L/T – GND is ecological care work

Like the work of social reproduction, the “life support systems” of planet earth— the carbon cycle, water purification, soil fertility, and many other processes often referred to as “ecosystem services”— have often been treated as background conditions against which the formal economy can function. But they are crucial to maintaining a habitable planet and a livable human future on it. Our understanding of the crisis of care, then, should encompass the multispecies relationships necessary for sustaining life on earth. The web of life on which we depend is breaking down: it needs care, repair, and maintenance. We need to support and expand forms of work oriented toward caring for the ecosystems that keep the earth habitable. The New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) is one potential model of a green jobs program focused on care for the earth and reveals both possibilities and challenges. CCC workers performed a wide array of tasks, including forest and soil conservation, the construction of hiking trails and recreational facilities, flood control, and disaster relief. This work, too, was deeply gendered: the CCC was all male, and the work itself— mostly manual labor, often aimed as much at transforming ecosystems as maintaining them— was understood as ruggedly masculine, explicitly intended to make unemployed boys into strapping and independent men. (One slogan declared “The CCC- A Builder of Men.”28) Its militaristic inspiration was reflected in the description of the program as a “corps” and those who participated as “soil soldiers”; workers lived in barracks and obeyed military discipline. Meanwhile, a short- lived women’s CCC, championed by Eleanor Roosevelt and known informally as the “She- She- She,” met with resistance from those who thought women should not work outdoors and was ultimately deemed too expensive to continue. Even the male CCC members, however, were expected to work on the cheap: Franklin Roosevelt told Congress that “more important . . . than the material gains will be the moral and spiritual value of such work.” Pay was lower than the standard union wage, garnering criticism from labor leaders; like other New Deal– era jobs programs, it was temporary. A renewed, permanent version of the CCC could create new hiking trails, campgrounds, and nature reserves in rural areas. In places like West Virginia and Wyoming, former coal miners could turn abandoned coal mines into national parks dedicated to labor and environmental history. In cities, CCC workers could support the creation and maintenance of new city parks and community gardens; they could plant trees to combat the effect of concrete “heat islands” and make cities more livable even in the face of rising temperatures. Workers could restore areas that have long been damaged by fossil fuel extraction and subjected to the costs of industrial production, attacking the long legacy of environmental racism. Yet today most conservation work is still done on the cheap, often by young people on service years, as in the California Conservation Corps (motto: “hard work, low pay, miserable conditions, and more!”). National parks currently employ only about 20,000 paid workers while using 315,000 volunteers annually.29 Incarcerated people also frequently serve as a lowcost source of ecological labor: they make up one- third of California’s firefighting force and perform other conservation tasks like clearing brush and fallen trees, maintaining parks, and undertaking reforestation. For these kinds of work to be viable livelihoods, they, too, would have to be better paid and treated as necessary and permanent jobs rather than stopgaps. Another promising sector for ecological care work is agriculture, which is deeply dependent on ecological processes under threat from climate change. But contemporary American agriculture does not take much care for the earth, nor for those who work it. Instead, industrial agriculture aims to produce as much as possible as cheaply as possible, pushing both workers and soil to exhaustion. Integrating care for the earth into the American agricultural system will thus require reckoning with the exploitation of farmworkers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants. The National Agricultural Workers Survey, conducted by the Department of Labor, suggests that nearly 75 percent of farmworkers are immigrants, mostly from Central America; an estimated 49 percent are undocumented.30 Their immigration status renders farmworkers vulnerable to intense exploitation: farmworkers are among the most exploited workers in the country, working brutally long hours for low pay, and are still excluded from many forms of labor protections. Beyond a small number of conservation jobs, ecological care work is not a recognized or paid form of work in the contemporary American economy. Programs for ecological restoration and maintenance will have to be intentionally created and should draw on the insight of Indigenous communities who have long performed the labor of ecological stewardship. As Indigenous scholar Nick Estes argues, “the relationship Indigenous caretakers have with the land, water, air, and nonhuman world is typically not viewed as productive. . . . Like unwaged caregiving work, land defense and water protection are undervalued but necessary for the continuation of life on a planet teetering on collapse.”31