Environmental politics must recognize reproductive and caregiving work as essential labor

Evidence

In this tradition and in modern ecology, there is potential to realize that work is not only industry, the productive action that transforms the world, but also reproduction, the work of remaking life with each year and generation. Seeing nature’s work in this light would align environmental politics with the key feminist insight that much socially necessary work is ignored or devalued as “caregiving,” a gendered afterthought to the real dynamos of the economy, when in reality no shared life could do without it. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 655

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the reader’s sacrifice article — unwaged, unvalued socially necessary labor as the true infrastructure of shared life.
• SEED: Strong angle: reframing what counts as real work in the economy through the caregiving lens, matching Odell’s own move of aligning ecology with feminist economics.