The storyline is valid: But does rehashing Marx's theory of alienation push forward our historical understanding? Alienation is still relevant. But that does not make it new or counterintuitive or cutting edge, as Montrie would have us believe, even if we add nature to the mix.

Another problem with the book is rural nostalgia. Montrie, like most of us ("us" meaning urban middle-class academics), takes a pessimistic view of the process that estranged workers from nature. Even if he grudgingly acknowledges that modernization had "a few good ends"--"access to better schools, doctors, and hospitals, as well as cultural amenities such as movie theatres, amusement parks, and dance halls," he generally depicts the lives of workers after their separation from nature--even those who fled poverty in Appalachia for high-paying wartime jobs in the North--as largely miserable and bleak. (91) Preindustrial labours, on the other hand, are cast in the most glowing terms: "Settled on a hillside or nestled in a hollow with access to bottomland, mountain residents grew, raised, gathered, and caught their subsistence as part of family production units, based on an ideal of interdependence and a life lived close to the natural world that was directly and perceptibly around them. There was a division of labor, often by gender and age, but family members had a sense of their place and function, and their work was meaningful." (74)

I am critical because I also fall into the trap of romanticizing preindustrial labours and demonizing the "dark satanic mills." But only by escaping such nostalgia can we begin to tell a new story. If not, we are left retelling the same old tale of "Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft," or, as one of my mentors used to call it, the "community goes smash" model. I like this model too. But it needs rethinking, and for the same reason that environmental historians have jettisoned the concept of "pristine" wilderness: it posits a romantic and ahistorical past.

Montrie is trying to rethink things and Making a Living is a step in that direction. His book should stir a lively debate in graduate school seminars among environmental and labour historians who will likely meet in separate classrooms. Unfortunately, the book will not gain much of an audience outside of academia where we really need a rethinking of the relationship between labour and the environment. For too long, a wall has separated workers and environmentalists just as it has divided historians. It's time to bring the discussion together and stimulate debate. Chad Montrie has tried to do just that and I applaud him for it.

DAVID ARNOLD

Columbia Basin College

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