Repairing social connections: Dismantling carbon infrastructures with care

Abstract

In this final commentary to close the forum, I engage with the responses to my article, ‘Repair and Care: Locating the Work of Climate Crisis’. These rich analyses provide a basis from which to reflect on three developments since writing the first article: cascading disasters caused by intense weather events; a change of government that has shifted Australia's political relationship with climate change; and a year of fieldwork with metallurgical coal miners in a rapidly transforming energy landscape. Together, the responses offer a nuanced approach to the work of climate change that is more attentive to power and politics, diverse skills and knowledges, and the structures and systems that continue to marginalise those who are tasked with repair and care.

Introduction

In the first article of this forum, I set out a case for more attention to be given to the labours of repair and care in the context of climate crisis (Carr, 2023). My contribution was shaped by a long-term empirical focus on workers in energy-intensive sectors and regions – perhaps not the obvious place to start when thinking about care and repair. However, there is a pressing need to connect the experiences of all workers with the challenges of climate change (Denham and Rickards, 2022), not least because such challenges will require an unprecedented range of skills to repair and maintain social connections (Barca, 2023; Smith, 2023), while simultaneously building new energy futures and dismantling outdated carbon infrastructures.

The opportunity for dialogue with these colleagues is a privilege, given their sustained critical contributions across many areas: human geography, but also environmental and labour history, design studies, feminist political ecology, urban planning and social justice, sustainability transitions, postcapitalist and community economies. Read together, the responses offer a nuanced and inclusive approach that is more attentive to power and politics, diverse skills and knowledges, and the structures and systems that continue to marginalise much of the work of repair and care, and those who are tasked with it. In what follows, I draw on this more holistic analytical approach to reflect on three developments since writing the first article.

Cascading disasters and the role of the state

The original article began with a vignette drawn from the catastrophic 2019–2020 bushfires in Australia, illustrating the already-on-the-ground work of responding to intense weather events. Reflecting on this example, Osborne (2023) identifies several ways the volunteer response can be read: as radical DIY; as a rendering of the state as incapable of caring for its constituents; or as a new collective confidence in community self-organisation. At the centre of Osborne's sharp analysis are questions around the role of the state in responding to the uneven effects of climate change. Where do the state's responsibilities for repair and care begin and end? Who does the state care for, and how? Who does the work of repair and care fall to in the absence of the state? Here Osborne orients us more clearly to the edges of climate labour, and to those already marginalised by capitalist, patriarchal, settler-colonial systems and structures ‘who have never been able to rely on the State …’ (Osborne, 2023). Osborne's work (and indeed that of all the respondents in this forum) makes clear that while it is important to locate overlooked capacities for repair and care and to understand how these might be nurtured and amplified, there is a need to remain ever-vigilant in calling powerful interests to account in failing to plan for climate realities.

Since the first article was published, visceral awareness of mounting disruption has captured the attention of a broader Australian population (Cox, 2022). In early 2022, northern NSW faced record-breaking floods that completely overwhelmed formalised emergency services. In a response echoing Tradies For Fire Affected Communities (TFFAC) in the first article, a local ‘tinnie army’ risked their own lives to rescue trapped residents using small fishing boats (‘tinnies’), kayaks and jet skis. These efforts were described by some in the community as literally their only option for survival, in the face of a slow and inadequate government response. Six months later, the NSW Floods Inquiry identified the need for stronger and more permanent governance mechanisms in response to the likelihood that flooding will become more common (O’Kane and Fuller, 2022). Yet what appeared to capture political and media interest disproportionately was the successful community-led rescue response, with the NSW Government announcing plans for this to become more permanent and formalised in future disasters.

