Field Notes: Heat

“Do you not see that nature is clamoring for two things only, a body free from pain, a mind released from worry?” Lucretius, De rerum natura

Perhaps you don’t remember or weren’t around my corner of the world, but at the beginning of July, the weather was horrible. On the farm, it didn’t rain in May or June. Then, temperatures skyrocketed. On July 2nd, my family snuck away to the beach for a few days (our anniversary is July 4th). The coast was a little cooler, but when we got back to the farm, we were greeted by brutal temps and heat indices that beggared belief. A farmer friend later told me that her farm experienced the highest heat index ever recorded on the weekend of the fourth. On Friday, the 5th, Raleigh hit the highest record temperature ever: 106 degrees. 

When I went back to work Monday morning, I shifted my schedule back two hours: out the door at 6:00am; back for lunch at noon. By 10 am I had moved the sheep, the chickens, made sure everyone had water, and then did a few chores around the house and in the garden. I didn’t check the temperature, but the heat was punishing. By noon, I couldn’t stand it. I went inside, poured a glass of ice water, and stretched out under a fan. It took me several hours to recover. 

Usually, I’m not one to complain about working conditions. I’m extremely lucky to work on land that I own and to be my own employer. But when the weather’s higher than 90 for the better part of the day, it’s hard to imagine how anyone can stand working outside for longer than four or five hours at a time, regardless of who they work for and what they get paid. It’s the kind of heat that makes you question your life choices. 

It’s not just North Carolina that had it bad. It was a brutal stretch in lots of regions around the country. The Washington Post reported 28 heat-related deaths in the first week of July. That number will grow throughout summer, as more and more deaths get reported. Some are wondering if we will outstrip the number of heat-related casualties in 2023, the highest on record (2,302). 

One of July’s deaths happened fairly close to home. On July 6th, a migrant farmworker died in the fields of Wayne County, North Carolina, about an hour and fifteen minutes from downtown Raleigh. This week, the North Carolina Department of Labor announced an investigation into the man’s death. His name was Juan Jose Ceballos. When he died, I saw a rumor circulating online that Ceballos’s death was because of heat. A GoFundMe page, which his family set up shortly afterwards, indicates that he died of heatstroke. According to the website, the company who employed Ceballos promised they would pay to have his body sent back to his family in Mexico. But since then, the family has not heard anything from the company. (This isn’t the first time that Gracias Harvesting, Inc., has run afoul of OSHA and the Department of Labor: see US Dept. of Labor violations here. In 2023, the company settled out of court on charges of “human trafficking, wage theft, and mistreatment of female migrant workers.”)

As the heat flares up again this week, I’ve thought a lot about the death of Ceballos. I go about my daily work; I am adrift in the heat. What I feel is the same sun, the same humidity, the same temperature that thousands of workers in our state feel–at the same time, in a different place. If you know how to work hard, it’s easy to push yourself to keep working beyond a threshold of physical safety. I’ve been there before. But I have always had the option of retreating indoors when I felt like my body might give up. I don’t pay myself hourly; I’m not bound by poverty; I’m not a migrant. 

I have no idea if Ceballos’ employers coerced him into working on an afternoon when the temperature reached 101 degrees. Maybe they did; maybe they didn’t. What I find myself thinking about is the experience of a certain kind of internal necessity. Absent coercion, what are the conditions for feeling like you have to remain in a situation that is literally killing you? 

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In the Politics, Aristotle says that the slave is essentially the same thing as a tool or an implement for providing the “necessities of life.” Without such necessities, Aristotle says, “even life, as well as the good life,  is impossible.” (1253b; the discussion of slavery continues to 1256a). The production of food, clothing, shelter, and children requires labor that is painful and time-consuming. With food, the product is consumed nearly as quickly as it is produced. In care work or child-rearing, the work disappears in the very act of rendering service.  For Aristotle, slaves free their master from the burden of providing such “necessities.” With slaves, a citizen gets his own body and his own time back. He’s free to pursue things that really should occupy citizens, like politics or philosophy. Slaves have a second advantage, too. A slave is like a meta-tool, a tool that can use other tools like a hoe, a rake, or a plow. Thus, among the category of tools in the householder’s workhouse, slaves are most like “tame animals” who “with their bodies minister to the necessities of life.” (1254b25). 

