Wages for climate stewardship?

• Main Author: RANDLE, Sayd
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: Environmental Policy
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cis_research/103; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/cis_research/article/1102/viewcontent/Wages_for_Climate_Stewardship.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

IN 1996, environmental historian Richard White published an essay with a title borrowed from a pissed-off bumper sticker: “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?” White used the frictions between loggers and spotted owl advocates in the Pacific Northwest to show readers exactly how US-based environmentalism had come to be seen as orthogonal to productive labor. “Work,” he asserted, is in fact “where we should begin” when we talk about environmentalism. Set aside idealized images of natural spaces as best suited for leisure, he counseled. It’s only “[i]n taking responsibility for our own lives and work, in unmasking the connections of our labor and nature’s labor, in giving up our hopeless fixation on purity,” that “we may ultimately find a way to break the borders that imprison nature as much as ourselves.”