On working-class environmentalism: a historical and transnational overview

Abstract

The article reviews some of the available literature, in English, Italian and Portuguese, on work/environment relationships in historical perspective. I discuss the Environmental Justice (EJ) movement as the one most promising for pushing both the research agenda and public policy towards a better understanding of the connections between work and the environment. At the same time, I argue for the need to creatively re-work the EJ paradigm in a sense that allows to better incorporate labor issues and to elaborate a political ecology of work, in order to build a coherent platform of analysis and public action which could be adopted by both environmental and labor advocates.