Planet Work: Rethinking Labor and Leisure in the Anthropocene

By Ryan Hediger, David Rodland, Ted Geier and 10 more

Labor and labor norms orient much of contemporary life, organizing our days and years and driving planetary environmental change. Yet, labor, as a foundational set of values and practices, has not been sufficiently interrogated in the context of the environmental humanities for its profound role in climate change and other crises. This collection of essays demonstrates the urgent need to rethink models and customs of labor and leisure in the Anthropocene. Recognizing the grave traumas and hazards plaguing planet Earth, contributors expose fundamental flaws in ideas of work and search for ways to redirect cultures toward more sustainable modes of life. These essays evaluate Anthropocene frames of interpretation, dramatize problems and potentials in regimes of labor, and explore leisure practices such as walking and storytelling as modes of recasting life, while a coda advocates reviving notions of work as craft.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Release date: Dec 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781684484607

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Denaturalizing the Slow Violence of Work

RYAN HEDIGER

WHEN COVID-19 FIRST made its presence known on the global stage in early 2020, it brought the social contract and its orientation around work starkly into focus. A politicized debate arose around how much damage to the economy should be sustained in order to reduce the spread of the disease. In other words, it became for some a question of economy versus life. Many saw that debate as a shocking affront to the dignity and value of life. It is. Yet, in fact, the two are regularly put in conflict. That, in a nutshell, is the central tension investigated by the chapters in this volume, a tension that we suggest is crucial to the larger investigation of questions of the Anthropocene: work versus life, extraction versus care.¹ One might counter this framing with the common claim that work and life are not opposed but complementary. Well, sometimes, for some forms of life. In fact, as the following chapters demonstrate, too often, work directly conflicts with the needs and values of life—especially life beyond the human. Binary distinctions such human/nonhuman and human/inhuman have been some of the most powerful ways of facilitating and excusing harm, including harm to humans, particularly groups of humans seen as inhuman or less-than-human, racist designations that sought to justify the massive labor movements of chattel slavery as well as huge international migrations, forced and voluntary, migrations that powered the rising industrialism that is so often associated with modern environmental trauma evoked with the controversial name Anthropocene.²

The Anthropocene, we suggest, names a massive, long-term global crisis caused in large measure by labor norms and labor machines.³ Although it may not be obvious at first, this is true of all the myriad approaches to defining and framing the Anthropocene, which is a disputed concept in a range of ways. The clearest case connecting the Anthropocene to work is the standard, often-noted argument by Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, who first popularized the term Anthropocene. They date the beginning of the epoch to the advent of James Watt’s steam engine in 1784.⁴ That device helped facilitate a radical transformation of the nature of work and the nature of life for humans and finally for all life. We might say henceforth that human work—which can be defined as a set of ideologically framed, deliberate practices intent on transforming the world to fit human wants and needs—began to approximate the work of increasingly refined machines that are paired with nonhuman animals to model regimes of labor across the centuries.⁵

Another historical moment marked as the opening of the Anthropocene epoch is 1610, marking the onset of the Columbian Exchange of plants, animals, and other forms of life wrought by European contact with (what are now often called) the Americas after Christopher Columbus’s expeditions.⁶ While one might not first connect such events to labor per se, Columbus’s primary motivation in sailing was to engage in the spice trade, clearly an undertaking of commerce. The imperialist and colonialist history that ensued, and its importance to modern conceptions and practices of work, does not need rehearsal here. A third prominent date used to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene is 1945, with the Great Acceleration of human population growth and fossil fuel use after World War II.⁷ Accentuating the claim by Jan Zalasiewicz and colleagues, Jesse Oak Taylor emphasizes that 1945 represents primarily a change in the scale of already existing trends.⁸ That is, for example, population growth and fossil fuel use already existed but increased markedly after 1945.

Again, one may not immediately connect such changes to norms of labor per se, but, we are arguing here, one should: all these shifts were facilitated by the steady development of whole systems of labor, mining and extraction, transportation and distribution, material science, and so on. Indeed, in her discussion of these dates competing as the origin of the Anthropocene, Kathryn Yusoff emphasizes how the three distinct moments in a larger cultural system all demonstrate a technology of race that turned Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples into inhuman objects who could be sacrificed in a regime of extraction.⁹ Such regimes continue to operate in the revised forms of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and financially dependent Third World governments, contributing to a Planet of Slums, as Mike Davis titles his book.¹⁰ How might such realities change if cultures prioritized care as a value instead of extraction?

