Because everyone needs to eat, the labor to grow, harvest, butcher, prepare, ship, and sell food has been deemed essential. Yet despite its importance, work related to food converges with racism, sexism, and xenophobia, which has resulted in conditions whereby food-related work is often unsafe and unprotected, as well as poorly paid or even unpaid. These stories shine a light on the histories and inequalities of food labor, but also the communities that arise to meet this fundamental human need and cultural foundation.

Essential work in the Pacific Northwest is profoundly shaped by the local and regional geographies of human and natural systems. While geography is foundational to the entire Atlas, stories in this theme explore explicitly spatial dimensions of essential work. From the spatial practices of protestors to the distribution of wildfires, these stories reveal how labor intersects with place to create an essential work that is uniquely of the Pacific Northwest.

Work as a form of place-making is fundamental to historical knowledge. Labor remains written on the land, though it may appear faintly, as in a palimpsest. Pockets of oak savannah in Oregon’s Willamette Valley speak to the work of Kalapuya peoples, who remain in the region, while the work of Black loggers brought into Eastern Oregon in the early twentieth century and later driven away by racism remains present, too, in forest ecologies. Rarely memorialized, work creates histories that generations live, breathe, and navigate.

Community among workers can sustain lives in conditions of invisibility, insufficient pay, extreme weather, and racist or anti-Indigenous bias. Workers’ sociality manifests in their relations with the land, with animal and plant species, and one another. The reciprocal, often exuberant care that workers share undergirds solidarity movements like those of migrant farm laborers or protestors against fossil fuel extraction. Such care also serves as a bulwark against the violence of frontline jobs, from wildfire fighting to industrial butchery.

In the work for a just and sustainable world, not all labor is paid labor. Activism—from strikes to protests—plays an essential role in pressuring the powerful, activating collectives, and drawing attention to violence and injustice. These stories explore the multi-faceted work of activists.

Pacific Northwesterners are feeling the effects of global climate change through smothering summer “heat domes,” reduced snowpack, periods of heavy rainfall but also drought, and multiple, often enormous wildfires and the sky-and-lung clogging smoke that accompanies them. These and other effects are projected to increase in the coming decades, along with an expected increase in population as people flee climate catastrophe. The stories in this theme intersect labor with climate change impacts and potentialities.

Stories of migration to the Pacific Northwest range from histories and fantasies of settler colonialism to the complex histories, presents, and futures of immigrants from East Asia, Latin and South America, and other parts of the world. The stories in this theme unearth strands of these experiences.

Work done by incarcerated people in the Pacific Northwest is often forced and is generally poorly paid, lacking in protections, and limited in the ability for self-advocacy and community organizing. It may also be a source of pride or skills development, and is particularly essential-but-invisible. The stories in this theme uncover the vitally important work that incarcerated laborers do in support of wildfire response.

The focus of this Atlas is essential, often invisible work in the Pacific Northwest, and yet we recognize the Pacific Northwest itself as a region both literal and imaginative, real and constructed, with a complex history, a contested present, and various possible futures.

The term “essential work” rose to prominence because of the COVID-19 pandemic but bears further definition and examination, particularly around the often invisible and precarious conditions of most work deemed “essential.”

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The stories in this Atlas project make visible the often forgotten or hidden essential labor of under-represented workers, including migrants and the incarcerated. These projects also foreground workplaces that are culturally undervalued and difficult to see, such as the private spaces of domestic care work and the remote scenes of wildfire. Each of the Atlas stories offers a case study in how this essential work creates the place known as the Pacific Northwest while remaining largely unseen and rarely appreciated by the society it serves.