Introduction

The Anthropocene era describes now: a world made by human-economic activity that has fundamentally changed environments. The Anthropocene is a human-induced threat to human life (and to all other life). Dualist philosophy separates nature and culture to make it seem like nature is a resource for human use, and a source of value. That makes humans dominant actors. This is problematic. Decentring humans to understand them as part of natural, technical, informational and economic entities is essential to relearning the position of the human. Decentring unmasks the idea of autonomous human activity and reveals human dependency on nature. Nature affects everyday life in dramatic ways through ‘natural’ disasters and in routine and habitual ways. It is not a pre-given entity on which humans act. Nature has temporalities and material effects, it incorporates the existence and effects of human and non-human bodies, and it brings the unpredictability of weather, the transforming power of soil, coal and rare earth minerals. Decentring, not dualism, has some important implications. For example, ‘natural disasters’ such as droughts or floods often have devastating effects because of their economic, political, cultural and technological entanglements with nature, rather than being only natural – or indeed only economic. Perhaps because of the long effects of colonialism that let poverty take hold, or because state infrastructures are not able to cope, some populations are more vulnerable to ‘natural’ disasters. Calling something a ‘natural’ disaster makes invisible the social, political and economic entwinings.

Nature emerges in work practices in many ways: as what is worked on and with, as ecological commitments, as the work that makes the world – where wildlife is protected, a toxic plant controlled, a broken supply line is mended, or profit is extracted from a resource. Both how work is organised in relation to nature, and what that work does, is especially important. Often, these questions have been answered using a ‘jobs versus environment’ framing – whereby either jobs or environment can be protected, but not both – showing that the well-established conflict between labour and capital is transversal with other kinds of conflicts. This shows that when nature and environment are recruited as ethical issues in a discussion of the ethics of work, the conversation gets complicated. One response has been to think about how to protect jobs and the environment simultaneously, which is discussed below in the section on green jobs.