Beyond those three prominent dates, another moment has often been cited as the opening of the Anthropocene: the dawn of agriculture, some 12,500 years ago.¹¹ Perhaps even more so than the dates mentioned above, this boundary is porous and somewhat indistinct.¹² As James C. Scott shows, for instance, agriculture rose gradually as part of a complex strategy of gaining access to food that also included hunter-gatherer techniques.¹³ For our purposes in this essay collection, rather than insist on protocols that aim to affirm a single event and date to found the Anthropocene, we follow the lead of scholars like Steve Mentz, who urges us to pluralize the Anthropocene, to recognize its multiple histories and dynamics.¹⁴ That approach motivates this collection’s inclusion of a range of theoretical frames and subjects of inquiry, from the roles of horses in eighteenth-century Great Britain (chapter 4) to the importance of walking for Dharug First People in Australia across millennia (chapter 11), from the nineteenth-century Black agrarian tradition in the U.S. (chapter 5) to the globalist fantasies connected to the 1964–1965 World’s Fair in New York (chapter 6).

The summary above, tracking the history of the Anthropocene dispute, notably toggles backward and forward in time, from 1784 to 1610, from 1945 to 12,500 years ago, demonstrating how Anthropocene debates radically upset the conventional sense of time marching in an orderly, linear way. Even as Anthropocene framings aim to periodize, then, they also complicate forms of neat periodization, pluralizing time.¹⁵ Threading through these pluralities is a common theme: the crucial importance of work. The oldest date, reaching back so far as to essentially replace the Holocene epoch with the Anthropocene, is compelling to mention in part because it links modernity with hunter-gatherer practices, a lineation that is important in order to draw stark contrasts between and among possible ways of living as human beings on planet Earth. More on that below.

Despite the centrality of work to these concerns, stunningly, far too little analysis impugns our fundamental cultural conceptions and practices of work in the context of environmental trauma.¹⁶ This is a crucial lacuna. There is a great deal of discourse on changing machines and their fuel systems, say replacing fossil fuels with renewables; a great deal of discourse on pollution and species extinctions; and infinitely much discourse on the politics of all these steps. And, of course, there is a robust tradition investigating the power dynamics of labor, not just in Marxism but in trade unionism and the like. These are all important discourses, but this collection, motivated partly by the Anthropocene’s much wider framings, opens broader questions. We need to ask more fundamentally: What is work for? As Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argue in their book The Shock of the Anthropocene, the modern industrial and labor system was intended and designed to produce control over the planet. They quote Saint-Simon in the early nineteenth century, who states this principle plainly: The object of industry is the exploitation of the globe.¹⁷ Yusoff similarly accents the deliberateness and desire driving long-term regimes of extraction.¹⁸ This logic of transformation clearly underlies the history of agriculture and urbanization,¹⁹ and it takes severe and concentrated form in organizations such as the United States Bureau of Reclamation, which has transformed millions of acres of land with the building of dams, a process then repeated globally.²⁰ Perhaps the most astonishing example of this transformational logic is Operation Plowshare in the 1960s United States, the vision of using nuclear explosions, ostensibly peacefully, to remake planet Earth. It would have involved removing mountains for highways, excavating massive cavities in the earth for various purposes, exploding new water ports into existence, and so on. As Jennifer Fay explains, this program targets the earth itself as the obstacle to human progress.²¹ Earth must be destroyed and remade in humanity’s image.

Clearly, in huge ways, Earth has indeed been remade in humanity’s image. Such efforts are only possible because many billions labor to make them so. This is doubly destructive. The labor practices themselves harm laborers, and the undertakings harm the planet. Yet, labor per se remains one of the uncritically embraced elements of contemporary life. Even critics on the left, who may question ownership of the means of production and the justice (and injustice) of the class system, tend to tacitly assume the soundness of the general framework placing labor practices at the center of life. Interrogating labor regimes is central to the ecological Marxist tradition, for example, from John Bellamy Foster to Jason W. Moore. This discourse is vitally important and informs elements of this volume. But its frames of interpretation—like all frames of interpretation—have limitations as well as strengths. For instance, such writing often treats labor at aggregate levels via a terminology of energy and metabolism.²² Such framings can disable other fundamental questions about our labor imaginary, not only about how justly work norms are exercised and the like but also about what labor is for and how and why we do it, and even whether we should. That last question is placed squarely at the center of Kathi Weeks’s valuable 2011 book, The Problem with Work.²³ By contrast, when ecological Marxism sometimes blends distinct and individual experience into a homogeneous category, it makes the kind of move, like commodification’s deindividualization of entities, that participates in precisely the kind of extraction logic that this collection calls into question.

