The theme of the Atlas is under-examined and yet deserving of thoughtful consideration. Indeed, we are invested in examining why it is important to think about essential work spatially and regionally. Specifically, we are interested in exploring questions of how space and essential labor intersect in the Pacific Northwest, how geography shapes the nature of essential work, and how the work in turn creates new geographies.

We are facing many critical issues—climate change, food insecurity, energy transitions and scarcity, racial and gender inequality, inaccessible healthcare—and the story of how these intersecting issues will affect work is yet to be written. The thrust behind the Atlas is to think about how that story is intimately intertwined with the physical and cultural context of different regions.

For example, essential work in the southeast may be embedded in the first response, clean-up and long-tail of recovery after a major hurricane. While we in the PNW have become intimately aware of the impacts of wildfires and wildfire smoke on our landscapes, workers, and communities. In addition to region-specific weather extremes, areas may be driven by the challenges of an aging population, shifts in agricultural production, or globalization of service and supply chains.

The unique physical, demographic and socio-economic contexts of a region drive the “who, what, where, when, and why” of essential work, and those doing said essential work will be, in turn, crafting new stories that shape the trajectory of those regions. Appreciating this dynamic literal and metaphorical movement of people and jobs is essential to grappling with our futures. Thus, our vision for this project is quite simple: to provide a digital framework and intellectual home to tell these stories in our region, the Pacific Northwest.

OREGON HISTORICAL SOCIETY LIBRARY, United States. War Department. Spruce Production Division

In settler narratives, the PNW figures as an endless battle against resistant landscapes. Ken Kesey’s well-known novel of Oregon, Sometimes a Great Notion, casts the PNW as a region of “everlasting labor.” Labor has long been a crucial theme in the settler shaping of the Pacific Northwest, with a mythos of a particular kind of challenging landscape–one of endless rain, mud, and gargantuan forests–that distinguishes settler stories of the PNW from those of other areas of the American West. Stories of labor that define the region for settlers reflect the region’s land cover and how it has been conceived as both a resource and an antagonist. Still today, the PNW is predominantly forest, grassland, and shrubland, with Oregon and Washington divided by the rugged Cascade Mountains, which slope into the fertile Willamette Valley and Puget Lowland. Historically, these lowlands were the “Eden” sought by Euroamerican pioneers, with much of the rest of the region unsuitable to Euroamerican settler farming.

Yet, the story of a region shaped by work begins well before settler narratives. Since at least 15,000 BCE, Indigenous Americans lived and worked with landscapes of the PNW, cultivating anadromous fish populations, burning forestlands to encourage huckleberries and big game, and planting camas for its protein-rich bulbs. As the map below shows, native peoples of what is now called the Pacific Northwest come from various tribal nations that are distinctive even when they overlap each other. Amongst the things they share is millennial connections to this place and many generations of physical and cultural labor to shape and care for it.

The Nishnaabeg scholar-activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offers an Anishinaabe translation of “sovereignty” as “the place that we all live and work together.” Here Simpson emphasizes both that labor is fundamental to Indigenous self-governance and also that labor from an Anishinaabe perspective consists of reciprocal relationships among humans and non-human kin, plants and animals. While Simpson speaks as a member of an Indigenous cultural community far from the PNW, to an extent her definition of “sovereignty” as relationships of work and life can be extrapolated to the PNW’s Indigenous nations. Maps of the PNW offer palimpsests of Indigenous traditional lands, inter-tribal agreements about seasonal access to resources, and Indigenous terraforming through agriculture, water and fire management. We might think of the tribal nations of the PNW as the region’s original and most consistent essential workers.

Long criminalized by settler states including both the US and Australia, Indigenous fire tenders now lead workshops for settler communities. The climate crisis has shed light on the importance of the prescribed burning that is a longstanding Indigenous practice.

BRIAN BULL / KLCC

In our current era of climate crisis and global social disruption, the PNW is experiencing an influx of workers, some of whom are climate refugees, many who are Indigenous in their native lands. All are bringing their worldviews and cultures.

To this day, Euroamerican settler stories of the PNW dismiss the ways in which Indigenous labor shaped and continues to shape the region, as well as the shaping done by Black Americans, Asian Americans, Latinx Americans, and migrants and immigrants from around the globe. Contemporary rhetorics of economic globalization render all workers as exploitable resources. A remarkable, and in our view deliberate, aspect of essential work often is its invisibility, stemming from an intentional obfuscation of labor and its conditions by not only the logics of settler colonialism, but also those of white supremacy, neo-liberal capitalism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy. Our definitions of essential work recognizes both its fundamental impact and its marginalization.

