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1 Introduction
The mysterious absence of domestic environmental labour
Domestic labour is as ancient as humankind itself. Domestic labour is observable across space and time. It takes on myriad forms across different cultural and geographic milieu, and is associated with a vast range of different technologies. It involves complex socio-ecological systems within and beyond the domestic. Domestic labour is the work involved in carrying out, either personally or by enrolling others, those everyday activities that sustain life. Accessing and using water to wash and bathe. Finding, nurturing, distributing and processing plants and animals to eat, and materials to clothe, house, transport and entertain members of a household or commune, particularly young ones. Keeping dirt from bodies, dwellings, clothing and other possessions at bay. Sourcing energy for cooking, heating and cooling.
What counts as domestic, at least for my purposes as a cultural geographer, is both fluid and broad. Having already referred to âhouseholdâ and âcommuneâ and âdwellingâ, it is important to point out that domestic labour can be conducted in any place where people organize access to water, shelter, food and so on in their usual zone of residence (mobile or stationary), as well as engage in tasks such as cooking, cleaning and child caring. We might find domestic labour being performed, for example, in a supermarket, a community garden or a dumpster, as well as in streets, houses, units, caravans and tents.
Often, but not always, domestic labour is unpaid. While some of this labour is outsourced and distributed in the wider economy, blurring any boundaries between domestic and non-domestic, it would be a mistake to assume that the burden of domestic labour is necessarily lighter than in times past. Modernityâs promise of reduced labour through increased technology and specialization in the industrial and post-industrial economy has not been fully realized. The sites and processes of mass consumption, including but not limited to domestic technologies such as washing machines and online shopping, do not necessarily â in and of themselves â lighten the load of domestic labour. Rather, they change its form, at times redistributing it; for example, from men to women. Domestic practices are now characterized by an abundance of choice and information; furthermore, that brings new analytical, administrative and organizational labours to the domestic space. This book is concerned with a wide variety of domestic work, but delimited by a particular moral investment in domestic labour that has emerged in association with modern environmentalism, broadly conceived. It is concerned with domestic environmental labour.
It is only recently, in the last few decades, that domestic space has become a focus for personal responsibilities for environmental care. While such personal responsibility, as I will explore, has received significant attention in some respects, and indeed has changed many domestic practices, only rarely has environmental care in domestic spaces been conceived as a form of labour. This book starts from the proposition that domestic labour, regardless of its form, has always shaped, and been shaped by, an elusive entity, perhaps best understood as having various guises. At least in Western contemporary discourse, which is the focus here, this entity is at times âNatureâ, a mythical, sometimes mystical Other. It is also ânatural resourcesâ, conceived primarily in terms of its opportunities for human use. It is also âthe environmentâ, a thing to be utilized and enjoyed yet respected and protected. Domestic environmental labour, however, is a phenomenon unique to the contemporary era. I will contend that domestic environmental labour is often carried out under the auspices of individualist and consumerist environmental politics. Thus, arguably new forms of environmental politics are embodied in household activities that ostensibly reduce impacts on Nature(s), but are often far removed from the households in question. Activities such as rinsing cans and sorting them into recycling receptacles, researching âgreenâ cleaning products or nappies, and installing and maintaining a set of solar panels are new types of domestic work that warrant examination. What is culturally and politically important about labour that is (typically) consciously undertaken for an entity named âthe environmentâ?