Osborne's second key point is prescient here – the issue of framing climate change as a crisis, where an implied sense of emergency opens up opportunities for oppressive or inadequate measures to address ‘temporary’ problems (see also Anderson et al., 2019). Although the Community First Responders program was only one of the 28 recommendations made by the NSW Floods Inquiry, the NSW Government response (2022: 3) makes clear that volunteer labour is now being structurally factored into future disaster response plans. Is volunteer labour appropriate or sufficient for providing support to vulnerable post-disaster communities going forward (Whittaker et al., 2015)? The most recent assessment of the impacts of climate change for Australia concluded that a significant risk is the ‘cascading, compounding and aggregate impacts’ on physical and social infrastructures as severe weather events become more frequent and intense (Lawrence et al., 2022: 1635). Perhaps a community-led volunteer response to severe weather events might be addressed through good policy design (McLennan et al., 2021), but what also needs to be factored into these discussions is a ‘protracted disaster frame’ (O’Donnell et al., 2022: 29), where capacities to respond become limited and communities experience fatigue. The key point is that a climate crisis framing might unwittingly imply that the work of care and repair is infrequent and temporary in nature, yet climate scientists are already pointing to the ongoing, cascading nature of severe weather events. Osborne's attentiveness to the discursive power of crisis guides the research community towards advocating for more robust policymaking, which clearly delineates how the work of climate change adaptation and post-disaster repair and care will be funded, coordinated, and carried out.

Playing political ‘catch-up’ on climate action

The first article sought to capture Australia's turbulent and highly politicised relationship with climate change; an important context for understanding how workers is impacted by decarbonisation and energy transitions. In May 2022, following a decade of inaction on climate change, the sitting conservative government conceded defeat in what has retrospectively become known as the ‘climate election’. Several factors conspired against the incumbents: the devastating fires and floods that were a recent and embodied experience amongst the population, a growing awareness of Australia's ‘outlier’ status at global climate negotiations, concerns about energy insecurity caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and a movement of well-resourced independent candidates emerged in traditionally conservative electorates, demanding stronger action on climate change. Four months later, the Climate Change Bill 2022 was passed by the newly formed Labor government, legislating a 43% reduction in emissions by 2030, and net-zero emissions by 2050. Although modest by global standards (and IPCC targets), the legislation has provided a framework for ratcheting up emissions reduction targets over time, and more certainty for large-scale investment in decarbonising energy generation and industrial production. This has laid the groundwork for accelerating energy transitions that will fundamentally re-shape Australia's economy, with immediate and far-reaching implications for carbon workers.

Stein's (2023) response speaks to the challenges climate change presents for democracy, where the dramatic, macro-level societal transformation needed sits at odds with the complexity of human experience and needs. It is clear that workers in carbon-intensive energy generation and industrial production face an uncertain future in those sectors in Australia. Yet the roadmap for transitioning workers to existing and emergent low-carbon industries is under-developed. Stein is deeply pragmatic in her approach to the issue of re-training, raising questions of how carbon workers navigate upheaval in their working lives when they are already deeply embedded in household and community relations, often with the financial commitments and time constraints that come with familial responsibility. This certainly echoes the sentiments of coal workers I have interviewed over the last 12 months. Much is being made of the benefits new offshore wind development will bring for Illawarra's skilled industrial workforce from 2023 (evoking the ‘rebranding’ of long-marginalised regions as new sites of innovation that Smith (2023) describes in his commentary). Yet workers are already asking practical questions about how training for this sector will unfold, in a region where the cost of living is already relatively high.

By looking at how workers have negotiated structural change in the past, Stein points to broader government and union support (and indeed care) that went some way to collectivising previous structural transitions for Australia's industrial workers. She contrasts this with the more individualised pathways workers speak of today, including plans to ‘jump ship’ before capital interests withdraw from regions where profits are rapidly declining. With national union membership declining to just 12.5% (ABS, 2022), it is difficult to see who will be in a position to hold powerful interests (not least exiting carbon capital) to account, ensuring the regions and workers most affected are supported on Australia's decarbonisation journey. And then there is the issue of speed: the work of transition planning is more urgent than ever for a resource-dominant nation-state looking to make up ground following a decade of very little action on climate change. Stein's commentary makes clear that the work of climate change must necessarily extend to building new political alliances across divergent interests, and the speed and scale of transition required present enormous challenges for inclusive and just governance.