The sanitized scene of the supermarket masks the dirty, dangerous work of industrial slaughter and meatpacking, which is often performed by immigrants, refugees, and people of color. Sites of industrial food preparation accounted for some of the worst COVID-19 outbreaks in the US during the recent pandemic, due to the lack of on-site safety regulations in these worksites.

Images from USDA

The PNW remains whiter in terms of racial and ethnic percentages than the rest of the US, largely due to racist exclusionary practices codified into law and manifested in dominant/white culture throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. As well, when viewing demographic shifts from census data it is important to consider how racial and ethnic categories themselves change wildly across eras of census-taking. Such changes reflect shifting cultural understandings of who people are and underscores the socially-constructed roots of racial and ethnic categorization.

Black, Indigenous, and People of Color

Percentage of Total Population, 1950 and 2020

Between 1950 and 2020, the percentage of Black, Indigenous, and people of color has increased in the Pacific Northwest, yet the region remains the least racially and ethnically diverse of all regions in the United States.

Data source: US Census

Moreover, the PNW has long hosted non-white laborers, including Native Hawaiians (“Owyhee”), Chinese, and Métis who emigrated as sailors, miners, and trappers well before the Oregon Trail. The research of Bob Bussel, Lynn Stephen, and John Arroyo accounts for political and ecological transformation wrought by non-white migrants and immigrants to the PNW since the last half of the twentieth century.

Because of the aforementioned historic exclusionary laws, Oregon is particularly a site of marginalization for Black people, who are subjected to disproportionate rates of imprisonment, surveillance, and harassment, as described by Ashia Ajani. Black workers also have had a significant historical impact as place-makers on the land. They built railroads, logged forests, and underwrote the WWII-era industrial boom that serves as a foundation for the PNW’s urban wealth, even as they were and remain underrepresented and minoritized in state demographics.

In the early 20th century, Black loggers from the US South were brought to Oregon, where their expertise contributed to the modern landscapes we see today. This history finally is entering public memory, thanks to the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center in Joseph, Oregon.

MAXVILLE LOGGER COMPANY PHOTO, C.1926, MAXVILLE HERITAGE CENTER, DELORES CROW SMITH COLLECTION

In the PNW, the histories and narratives of labor continually bump up against other mythic stories of the region as an “ecotopia,” equal parts paragon and playground for (white) residents and visitors. This narrative casts the PNW as a region of “unspoiled” wilderness ready and waiting for recreation and exploration. As labor historian Mario Sifuentez argues, ecotopia is a white mythology. Ecotopian idealism strands us in antiquated versions of environmentalism where it appears that working people do not belong on the land, especially if they aren’t white.

Almost thirty years ago, the environmental historian Richard White critiqued the false dichotomy of Nature v. Labor, largely in response to the partisanship that grew out of the PNW’s Timber Wars, where environmental efforts to protect the spotted owl appeared to sound the death-knell of the timber industry. He argued then that “work… is where we should begin” to reimagine environmentalism in the United States, since labor is enmeshed in and creates ecologies.

The Timber Wars of the 1990s grew out of new scientific understandings of the importance of old growth to overall forest health. Sadly, their lasting legacy seems to have become a politicized misperception–that economic interests cannot coexist with ecological ones.

U.S. Railroad Administration, Season 1919 (left) and Environmental Health News (right)

Refocusing the lens of environmental history and advocacy on labor not only helps to address the historical repercussions of racism and urban elitism that shadow American environmentalism, it also makes sense as global warming causes the social instability and ecological collapse already bringing more migration into the PNW.

As climate stresses intensify, work that interfaces with “the intransigent materiality of the world,” in Richard White’s phrase, increasingly falls only to the most socioeconomically undervalued, to migrants and to the incarcerated workers whom Leigh Johnson’s research recognizes as another nearly invisible modern workforce. These essential workers in the PNW now suffer heatstroke in our fields, defend our firelines, and care for our elderly and disabled through pandemic.

The PNW Atlas of Essential Work showcases the stories of those essential workers who not only make the places where we live, work and play, but who also make those places more habitable through the climate crisis. These are our essential workers. Their bodies suffer most by way of exposure, confinement, and cultural invisibility. Their labors tell us a good deal about what the futures of work may be, as the rains and forests of the PNW are diminished. Their stories also offer clues for how to begin knitting together social justice and ecological survival.