Much of the tradition of writing about labor, in other words, is still in the thrall of powerful cultural norms and beliefs built around and for work. Work norms can be interrogated one layer deeper, reaching much further back in time for comparisons to other ways of life, a move that is enabled partly by the powerful antiracist work happening in many domains. Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples have been forced, after all, to perform much of the labor of the past half millennium. This collection ventures an effort in that direction of deeper interrogation, relying on a range of theoretical frameworks to claim that attention to our norms of work provides not only a scholarly entrance into this issue but also, more importantly, a practical route into cultural change in the Anthropocene. We inquire into how such changes might look by exploring work and its modern binary opposite, leisure.

To facilitate this effort, this introduction claims a more focused and narrow position pointed especially at the norms and expectations around work: they remain one of the most thoroughly naturalized and powerful sets of expectations driving contemporary life, including particularly the trends that are gathered together under the term Anthropocene. Even without the Anthropocene, these norms would need to be reconsidered, as many scholars discussed below have argued. Work norms are naturalized in the sense of being understood as inevitable and inherent to human life. The term work risks reproducing this naturalization, since it can be read as the term from physics denoting energy expended over time. That is not our meaning here; we intend a meaning synonymous with labor. And work norms are powerful in the sense that, whatever the technological, social, demographic, and environmental changes involved with the epoch, those changes are often powered by human actions. These human actions invariably involve partnerships with the nonhuman, to be sure, as many posthumanist and ecocritical scholars have noted, importantly.²⁴ However, such arguments risk blinding us to the power of specifically human expectations around work, which have been among the most powerful motors driving change after change in a history that predates capitalism. Our partnerships with nonhuman animals and materials, then, are often better understood as asymmetrical at best, or violent, even necropolitical enslavements at worst. But—again, this is crucial—I do not mean that the norms around work are universally human, practiced by all people everywhere in the same ways. Not at all. There are massive and vital differences among cultures and across time as regards work. Recognizing those differences frees us from the potential trap of imagining that humans are simply a doomed species, destined to work endlessly and forever because of some fatal flaw.

However, across the political spectrum, a sense of inevitability attends to many elements of work, as the labor historian Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt explains in concluding his book Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream: Overwork appears to some to be the inexorable outcome of capitalism.²⁵ Yet, as he details in that text, there is a powerful tradition in the United States of thinking otherwise, of imagining better purposes for life beyond work; that tradition is inside capitalism. More generally, much significant and readily available evidence suggests that the prevailing social contract around work is far from inevitable. Juliet B. Schor, for instance, made a significant cultural splash with her 1992 book The Overworked American, which, among other things, registers a clear and forceful account of the varied history of work. She reminds us, despite the strong, general cultural bias in favor of ostensible development and modernity, that hunter-gatherers, so-called primitive peoples … do little work, very much the opposite of the supposition that early human life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, in the immortal words of Thomas Hobbes.²⁶ Scott makes a point similar to Schor’s, noting that contrary to earlier assumptions, hunters and gatherers—even today in the marginal refugia they inhabit—are nothing like the famished, one-day-away-from-starvation desperados of folklore. Hunters and gatherers have, in fact, never looked so good—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure.²⁷ Jo Anne Rey’s chapter in this volume reflects on such traditions from inside them.

Such ambiguity about how to understand the premodern past and how to compare it to the present is a deep problem, explains Gary S. Cross, a conflict … at least, as old as the modern discipline of history.²⁸ Why? Schor offers a powerful explanation, worth quoting at length, of how such a problem could endure:

One of capitalism’s most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit—but rarely articulated—assumption is that the eighty-hour standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up the dreary life of medieval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret, rising even before the sun, laboring by candlelight into the night.

These images are backward projections of modern work patterns. And they are false. Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind.

