Mining, logging, and other extractive industries have profoundly transformed environments and working-class communities across the Americas. Large-scale extraction depleted water supplies, polluted rivers and air, and produced toxic landscapes that exposed working-class communities to chronic health risks, industrial accidents, and long-term environmental harm. At the same time, these industries created jobs—sometimes well-paid ones—and fostered economic growth, while entangling distant communities through the global circulation of capital, labor, and commodities. In the aftermath of extractive booms, communities were left grappling with unemployment, ruination, and environmental degradation.

Sitting at the crossroads of labor and environmental history, this panel examines the relationship between working-class communities and resource extraction across the Americas. Bringing together case studies from Chile, Peru, and the Pacific Northwest, the papers analyze how workers and their families experienced hazardous working and living conditions and how they responded—through protest, negotiation, adaptation, and demands to land, water, jobs, and health. The panel argues that concerns over safety, disability, health, and environmental degradation were central to the formation of working-class identities and demands for environmental and labor justice. It also shows that these issues remained well after the economic booms had passed.

The panel advances two interconnected arguments. First, it challenges depictions of working-class communities as homogeneous or passive victims of extractive capitalism. Instead, the papers highlight the diversity of responses to environmental and occupational risk, ranging from demands for safer workplaces to broader struggles over water rights, land use, and sustainable resource management. These conflicts involved not only workers and employers but also families, nearby residents, Indigenous communities, state agencies, and technical experts, revealing the complex and sometimes invisible ties that underpin extraction.

Second, the panel places landscapes at the center of analysis on how extraction shaped working-class communities. Extractive industries produced distinctive landscapes that were simultaneously sites of production, environmental degradation, social reproduction, and cultural attachment. From the Atacama Desert to Oregon forestry plantations, working-class communities built places they called home, embedding landscape in labor traditions, community identities, and environmental justice movements.

The papers approach these questions through distinct yet connected case studies. Thomas M. Klubock placed centers waterscapes in the political ecology of mining ecology, showing how industrial mining complexes appropriated and altered fragile river systems in the Atacama Desert. Ángela Vergara examines the industrial supply chains that sustained extraction by tracing the controversial history of the DuPont’s explosives in Chile. Juan Rubio draws on disability studies to analyze the long-term consequences of mining in Peru. Steven Beda examines the decline in resource extraction in Oregon, exploring how deindustrialization reshaped working class identity in former timber towns. Grounded in specific geographical places, the papers nevertheless demonstrate the global nature of extractive capitalism. By integrating these insights, the authors invite the audience to rethink working-class communities as central actors in the environmental history of capitalism in the Americas.