By imagining that our true home is in the wilderness, we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit.

William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’

In May this year, environmental groups held a sort of vigil on the steps of state parliament for seventy-three birds that they had recovered from recent duck hunting, including eight illegally shot protected and threatened species laid out alongside a bouquet of shotgun cartridges. In a split that revived animosity between the environmentalist and labour movements, unions such as the ETU and CFMEU objected to the recommendations of the Victorian parliamentary inquiry for a complete ban on duck hunting. Members of the Electrical Trades Union walked off work on the Metro Tunnel project in March and in August the Building Industry Group of Unions was running campaigns against the ban on hunting, and more broadly to ‘defend our rights to the great outdoors.’

This framing — nature as a sort of backyard for leisure — remains a contentious one for the conservationist arm of environmentalism. Indeed, environmental protection regulations have a history of opposition from working class (and big businesses) whose ‘recreation’ (and sometimes livelihoods) are threatened. For instance, in the late nineteenth century, as land clearance and settlement drove environmental destruction in the inland colonial frontier, a party of South Australian ministers toured the Murray River to try and address over-exploitation of fish. As Quentin Beresford reports in Wounded Country, in their attempts to engage with fishermen, they met the response that ‘best regulation you can make is to leave us alone.’

The ban is supported by such groups as Wildlife Victoria, whose veterinary team assessed the birds laid out for the press, and who argue that

waterbird populations continue to show significant long-term declines. If we are serious about recovering and restoring these beautiful species, we must remove any additional pressures. That means an end to recreational hunting.

The ban would be consistent with measures in other Australian states, and although one Labor MP told the Guardian that ‘It’s a bizarre hill to die on,’ it exposes friction in what many on the left assume to be a cosy alliance between green and red. It is symbolic of a divide haunting progressive environmentalism’s moralising tendency and middle-class proclivities. The two sides in the debate articulate different visions of human relationships with nature, not only in recreation but in work and human society.

The alliance between labour and environmentalism has a uniquely Australian history, with many crediting the green bans of Jack Mundey’s BLF with pioneering a model of red-green cooperation. Mundey writes in ‘Preventing the Plunder’ that the green bans ‘brought together an enlightened trade union in common struggle with other progressive segments of society’ by articulating a comprehensive vision that fought not just for jobs but work that built genuine public amenities like ‘kindergartens, homes for the aged and unemployed, community welfare housing’ and so on. He described unions and environmentalists as ‘natural allies’ against capitalist exploitation, as well as against ecologically ‘insensitive’ governments and departments like the Tasmanian Hydro-Electric Commission.

While Mundey’s activities and strategy focused primarily on urban development, his example inspired environmentalists and unionists to jointly support the construction of renewable energy and infrastructure to support electrification. In turning from conservation to climate change, the compatibility is arguably strengthened by directly shared interests, notwithstanding the challenge of convincing communities reliant on fossil fuel jobs that an alternative is possible. As Verity Burgmann writes,

that workers’ interests and environmental imperatives can become increasingly compatible is apparent in the various developments worldwide in the expansion of renewable energy sources and methods to increase energy efficiency.

It is revealing, then, that tensions have flared not over jobs or development (though those too are present) but over leisure. Environmentalists have yet to convince working-class people of their version of pleasure, both in our relationship with nature and in consumption more broadly. This makes duck-hunting a model for the persistent differences between ‘green’ and ‘red’ ideas of a good life and its relationship to nature. These ideas take shape in historical moments. In defending their campaign against the hunting back, Troy Gray of the ETU cited the mid-nineteenth-century’s movement for

eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, and eight hours of recreation. It is working class recreation that is in the balance here…

Unions are about ‘much more than wages and conditions,’ he argues, echoing the environmentalist’s stance that environmentalism is about more than climate change, carbon emissions or biodiversity. At heart, both labour and environmentalist politics articulate a relationship with nature formed — not reductively — in their historical class positions. These positions often collide over the topic of consumption, which seems to aggravate some environmentalists’ moralising tendency, but also leave gaps in some materialists’ rendering of a consumptive cornucopia in a climate changed world.

Efforts by scholars like Kate Soper to frame leisure and consumption in terms of ‘eco-friendly hedonism’ or pleasure invariably meet with scepticism and opposition. Anselm McGovern, for example, argues that an environmentalist movement that threatens to take away cheap aeroplane travel or motorsports will not appeal to working-class people, whose support is crucial for political change. Richard Seymour has challenged Matt Huber’s consistent opposition to degrowth and the moralising environmentalism of consumption by putting forward the provocative question of consumption of what and for whom, but remains unconvinced by the modes of communication that ‘must find intelligent mediations between ecological exigencies and the galvanising interests of the working class.’ Nor, he remarks, should we fix the ‘material interests’ of the working class in terms just of higher wages.

Clearly, the long bow drawn by unions over duck hunting is an example of direct interests that are not ‘material’ in the restrictive sense. Writers like Huber urge an analysis of capitalist social relations that risks reducing them to narrow economism. Yet the dividing line between green and red has consistently fallen on class lines. Mundey wrote:

I find that the articulate, middle-class people who control and influence the environmental movement generally fail to understand the importance of involving the working class in the movement.