Therefore, we must take a longer view and look back not just one hundred years, but three or four, even six or seven hundred.²⁹

We have already seen how Anthropocene framing of this problem resembles—and radically extends—Schor’s sense that we need a much wider temporal reach to better investigate this issue. She stretches back as far as seven hundred years into the past; this collection stretches more than ten thousand years backward, at least in a nascent way. That gesture follows scholars such as Scott and Morton, discussed above, and James Suzman in his 2021 book Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, where (like Morton) he derives modern labor norms from the growth of agriculture some ten thousand years ago.³⁰ This wider temporal reach is one of the more important gestures in this volume because it has the potential to significantly reframe our understandings of work and human relationships with the planet.

Schor shows, drawing on scholarship in history, sociology, and more, that the very distinction between labor and leisure is largely an artifact of the developing regimes of work in capitalism.³¹ Furthermore, she argues, rather than capitalist modernity freeing us for leisure, largely the opposite is true: leisure began to take its modern shape in the nineteenth century "because workers struggled mightily against the normal processes that determined the length of working hours. In this sense, leisure exists in spite of rather than as a result of capitalism."³²

Schor’s work resembles much other important thinking that is inching toward recasting norms around work, especially in light of the growing anxiety about the automation of jobs not only in the blue-collar sector but also, increasingly, in the white-collar sector.³³ Perhaps most prominently, considerations of a Green New Deal in the United States have animated discussions around labor norms, even though they tend to accept the basic structure of the working day and working life in capitalism. The Great Resignation, the massive wave of people dropping out of employment in the midst of experiences in COVID-19, sometimes includes calls for more radical rethinking of labor norms.³⁴ Interest in a Universal Basic Income, also sometimes called a Basic Income Guarantee, a Basic Income, and others, has grown of late, though it is a centuries-old idea, reaching back to Thomas More’s Utopia (1551) at least.³⁵ The core idea is that every citizen receive a fixed monetary stipend, though there are many variations. It is not just theoretical; the idea has been put in practice in various forms. For example, in 2017, Finland ran a trial that, after two years, was not renewed by the government;³⁶ in Canada, a town in the province of Manitoba offered a basic income in the 1970s; pilot programs were run on three additional continents, in India, Kenya, Brazil and elsewhere;³⁷ and in the United States, the Alaska Permanent Fund, established in 1976 with monies supplied largely by oil and gas extraction in the state, issues dividends annually to Alaska residents, with some exceptions and rules.³⁸

These ideas, which share logic with other forms of socialized provision such as Social Security, welfare, and the Veterans Administration, all in the United States, signal a separation between obligatory work norms and standard of life. And scholarship such as David Graeber’s sharp rebuke of common labor norms, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, shows a minority interest in revisiting questions of labor. Graeber’s book, which began as a controversial essay that went viral, argues that the cultural obsession with work as a moral undertaking has, perversely, produced a world with far too many jobs that fail to provide any social value, jobs that are resented as purposeless even by those who work them.³⁹ Such scenarios are worsened by the growing recognition that prevailing regimes of work are inefficient, even on their own terms. Human beings, exposed to excessive labor daily and annually, tend to resist, to slack off, to grow torpid whether consciously or inadvertently. Thus, even some committed capitalists see the benefit in rethinking the social contract regarding working hours.⁴⁰

Yet, in the public squares and the universities, in secondary education systems, and so on, the dominant feelings and concerns tend to flow in the opposite direction, emphasizing the need for and the value of permanent and stable employment according to the norms and procedures familiar throughout the West. As the sociologists Stephen Sweet and Peter Meiksins put it in their book Changing Contours of Work: Jobs and Opportunities in the New Economy, Western European and American culture advanced the value of the work ethic, a belief that work is not something people simply do, but is a God-given purpose in life. They note that such a view of work can become pathological, leading to workaholism and the like; nonetheless, those who resist such scripts of work norms are often denied standing as moral and upright citizens, becoming threat[s] to social order.⁴¹ Amid these prevailing social norms, college students are increasingly driven into career-focused majors by parents and administrators concerned to win compensation for their educations, increasingly understood as investments.⁴²

SHOULD WE CALL IT THE ANTHROPOCENE?

