Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

3-2022

Abstract

In Los Angeles, water managers and environmentalist NGOs champion green infrastructure retrofits, installations intended to maximize the water-absorbing capacity of the urban landscape. In such arrangements, the work of water management is necessarily spread among a more-than-human community, including (but certainly not limited to) humans, plants, soils, and gravels. This article analyzes the human labor within these collaborations, tracking when and how this work gets enrolled in networks of water management and circuits of value. I develop the term ecosystem duties to characterize these exertions and as a useful analytic for assessing emergent dynamics of environmental justice.

Keywords

ecological labor, ecosystem services, infrastructure, water management, environmental justice

Discipline

Environmental Sciences | Infrastructure

Research Areas

Integrative Research Areas

Publication

American Anthropologist

Volume

124

Issue

1

First Page

77

Last Page

89

ISSN

0002-7294

Identifier

10.1111/aman.13650

Publisher

Wiley

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13650

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