Ecological labour or why environmentally friendly practices struggle to become mainstream

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between work and ecological transition by exploring ecological labour among neorurals, i.e., people who have left cities to live closer to nature in the countryside. In Diois, a mountainous area in south-eastern France where I did the fieldwork on which this paper is based, neorurals have been at the forefront of inventing more ecological ways of living for fifty years, but these solutions struggle to become mainstream. The article shows that under capitalism, ecological labour – defined as a human activity that goes into producing ecologically sustainable ways of living – struggles to become a job because it is labour-intensive and gets outcompeted by less ecological, technology-intensive alternatives. In contemporary France, ecological labour can become a “green job” only in the presence of superior purchasing power, otherwise it becomes unvalorised “reproductive” labour that limits the spread of ecological solutions. As long as the primary job-creation mechanism is built on two contradictory mechanisms – gains in labour productivity and strong local purchasing power – capitalist economies remain growth-addicted economies that upset ecosystems on an industrial scale.