It is important to register another key controversy swirling around the term Anthropocene, here best put in quotation marks: Is the name itself even apt? A number of critics have exposed the fallacy of naming a geological epoch after all of humanity—anthropos—when in fact much of the responsibility for the changes the term designates lies with a relatively small group of people. Bonneuil and Fressoz underscore the massive unevenness of responsibility for climate change this way, for instance: Ninety corporations are responsible for 63 per cent of the cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide and methane between 1850 and today.⁴³ Andreas Malm coined the term Capitalocene, emphasizing how the system of capitalist production is most essentially to blame.⁴⁴ In Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, Malm thus argues against understanding industrial machinery as the first cause of this change. Instead, he claims that the decision to move away from water-powered mills, and the like, to fossil power was inspired first and foremost by a desire to control the conditions of labor. He underscores capitalism’s class antagonism, harmful to the worker and intensified by growing technical power: From the very start, at the very smallest scale—in the hot factory, the smoky street, the mine laden with explosives—there emerged a pattern—some swept away by the storm we call progress, others sailing on to their fortunes—subsequently magnified and iterated on progressively larger scales, until climate scientists discovered it in the biosphere as a whole, where the self-similar storm now spirals on.⁴⁵ As implied in that passage, Malm insists that this pattern continues to produce profoundly different exposures to harm in the ongoing environmental crisis.⁴⁶ Even as Malm captures well here the scaling up in terms of power, Bonneuil and Fressoz give reason to quibble with this notion that climate science discovery is recent, underscoring instead that labor and economics discourses have long thought at the planetary scale, aiming to remake the entire world, which renders the importance of purpose and intention clearer yet.⁴⁷

In other words, such accounts motivate the case of this introduction that (initially much disputed) forms of labor are at the heart of producing the condition and the temporal period of the Anthropocene. Jason W. Moore’s work reinforces this case, arguing that we need a more complex view of the Anthropocene than one that simply blames the rise of fossil fuels. As he shows, the tendency to mark the beginning of modernity with the rise of the steam engine obscures the long history of transformations that had an impact on labor, land, and much more, dating back to 1450 at least.⁴⁸ Jan de Vries makes a detailed version of this argument about the run-up to modern capitalism in The Industrious Revolution, showing that many of the transformations were cultural and social, not merely technological. In part, communities engaged in new forms of desire for new commodities that were increasingly available.⁴⁹ Thus, we see a kind of dialogue or interbraiding among the means of production, its products, and the cultures surrounding them, complicating simple accounts of the causalities of economic change.

Donna Haraway has also proposed the term Plantationocene to underscore the impact, more specifically, of regimes of monocrop planting and slavery, which she notes preceded widespread use of fossil fuels. The economic system of the plantation involves isolating and alienating a range of forms of life, from the primary crops to the (generally enslaved) workers to the microbes necessary to make the assemblage work. As Anna L. Tsing notes, participating in the discussion that generated the term Plantationocene, the plantation facilitated an abstract relation between investment and property that clearly undergirds capitalism in general, especially the more recent and powerful global capitalism.⁵⁰ Timothy Morton pursues this logic much further back in time to the development of agriculture, resisting Capitalocene naming to argue that capital and capitalism are symptoms of the problem, not its direct causes.⁵¹ Noburu Ishikawa, an anthropologist in Kyoto, Japan, discusses the use of the term Humanosphere, perhaps a less totalizing alternative to Anthropocene.⁵² In The Shock of the Anthropocene, Bonneuil and Fressoz use the range of possible names for the epoch as an ordering principle of their text, marching through possibilities such as Thermocene, Thanatocene, and Phagocene, using these terms in separate chapters to emphasize the importance of heat, death, and consumption, respectively, to the global changes being named.⁵³ Mentz offers yet a longer list of alternative names.⁵⁴

Still other names have been proposed, and more are likely to proliferate. The alternative terms derive from important arguments, and I simply register and report their range here, rather than try to choose an alternative to Anthropocene among them. The uneasy decision to use the term Anthropocene as part of the framing of this collection is intended merely to gesture toward this whole debate, which, for good or ill, already seems organized around the term;⁵⁵ despite its flaws, the term facilitates a field of inquiry.⁵⁶ Generally, however, the essays in this collection take a clearer position in Anthropocene debates in insisting on a more meticulous historiography and cultural criticism that indexes the contingent development of climate change and the other features named Anthropocene. That contingency matters not just, or even especially, for historical accuracy, but for imagining different possible futures. By denaturalizing and historicizing labor regimes in a range of scenarios, we make room for alternatives that are presented in a variety of ways here, including explorations of walking that undermine the labor/leisure distinction (chapters 8 and 11), a study of park rangers’ work oriented by care rather than extraction (chapter 9), and a consideration of how leisured practices like skiing can open new thinking about the nonhuman environment (chapter 10).

