Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States
Chad Montrie
The University of North Carolina Press
In an innovative fusion of labor and environmental history,  Making a Living  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.<p>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&#151and 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.<p>Filled with poignant and illuminating vignettes,  Making a Living  provides new insights into the intersection of the labor movement and environmentalism in America.