The history of struggles against war and for peace is typically narrated as a human story. Peacemaking, however, is about more than humans.1 While the theoretical and empirical relationship between peace and the environment has a long history, it entered a whole new chapter in the modern era. As industrial capitalism drove exponential increases in production and consumption around the world while augmenting the destructiveness of warfare, peace seekers frequently drew their metaphysical ideas, policy issues, and personal inspirations from the natural world. At the same time, those who studied and spoke about nature also actively absorbed the philosophies of peace, protest tactics, and rhetoric of war to address the accelerating human impact on the environment. As we confront a host of human-driven environmental changes with potentially catastrophic effects, historians must work together to uncover and teach a more-than-human perspective on peace and justice.

This essay proposes a novel paradigm for a political theory of climate justice: wages for earthwork. Indigenous peoples have disproportionately contributed to the sustainable stewardship of the natural world through ecological systems of governance, which I theorize as “earthwork.” Proponents of climate reparations have focused on reparations for unequal climate damages from emissions. By contrast, I propose “wages” or reparations to Indigenous peoples for debt owed to them for their devalued climate work. This framework makes use of an analogy to the 1970s feminist wages for housework movement, which sought to reveal the exploited and yet indispensable character of systematically devalued work rendered natural and invisible. I contend that (re)valuing earthwork must also be central to projects aimed at decolonizing climate justice, that is, anticolonial climate justice. More than monetary transfers alone, wages for earthwork prioritize the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty and land and wider structural transformation of colonial capitalism.