Richard White’s classic essay ‘Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living?’ draws the line as one of play and work. Middle class environmentalists

often seem self-righteous and privileged, and arrogant because they so readily consent to identifying nature with play and making it by definition a place where leisured humans come only to visit and not to work, stay or live.

He might have added hunt, since this too does not fit into the ‘leave nothing behind’ or ‘tread lightly’ ethos of the weekend hiker or conservationist. White’s line, then, must be extended to a contest between different visions of leisure. The vision articulated by the duck hunting parliamentary committee proposes to ‘convert’ game reserves into parks for

greater access to outdoor recreation for all Victorians, with appropriate investment in camping, boating and related infrastructure.

The dividing line maps a series of cultural fault lines, perhaps even the very definition of a culture. Patrick Medway of the Australian Wildlife Society proposed a civilisational divide in suggesting that ‘shooting native and protected species should not be permitted in modern society.’ Carefully, if not exactly subtly excluding subsistence cultures from this division, Medway attacked hunting as a ‘cruel sport’. On the other hand, various unions have invoked a wide range of leisure activities as stepping stones down the slope to the ‘nanny state’, with one submission to the committee warning:

Not until they ban fishing, hunting, meat products, horse racing, greyhound racing, cheese, milk, cream etc etc. They will never be happy!

This submission articulates, not without some accuracy, the fear that this ban represents a move towards a comprehensive re-evaluation of the relationship between humans and animals, a dividing line historically invoked in the definition of civilisation.

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Returning to consumption, Soper defends a vision of the green lifestyle that appears to soften the strict line dividing nature from civilisation. She proposes that

walkers, cyclists, climbers, bird-watchers, so-called nature lovers generally, and those living in sustainable dwellings: these types might all in virtue of their close engagement with the natural environment be said to be less alienated than others.

This romantic evocation of natural amenity recalls the philosopher Alain’s whimsical quip, ‘what the city dweller likes about the country is the going there.’ On the other hand, Shierry Nicholson Weber, in The Love of Nature and the End of the World, also describes the hunter’s ethos in terms of immersion in nature:

The hunter’s gaze places him within a field in which contact with the prey can be made at any time. Withinness is requisite for contact …

Yet she maintains a similar exception for the ‘trophy hunter’ who is just the ‘alienated product of an alienated culture.’

Overcoming this alienation of the urbanite nature-lover and hunter alike, Richard White argues, will involve returning from the environmentalist’s conception as nature as a ‘preserve’ and hunters’ of nature as a ‘reserve’ to one that treats nature through work. This anticipates the critique of consumer and leisure environmentalism, insisting on the realm of production as the primary relationship to nature. (The metaphor ‘safe operating space’ seems to imply this is a fait accompli whether we like it or not.) Soper pushes against this productivist tendency by recognising the alienating quality of consumer culture but defending a

turn to the spirit [that] would seek to address this imbalance and to restore sources of direct spiritual well-being that have been sacrificed to the commodifying logic of consumer culture.

Critics remain unconvinced of the persuasive power of this ‘alternative hedonism’:

They’ve painted a beautiful painting, and for some reason, no one wants to buy it.

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Of course, we need to keep scale in mind. Duck hunting is a relatively small leisure pursuit, with around 20,000 native bird hunting licenses issued in Victoria in 2023. The duck hunting season ran for thirty days and hunters were limited to four ducks per day, with the Game Management Authority adjusting year-by-year according to conditions. The inquiry’s report also openly admits that the ‘hunting is not the sole contributor to the decline of native waterbird population but it is one of the easiest ways to prevent it from occurring.’ This intense debate about an easy but far from sole contributor to an environmental problem arguably distracts from the wider, but far more difficult problems to address like ‘agricultural practices in the upper Murray-Darling Basin and climate change.’ An environmentalism that selects easy target risks missing the wider picture, and making enemies in the face of what Verity Burgmann calls ‘a concerted public relations campaign that pits jobs against the environment.’

A lesson of history is that piecemeal conservation is far from adequate in the face of catastrophic environmental change. Beresford’s Wounded Country describes successive attempts to restrict hunting and enforce environmental protection failing under the weight of what he describes as a ‘war on nature’ complete with ‘extermination’ campaigns that even participants recognised in the case of an 1897 kangaroo hunt as ‘all too brutalising from a sporting point of view.’ Similarly, laws to protect native birds fell afoul of consumer demand for plumage in fashion, and various marsupial pelts were even exported in the millions for warmth. Without direct enforcement, impossible in the Australian setting, what Burgmann describes as ‘the only truly reliable deterrent to environmental vandalism’ is the ‘withdrawal of labour,’ which in this context isn’t viable.