Aristotle doesn’t try to hide his contempt for physical labor. In his hierarchy of work, the lowest and most degrading tasks are those “that most deteriorate the body” (1258b35). By this measure, labor in the fields is the most wretched. Curiously, shepherds are the laziest of the agricultural workers, so they get something of a free pass: ”they get their food without labor from tame animals and have leisure” (1256a30). The word for leisure here is scholazousin, which has as its root schole, from which we get our words “school” and “scholastic.” It means, roughly, abstention from work, or leisure. One scholar has suggested that, in ancient Athens, up to 80% of labor was performed by non-citizens. 

You might be thinking: what’s the point of comparing a migrant worker to a slave? By definition, a slave is the personal property of someone else. Migrant workers work by the hour or by contract. They are free to come and go as they please. But in Aristotle’s discussion of slavery, what matters is not so much the concept of private property (which was different in ancient Athens, anyway) but that the slave belongs to a category of living tools that are available to the free citizen who is in charge of his own household. This category includes domesticated animals, but it also includes apprentices in the trades. Such living tools free citizens up to do the things that are proper to being human. So long as someone is a non-citizen, they cannot have freedom to pursue these activities. 

When I think about Aristotle’s discussion of necessity and slavery, I find myself struggling to find a difference between migrant farm work and the enslavement to necessity embodied in the figure of the Greek slave or domestic animal. Sometimes, work on a small farm sucks. On an industrial scale, it is backbreaking, repetitive, and unbearably boring. Part of the problem stems from the fact that, in an industrial farm system, the most engrossing and interesting parts of the work are disaggregated from the actual labor that goes into planting or harvesting crops. Strategy, planning, skill, and know-how belong to the employer or the managerial class or the latest piece of technology. The point of migrant labor is that it is cheap and doesn’t require specialized knowledge. It is perhaps the purest, most mindless distillation of human labor power. Most importantly, it saves us from having to sacrifice our own bodies for the “necessities of life.” Instead, we pay other people to do the work we don’t want to do. 

Legally, our nation doesn’t treat migrants like private property. I have no doubt that some farmers and traffickers do. Still, the fact is that migrant labor accounts for approximately 73% of all agricultural labor in our country (migrants make up about 20% of all US labor). It’s estimated that half of agricultural workers are undocumented. Some are children. Many work for less than minimum wage doing jobs that would crush most people. 

Wendell Berry once claimed that a root cause for the ecological crisis in the United States was chattel slavery. He said this in 1970, when most folks were unaware that there was any sort of ecological crisis. He argued that white people in America have always excelled at finding other races to do the work they preferred not to do. That work includes agricultural work, childcare, care work, housekeeping, construction work, and other poorly paid jobs. To provide the “necessities of life,” to unburden themselves from the pain and the enormous cost in time, white people pressed other people into the fields. Outrage at such practices can sometimes obscure the profound ecological dilemma it puts a society in. When someone else does the work, the farmer is removed from the care of the land. “Management” and labor are divorced. The person in charge forgets what care and attention look like. But you can’t see and respond to the soil if your feet aren’t in it. 

It’s not my intention to step up on a soapbox. But it does seem plain to me that you and I and every other citizen of this country are implicated in an agricultural system that, in addition to destroying the planet, is profoundly inhumane. The question isn’t “should we let more migrants in,” or “should we kick them out?” There’s really only one question: why do we put up with an agricultural system that harms its workers, poisons its consumers, and degrades all living things? I suspect that the further your life is from the labor that provides the things you need to live (like food), the less urgent that question will feel. One way to feel it is to learn (again?) what it’s like to provide for the necessities of life–to take some small, daily part in the suffering internal to the life of what Hannah Arendt called the animal laborans.