Domestic environmental labour, in an idealized form, involves accessing and using water to wash and bathe without significant depletion or pollution of the water source. It involves finding, nurturing, distributing, processing and sustaining, over time, plants and animals to eat, and materials to clothe, house, transport, entertain and keep cool or warm members of a household or commune. It involves keeping dirt at bay domestically without damaging non-domestic ecosystems, and sourcing accessible and clean energy for cooking, heating and cooling. It is with these types of domestic âgreeningâ activities that this book is chiefly concerned. For some who are socially as well as environmentally conscious, such labour needs to be undertaken without reducing, and preferably advancing, othersâ (i.e. anyone beyond the confines of the domestic space in question) enjoyment of health, safety or financial well-being. For some domestic environmental labourers, therefore, environmental concern is a primary driver. For others, both social and environmental concerns are important. There are, I contend, important social implications of domestic environmental labour either way. It is also my observation that domestic environmental labour is commonly mislabelled and misunderstood, and promoted and undertaken, euphemistically and optimistically, as good environmental (or social) practice or citizenship. In other words, putting out the recycling or installing a grey-water system can â politically â entail something more than a routinized expression of environmental care, and that this politics is not sufficiently taken into account. Domestic environmental labour is often labour-intensive, involving anything from sophisticated learning and creative effort, to mundane, repetitive, drudge-like chores, and it is implicated in wider social and political relations that are only beginning to be explored (Cox 2013; Gill et al. 2015; Marres 2011; Oates and McDonald 2006). My focus on domestic greening as labour, it should be noted, is a deliberate attempt to gain a better understanding of the broad realm of human activities often understood using the conceptual tools of ethical or green consumption, or environmental citizenship. And indeed, the first point of critique is to note that it is indeed a highly political maneouvre to isolate âgreen consumptionâ or âdomestic greeningâ from the social milieu, potentially placing the environment in a hierarchical position above considerations of social equity. This is in part a historical legacy, but since it is now well accepted that the socio-environmental nexus needs to be understood as an interconnected system, any focus on environmental care over social care needs to be considered as part of a politics of domestic environmental labour in this knowledge context.
Domestic greening is defined here as the processes by which homes and domestic life are modified to include (ostensibly) more environmentally benign materials and activities. Placing work at the centre of analysis of domestic greening is necessary, I believe, to add freshness to understandings of domestic greening as deeply political. Prima facie, the moralizing link between domestic labour and environmental care makes some sense: why shouldnât we be personally responsible for our household interactions with Nature/resources/the environment, regardless of whether we characterize them as survival, consumption, citizenship, labour or something else? What are at stake here, however, are the social and material relations through which any care of ecological systems linked to domestic labour is achieved. Domestic activities do not connect with one, purified Nature â in a globalized world they connect with many natures, and simultaneously, many social groups, near and far. These interconnections are often so complex that they are almost impossible for ordinary citizens (and indeed experts as well) to materially, conceptually or politically disentangle. How is it possible to fully know the environmental and social impact of even a single consumption choice, or even to judge the relative impacts of two options? Outside debates about ethical consumption, furthermore, domestic connections with social groups are too frequently forgotten when domestic greening takes place. IndividualâNature relationships are typically prioritized. But precisely because of this often ignored or forgotten social complexity, whether or not domestic environmental labour advances social equity and environmental care is a big question, well worthy of attention from ecofeminist quarters. Here, the âsocialâ includes, but also goes beyond, the care of distant Others (e.g. through fair trade) implied in the term âethical consumptionâ. While of course much has already been achieved in this regard and this is hardly the first work to take an interest in either domestic greening, ethical consumption or domestic labour, I believe there remains new terrain to explore.
In this book I have the modest aim of initiating exploration of a simple but I believe powerful proposition, namely, that domestic labour consciously undertaken for an entity named âthe environmentâ is a phenomenon rarely acknowledged or debated â in policy, scholarship and everyday life. In this absence, there is a complex politics of gender, space, class and nature. The analytical absence of labour in many studies of greening activities and ethical consumption is not entirely surprising. As Uzzell and Räthzel (2013) point out, the construction of labour as natureâs other has underscored a traditional antagonism between (formal) labour and environmental movements in the wider economy. Similarly, in research, labour has typically been neglected in environmental studies, while the environment is typically neglected in labour studies (Uzzell and Räthzel 2013). Betwixt these, however, a growing body of feminist and science and technology studies work that recognizes and attends to the contradictions, complexities and politics of âgreen homemakingâ, and is highly instructive in understanding domestic environmental labour. This body of work has been influential in informing the discussions in this book (Cox 2013; MacGregor 2011; Marres 2011).