THINKING THROUGH NEOLIBERALISM IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

There are a number of obstacles to rethinking labor, including the sense already mentioned that our labor norms are basically natural or at least inevitable. But the critique of neoliberalism in several quarters can have a denaturalizing effect, even if that critique sometimes fails to escape familiar anthropocentric frames. Consider Wendy Brown’s compelling book Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution as exemplary.

Brown shows how challenging it has become to rethink questions of work and labor. She rightly criticizes neoliberalism’s tendency to reduce all of life to the economic realm. In fact, that is how Brown defines neoliberalism, as a normative order of reason developed over three decades into a widely and deeply disseminated governing rationality that turns every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, into economic entities. Brown emphasizes that all conduct is economic conduct for neoliberalism.⁵⁷ She notes that this reduction of thinking about everything to economic terms has multiple interlocking effects. First, in neoliberalism, as individuals we are required to be responsible for ourselves, even as our efforts offer no guarantee of security, protection, or even survival.⁵⁸ The traditional securities provided by communities and robust social networks are undermined in this structure, isolating people as individuals, like solitary economic units. Second, neoliberalism reverses the expectations of liberal democracy, which no longer serves to ensure equality, as in the U.S. Bill of Rights, but instead works to facilitate inequality. In the competitive economic marketplace, inequality is seen as evidence of freedom.⁵⁹ That is what results when the logic of capitalist economics infiltrates the political, undermining the conventional distinction between those two domains. Third, when everything is capital, labor disappears as a category, as does its collective form, class, taking with it the analytic basis for alienation, exploitation, and association among laborers.⁶⁰ Fourth, the foundation vanishes for citizenship concerned with public things and the common good.⁶¹ One element—the essential element—of the common good, of course, is environment.

These are important, resonant critiques that deserve attention. Indeed, their resonance deepens and extends when we stretch their temporal frame and more self-consciously include the nonhuman beyond what Brown’s frame permits. Consider another key passage in Brown that underscores how the dominance of economic thinking increasingly damages all classes:

As economic parameters become the only parameters for all conduct and concern, the limited form of human existence that Aristotle and later Hannah Arendt designated as mere life and that Marx called life confined by necessity—concern with survival and wealth acquisition—this limited form and imaginary becomes ubiquitous and total across classes. Neoliberal rationality eliminates what these thinkers termed the good life (Aristotle) or the true realm of freedom (Marx), by which they did not mean luxury, leisure, or indulgence, but rather the cultivation and expression of distinctly human capacities for ethical and political freedom, creativity, unbounded reflection, or invention.⁶²

Brown accents the importance of values beyond ostensible economic necessity—the good life, creativity, reflection. These are the kinds of orientations and goals emphasized particularly in section 3 of this volume. But the discourses around the Anthropocene also teach us to be wary of some of this language, borrowed from the Enlightenment tradition, distinctly human capacities for ethical and political freedom, creativity, unbounded reflection, or invention. I endorse Brown’s general point that democracy ought to help us secure time and energy for activities outside of labor that include invention, freedom, and so on. But the triumphant humanism of these grand terms is strained in a posthumanist framework. The need to pile up qualifiers around the terms true realm of freedom rather than just freedom suggests a measure of mystification and a sense that these accounts of the purpose of life are not good enough.⁶³ Such claims raise crucial questions that are explored in this volume of essays: Reflection about what? Invention of what? For what?

It is also crucial to underscore how this Enlightenment framing around freedom hinges on the existence of slavery, excusing a discourse of freedom and free labor that runs contrary to the importance of community, solidarity, and interdependence,⁶⁴ a topic that I treat at greater length in chapter 3. In other words, there is reason to advance values of care (including self-care) in addition to, or even rather than, freedom. Similarly, it is worth registering the problematic workism in Brown, echoing Aristotle, Arendt, and Marx, that freedom did not mean luxury, leisure, or indulgence.⁶⁵ This familiar wariness about leisure reiterates the core questions of purpose and the set of values connected to it, which might in fact, for example, point toward something like a luxury or indulgence of time or an excess of care as prevailing values.⁶⁶ Indeed, questions of purpose are at the heart of Brown’s argument and her summary of such luminaries as Aristotle, Arendt, and Marx. What is the purpose of life? The Anthropocene requires us to reopen such questions in a serious way.⁶⁷

Brown’s somewhat traditional, self-consciously humanist approach to these questions of purpose may betray some of her hopes. For instance, one reason the economy has increasingly dominated the sense of purpose in modern democracy is precisely because other familiar (often humanist) forms of finding meaning, such as organized religion, have steadily eroded. Federico Campagna, for example, speculates that work fills the cultural void left by religion, becoming a focus for our beliefs and our faith. Even though we have the technological capacity to work far less, he writes, the discourse over Work is now more obsessive [than] ever.⁶⁸ Humanism is similarly, and deservingly, under critique in posthumanism, ecocriticism, and related fields, and from a different angle in Black critical theory. Many of us are increasingly skeptical of these grand ideas of unbounded reflection or true freedom.

