Turbulent Flows: The Intertwined Histories of Labor, Capitalism, and Environment in American Resource Extraction

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Recently environmental historians have reexamined the history of North American extractive industry, working to understand resource production within the larger process of environmental rationalization and quantification brought by global capitalism. They reveal similar narratives in which ever-expanding extractive systems have implicated both land and biological life within abstract, often obscured, systems of capital, trade, and commerce. Following the movement of people, resources, and energy through these interconnected networks has revealed previously unknown links between human activity and nonhuman life. However, such large-scale approaches can obscure the uniqueness of localized experience.

Following Andrew Needham, Chris Jones and others working to better understand the overlap between labor and working class history, the history of capitalism, and environmental history, this panel provides four place-based case studies from diverse resource industries. Such an approach acknowledges the agency of individual workers, bystanders, and organisms within the larger history of American capitalism.

Sarah Stanford-McIntyre argues that advances in oil drilling technology gave West Texas oil workers intimate knowledge of local ecology which mediated their understanding of industry expansion. Brian Leech argues that although open pit mining was safer, it changed daily work practice and meant a loss of worker control in Butte, MT. David Cohen finds the limits of corporate environmentalism, examining the Great Northern Paper Company’s opposition to a national park on company timberland. Jonathan Free reexamines the Kentucky coal industry during the 1970s energy crisis, finding its early economic warning signs in 1960s electricity shortages.

Our combined attention to the connections between the local and the global, the material and the abstract, allow us to highlight ways in which overlooked communities and unseen environments influenced both the trajectory of US resource management and contributed to our current global ecological crisis.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Plumbing the Depths: Drilling as Ecological Knowledge in Texas Oil Communities - Sarah Stanford-McIntyre, College of William & Mary

• Capitalism and the Wilderness Idea: Conservation, Labor, and the Industrial Forest - David Cohen, Brandeis University

• Coal, Power, and the Long Energy Crisis of the 1970s - Jonathan Free, Duke University

• The Open-Pit Workscape: Industrial Exposure and Mining Labor During the Shift from Underground to Open-Pit Copper Mining - Brian Leech, Augustana College

Chair

• Sarah Stanford-McIntyre, College of William & Mary

Commentator

• Erik Loomis, University of Rhode Island