Domestic environmental labour, it will be argued, is under-valued in governance and the formal economy, much like other types of domestic labour, as long argued by feminists. In the interests of widespread voluntary uptake of domestic green activities, environmental policy typically does not position domestic greening as (often) low or unpaid, possibly dangerous and sometimes unsatisfying work. Householders engaged in domestic greening have become a largely unrecognized and unaccounted supply of green labour, a new version of domestic labour displaced from a visible to an invisible economy (Marres 2011). From a broadly feminist ecological citizenship viewpoint, which is where I position myself, any tendency to posit domestic greening as a gender neutral, practical form of environmental citizenship becomes a point of social critique, not a foundational assumption for improving ecological outcomes. It is clear that domestic environmental labour, along with other forms of domestic labour, is often feminized and undervalued. Since the home is traditionally feminized while the public sphere is masculinized, the âdomestication of greeningâ is another way in which care can be further privatized and feminized, possibly denying womenâs and non-Western cultural groupsâ equal participation in environmental citizenship:
There are unfair gender asymmetries involved in greening the household, which stem from the traditional division of labour. ⌠In so far as consumption is a private sphere activity, and women tend to be principally responsible for household consumption, it is likely that exhortations to âlive greenâ are directed at (and will be received primarily by) women. Men may hear them, but expect women to do the work. There is evidence to suggest that women are more likely than men to take on green housework.
(MacGregor 2009, 134)
Indeed, the evidence is growing that women do much of the âgreen houseworkâ, particularly the more mundane domestic greening tasks such as sorting the recycling (Oates and McDonald 2006; Organo et al. 2013). In a case study by Organo et al. (2013, 559), for example:
⢠Women âspent more total time on sustainable practices, and did so more often. Menâs contributions related mostly to gardening and transport, in longer blocks of timeâ.
⢠Women âexperienced time as overlapping and fragmented, with no distinction between work and leisure. Men contributed to sustainable practices mainly through activities understood as leisure, in longer blocks of timeâ.
⢠âWhile men were often responsible for the labour and upfront time required to start or research a project, the responsibility of everyday implementation and habit-changing commonly fell to women.â
An ecofeminist critique of the dominant, ecological modernist environmental politics (which will be explored below) is that it pays insufficient attention to the politics of gender in general and the gendered division of labour in particular (MacGregor 2009). Feminist ecological citizenship sees care as a form of work and foregrounds the politicization of care as a necessary part of citizenship. It advances âa positive political identity that allows women to express their gender-related concerns for environmental quality but that does not forever tie women (in general) to the private sphere of care and maternal virtueâ (MacGregor 2011, 6â7). I agree with MacGregor (2011) that more traction can be gained from a theory of feminist ecological citizenship than from alternative ecofeminisms, particularly the ecomaternalisms which draw on the experience of women as mothers and care givers, as mediators of caring relationships between people and nature:
Ecomaternalist arguments that celebrate womenâs caring for people and the planet without condemning its implication in oppressive political economic systems risk affirming sexist notions about womenâs place in society ⌠they are particularly dangerous in an era during which unpaid caring work is increasingly exploited to facilitate economic restructuring and the dismantling of the welfare state.
(MacGregor 2011, 6â7; emphasis added)
The ecofeminism informing this book is one that conceptualizes domestic greening specifically as, often, unpaid caring work, but also more broadly considers Eurocentric mastery over women and nature as an interlinked phenomenon that needs unpacking at a variety of scales, including the domestic. In this book, I wish to consider conceptually the effects and implications of the absence of a concept of domestic environmental labour in the narratives that dominate much environmental social science scholarship and environmental policy, in Australia where I am based but also in the âGlobal Northâ more broadly. I am interested in the politicized relations that shape, and are shaping of, ways in ...
