Empire of Timber

Should resource policies protect jobs or the environment? This question has long divided blues (workers) and greens (environmentalists), preventing the formation of what could be a powerful coalition. Erik Loomis's book about Northwest timber workers attempts to show that the jobs-versus-nature debate rests on a false dichotomy. Following several timber workers' unions over the course of the twentieth century, Loomis argues that loggers have consistently pursued policies intended to make logging safer and sustainable, thereby providing a model for “how natural resource workers might balance work and the natural world in ways that could help” blues and greens form a meaningful alliance (p. 17). Loomis's work contributes to a growing body of labor-environmental history, and like many scholars working in this emerging field, he largely locates working-class environmentalism in the ecologies of “the workplace, home, and body” (p. 10). Beginning in the disease-infested logging camps of the early twentieth century, Loomis argues that disquiet over camp conditions radicalized workers, drew them to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and ultimately into strikes aimed at cleaning up the camps. The story of the Northwest IWW's efforts to improve camp sanitation is well-trod historical ground. Still, putting an environmental history spin on this story leads Loomis to an interesting reappraisal of IWW history, showing that the radical union's power rested less in its critique of capitalism and more in its message of environmental justice, or what Loomis creatively terms its “battle for the body” (p. 54). The IWW faded, Loomis maintains, after World War I, when employers and the federal government institutionalized many of the IWW's demands for cleaner camps under the auspices of company unions. Yet the battle for the body was revived in the 1970s when the International Woodworkers of America (IWA), a union formed in the tumult of the depression, began fighting against rising accident rates and toxic exposure

Alliance · Archaeology · Battle · Capitalism · Empire · Natural resource · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · American Literature and Culture · History · Law

• Climate change and energy transition

  Open Access•Mark Hudson•Futures•2024

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