Life beyond the coalface: recuperating social connections

Building on empirical work in postcapitalist and community economies, Smith (2023) provocatively raises the question of pushing from ‘what exists, to what could come into existence’, pointing (quite rightfully) to a slipperiness in the original article around transformative possibility. Here, I fear I am shaped by place – guilty of being so enmeshed within the heavy industrial landscapes and cultures of coal and steel that it is still difficult to see how to ‘turn the boat around’ at the pace and scale that is so urgently required. I am nevertheless inspired by the many emergent examples of ‘care-full production and maintenance’ that Smith describes, which are clearly oriented to more democratic, ethical, and ecologically sensitive outcomes. Across these examples is a strong sense of the importance of collectivity, and the need to recuperate social connections as a precursor to transformation. Such principles hold across many paradigms: they underpin labour solidarity, have the capacity to transcend economic systems, and are fundamental to practices of repair and care.

Barca (2023) proposes a multi-dimensional analytical approach to repair, drawing clear distinctions between the repair of infrastructures and material objects, the repair of life-sustaining systems, and a third, hybrid dimension which she terms repairing the commons. These distinctions are useful in thinking through the work of climate change and the challenges of decarbonisation. Barca's caution around avoiding analytical slippage between various forms of repair and care is timely and helpful for my current work in an industrial region where labour-environment tensions are keenly felt. Evident in this region are, of course, the repair skills and capacities to care for physical things that I wrote about in the original article and elsewhere (Carr, 2017). In Barca's terms, these are broadly akin to manufact repairing and are distinct from a second dimension of life work – repair which is broadly life-sustaining, such as of agroecosystems, the biosphere, and bodies. As Barca argues, there are classed, gendered, racialised, and spatially distinct divisions of labour that typically divide these two dimensions of repair. I wholeheartedly agree that understanding these structures is vitally important for analysing the work of repair and care, to avoid further marginalising many who are tasked with this labour.

I also see much to be gained in considering whether and how these dimensions of repair might overlap in unexpected ways. In recent interviews with coal workers, for example, I have heard stories of direct participation in environmental protection at a local level. Although I understand that these are not representative of the structural divisions Barca is referring to in who generally carries out this work, I am interested in how these stories might offer a touchpoint: bringing divergent interests, skills, and knowledges together around common concerns. A place-based approach is a key – the region I live and work in is likely to remain a centre for industrial production for some time to come. The question is how communities with materially different interests can come together in this place, to ensure the extractive practices of global capital do not override conditions under which the biosphere and its constituents can survive and thrive. Elements of Barca's third dimension of repair, repairing the commons, offer a guide here: I am thinking of the local landcare and ocean stewardship activities for example that industrial workers have described participating in, or at a different scale neighbourhood tool and skill sharing practices (Carr, 2017). Although such activities rarely challenge the systems and structures that cause harm in the first place (in this case industrial and mining capital), they do perhaps offer a site for exchange around ecological consciousness and agency. Importantly, this cannot be one way – a site for ‘educating’ the industrial working class. Rather, as I argued in the original article, industrial workers bring their own agency: haptic repair skills and dispositions (Corwin, 2023; Stein, 2023) but also long histories of negotiating and resisting industrial capital, as the history of working-class environmental action testifies (Barca, 2023).

Corwin (2023) commentary further enriches this line of thinking, speaking directly to how we might value different kinds of skills while also working to unpick the harmful systems and structures these skills have often served. It is somewhere in this realm that we might imagine possibilities for dismantling carbon infrastructures with care – for ensuring workers are not discarded, of course, but also thinking about who might be in a position to care for and rehabilitate landscapes that have been immeasurably changed by modernist industrial production. For Corwin, a multi-scalar and relational approach to the work of repair and care makes visible intimate connections between labouring bodies and the material world, while remaining attuned to the extended relationships and political contexts in which work is situated. I am mindful that in much of my own research with industrial workers I have tended towards a closer examination of labour process and skill to date, rather than the political context in which such work is situated. This forum makes clear that both are necessary – especially if we are to approach the kind of transformative change Smith (2023) and others argue is necessary to meet the challenges of climate change.