Making a Living

In an innovative fusion of labor and environmental history <i>Making a Living</i> examines work as a central part of Americans' evolving relationship with nature revealing the unexpected connections between the fight for workers' rights and the rise of the modern environmental movement.<br/><br/>Chad Montrie offers six case studies: textile “mill girls” in antebellum New England plantation slaves and newly freed sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta homesteading women in the Kansas and Nebraska grasslands native-born coal miners in southern Appalachia autoworkers in Detroit and Mexican and Mexican American farm workers in southern California. Montrie shows how increasingly organized and mechanized production drove a wedge between workers and nature — and how workers fought back. Workers' resistance not only addressed wages and conditions he argues but also planted the seeds of environmental reform and environmental justice activism. Workers played a critical role in raising popular consciousness pioneering strategies for enacting environmental regulatory policy and initiating militant local protest.<br/><br/>Filled with poignant and illuminating vignettes <i>Making a Living</i> provides new insights into the intersection of the labor movement and environmentalism in America.