A Consideration of Trees as Workers Amidst an Environmental Justice Struggle Against the Wood Pellet Industry on the Atlantic Coastal Plain of the United States

Keywords: political ecology, environmental justice, more-than-human labor, vegetal labor, arboreal labor
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 58

Abstract

The wood pellet industry that feeds Europe’s historically coal-fired power plants has exploded in the last decade and left old growth forests on the United States Coastal Plain bald, African American and Native American environmental justice communities in the rural South more polluted, and European carbon markets unsatisfied. We are robbing Peter to pay Paul in a shell game of fuzzy carbon accounting that is – despite millions of dollars spent on industry greenwashing to change the public discourse – leaving the planet more naked and hotter, and the world’s most vulnerable people and ecosystems in an even more precarious condition. As I tell the tale of one rural North Carolina environmental justice community’s (so-far) successful struggle against a brand new wood pellet plant, I consider trees as workers alienated from the product of their labor: in this case, their very own biomass. As I examine methodologies for defining and quantifying tree labor and productivity, I discuss the limitations to the received notions of ecosystem services and imagine what a serious consideration of the tree as worker would look like for a world on the brink. Finally, I bring the discussion full circle as I show the implications for human workers and for communities classed out of traditional labor cycles by neoliberal labor regimes and now on the receiving end of global economic detritus: Robeson County, North Carolina’s, environmental justice communities.