Importantly, in a footnote to the passage quoted above, Brown notes that Aristotle’s conception of freedom from want in the good life helped to create an unfree order, one based on slavery, gender, and class domination, and divided humanity between those condemned to mere life and those free to pursue the good life. Thus, this concept has often been used, even today, to secure hierarchies that value only some forms of life. This is a significant problem with her account of purpose. However, Brown contrasts Aristotle with Marx, who borrowed Aristotle’s concept to articulate a premise for liberation: all humans should be emancipated from mere life for the good life.⁶⁹ It can feel easy to celebrate this aim, but the framework remains caught up in the dialectic of freedom/slavery. As Graeber argues, many of our current conditions of work are themselves founded on ideas and practices developed in slavery,⁷⁰ though this history is rarely acknowledged.

But even if all humans are to be emancipated, who or what slaves will guarantee them access to the good life? If past is prologue, we can suppose nonhumans are the answer. They can remain our slaves. CAFOs—confined animal feeding operations—forests as standing reserves, and so on. Importantly, this logic of slavery extends beyond life to include minerals: fossil fuels have often been understood historically as a replacement for human slavery, in effect enslaving carbon reserves in the same oppressive cultural logic.⁷¹ While one may protest that the oil or coal does not mind being harnessed, the planetary consequences of such carbon regimes—and nuclear power regimes—are becoming painfully clearer by the day. And extracting carbon takes work. In other words, our carbon imaginary is ontologically flawed, and those flaws have real-world effects. Rejecting this scenario, Morton writes Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People, arguing for a significant reconception of traditional forms of labor solidarity, which have tended to exclude the nonhuman. Morton exposes the fallacy of that exclusive approach, arguing that, finally, solidarity implies nonhumans. Solidarity requires nonhumans. Solidarity just is solidarity with nonhumans.⁷² That impulse is pursued in various ways in this essay collection, as in Sinan Akıllı’s chapter on horses, and we also often pursue Morton’s more radical suggestions about frames of value outside labor.

WORK AS SLOW VIOLENCE

Morton’s argument in Humankind, like much of his scholarship, reverses the common idea that concerns about the environment and the nonhuman are merely peripheral to the serious work of human life. Instead, Morton underscores that relationships with nonhumans are unavoidably central to life, indeed that such concerns are ontological, about how to understand reality itself.⁷³ And recourse to reality and the inevitability of one thing or another are common in debates about work and environment. For instance, they animate the essay ‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’ Work and Nature, by Richard White, a prominent environmental and U.S. historian. His piece effectively encapsulates the need for the arguments in this essay collection, in part because White expresses well many of the prevailing ideas about work and its necessity. As the basic premise of his article, he states, We need to reexamine the connections between work and nature.⁷⁴ We agree. White further claims that as long as environmentalism refuses to engage questions of modern work and labor, many environmentalists’ goals will falter and our children, in the end, will suffer.⁷⁵ Again, hear, hear. But the thrust of White’s argument otherwise runs contrary to the orientation of this introduction and collection of essays. This mixture of shared interest but often-opposed conclusions makes White’s article worth engaging at some length to exemplify what is at stake in these questions.

White exposes flaws in common rhetoric among environmentalists, arguing that demonizing the blue-collar work carried out by loggers, miners, and the like is an unwise and unrealistic approach. I am sympathetic with that case. But this collection’s project requires us to turn that point around to ask how norms and scripts of work have damaged not only the environment but also the workers themselves. A central problematic element of White’s case is that he simply accepts and reiterates the notion that most humans must work.⁷⁶ He thus reiterates the seemingly practical fact and widely naturalized view of reality that this collection calls into question. At the very least, we must ask: What sort of work and under what terms? But, more essentially, a wide-frame view of history suggests that work has gone from being a brief, focused activity to a universalized value, a moral system, a trans-civilizational