Moralising campaigns of middle-class conservationists, premised on the consumption of nature as a field of leisure, meet opposition on the same territory of consumption, that as Stuart Hall recognised in the post-war period had become an ‘integrative mechanism’, forming and solidifying identities unmoored from traditions or by craft skills, compensating for indignity in increasingly immiserated employment. As much as environmentalists like to imagine theirs as the only form of leisure in nature, hunting equally (albeit with different class inflections) forms identities around leisure. Hunter Gary ‘Pud’ Howard describes spending ‘years restoring the Heart Morass wetland, purchased by Field and Game Australia, near Sale and believes it has become a haven for ‘disciplined’ and ‘safe’ hunting.’  Beresford describes hunting as an activity that ‘cut across social class lines’ in the nineteenth century.

Environmentally-friendly leisure is colonised by the middle class and environmentally-destructive leisure considered a working-class disorder. This extends to consumer items like cars, where symbolic working-class vehicles like utes dominate the Australian car market, much to the ire of the Guardian and similarly aligned voices. SUVs are just as likely symbols for environmentalists elsewhere, drawing the line more clearly against the rich. However, the fact that the ‘ute’ symbolises a certain consumptive identity and allegiance to working-class values demonstrates just how far our cultures of work in fact continue to dominate our consumptive and leisure identities. As critical theorists Oscar Negt and Alexander Kluge describe in The Public Sphere and Experience, leisure is ‘marked by behaviour carried over from the domain of production.’

With this in mind, hunting carries over experiences in work to the relationships with nature. Work marks our consciousness, and unions defend hunting as beneficial to mental health on the basis that shift work made their participation in other recreation difficult. But this only scratches the surface of the effect of work on workers. The ‘right to enjoy an outdoor lifestyle’ unions saw themselves defending all took forms we might describe in terms of occupation and claiming: camping, boating, hunting and fishing. Each asserts the place of the human, their relation to nature as a resource. Middle-class environmentalism (falsely) imagines its leisure as lightly passing through.

The fact that work indelibly marks leisure renders suspect the attempt to draw boundaries around the ‘real issues’ of union members, as the Animal Justice Party’s MP on the committee Georgie Purcell did. Purcell accused the unions of wasting resources on a deceptive campaign. Unions, for their part, performed the same boundary drawing by painting the conservationist cause as ‘political correctness’, as though to dismiss it as a part of a misguided culture war. Even Burgmann tries to minimise the divide by arguing that ‘Working-class interests and environmental imperatives are not in real or long-term conflict.’ Does this make ducks ‘not real’?

The dividing line between the real and merely cultural continues to be a point of contention in environmentalist issues. It is most effectively challenged, I think, by pointing to the ways in which the dividing line fails to contain the effects of work from spilling over into leisure. Negt and Kluge write:

The fragmentation of human beings in the labour process, their isolation by competition, and the breaking up of their lives into mere quantities of work and leisure time require an ideological libidinal compensation.

White’s opposition to the over-emphasis on play in environmentalism recedes into an underlying unity in which ‘our play in nature is often itself a masked form of bodily labour’, some of which he links to hunting. In seeking to transform nature, work ‘submerges’ us and puts something at stake, intensifying the knowledge and phenomenological awareness we might experience.

But with work itself marked and transformed by renewed drudgery and alienation, the persistence of activities like hunting should also alert us to the continued violence of industrial work under capitalism, enacted on human bodies and minds. The ornithologist’s pursuit of a bird might immerse them in ways described by Nicholson Weber, but the hunter’s immersion involves the goal of killing. Insofar as jobs link us to the expropriation and plunder of nature, hunting reflects this relationship in the apparent form of leisure. Our work lives enforce a particularly aggressive relationship with nature, and environmentalist leisure is far from exempt, despite its moral delicacy.

One response to the unions’ defence of more violent recreational activities is to place them in the historical change in working cultures. Erik Loomis describes post-war shifts in forestry, for example, which began with unions negotiating for leisure and recreation, shifting in the 1970s to fighting for wilderness and national parks to preserve spaces for recreation, then again in the 1980s re-aligning them against environmentalists who sought to close down the industries. The entrenchment of this position, Loomis argues, has

created new connections between masculinity and work to fight against environmentalists and to save their jobs. The return to precarity in an age of deindustrialisation and globalisation created a new version of masculinity in nature, one in which the decline of manual labour in the forest stripped labourers of their breadwinner masculinity, self-identity, and pride.

It is not simply by chance that men account for 97.9 per cent of ducking-hunting licenses. Similarly, it is far from accidental that Animal Justice Party’s Purcell received death and rape threats since joining the inquiry.

Nevertheless, masculinity, like hunting, cannot on its own explain the persistent tensions between environmentalism and labour. Work itself dominates the formation of our relationship with nature, so that even in play and leisure we are shaped by the physical and mental techniques applied to us in employment. Moreover, the ducking hunting case illustrates how threats to one aspect of the relationship necessarily spill over into threats to the other.

Yet this framing does not have to be negative. An environmentalism that concerns itself with the conditions of people’s work will necessarily also address our relationship to nature. Tactically, workers are indispensable to any large-scale transformation of society. But neither reifying these workers’ interests as fixed, nor moralising them will build solidarity. Though it may seem a petty dispute, duck hunting is an instance in the struggle to articulate a vision of environmentalism that reaches across class lines.

Image: Håkon Helberg