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Terra-Collar
A new category for work that ensures Earth remains a viable environment for many species, with humans as the primary risk group.
Definition
The terra-collar work arises from the climatic challenges set by the 2°C degrees by 2050 goal and encompasses various activities that ensure limiting global warming and adapting to the altered living conditions.
The “terra” type of collar stands for both the established collared division of labor that is being reworked, as well as for the terraforming processes being implemented for climate actions.
Repurposing existing industries, managing climate migrations, providing emergency services, supervising machinery and data production — these are the tasks for Terra-Collar workers.
Terra-Collar obtains a hybrid form where knowledge and skills that are labelled under different collars merge in a multidisciplinary manner.
It requires a collective and collaborative effort, beyond national and party interests, which is organized through mass mobilization of labor.
Millions of people will need to perform tasks according to the goal, while industries and nations will play a role in supporting societal adaptation to climate change impacts.
There are five operative parameters that define the terra-collar work: scale, mobilization, repurposement, training and sensing.
Scale
The current crisis demonstrates the impact of capital accumulation that commodifies matter and employs energy on a planetary scale.
However, the urgency to limit global warming does not allow to wait for a post-capitalist scenario.
To store back the carbon emitted during the last century, halt and actively reverse ecological damage, large scale actions should be activated, involving public and private sectors.
Historical
precedents, ranging from modern megaprojects to the 20th century forced labor systems, demonstrate how large-scale
goals can be achieved through centrally-planned policymaking, serving interests
of the nation-states, for instance, the Panama Canal and the Baikal-Amur Mainline.
These programs required complex infrastructures to provide living and
working conditions, educational and training programs, and organization of
leisure time
Recent examples of actions proposed at the required scale are the Green New Deals.
Ranging from contemptuous to ambitious, the Green New Deals are massive employment initiatives directed towards net zero and other sustainable modes of governance.
However, as nation-state sponsored initiatives, they imply financial benefits for the parties involved, grant access to those legally defined as citizens, and are subject to instrumentalization for election purposes.
While these programs are limited by national constraints, some remain useful if decoupled.
Likewise, recent green commitments of global actors, known to act driven by profit, demonstrate the effectivity and cross-institutional cooperation necessary for the Terra-Collar.
Corporations like Walmart are examples of planned and tuned supply chains that tweak production at the source adjusting for alterations in the projected demand.
The terra-collar work requires actions on both sides—state and market—a hybrid that operates best because its means of implementation are different; ones that ensure coordination and agreement towards shared goals.
The Panama Canal and the Baikal-Amur Mainline construction sites.
Mobilization
To carry out the climate mitigation and adaptation on the proposed scale, the terra-collar work should involve mass mobilization of labor.
Some examples of mass labor mobilization are forced labor systems, such as those in the former USSR and China.
These systems have demonstrated their productivity in constructing large-scale terraforming projects, like hydropower plants, railways, and irrigation systems, as well as coordinating thousands of people for these purposes.
While displaying different tools that enabled the mobilization of labor, they have also revealed its human and ecological costs.
Terra-collar jobs require reworking these and other forms of labor mobilization to limit global warming and avoid overexploitation of human and material resources.
The Terra-Collar category also implies the logistics and coordination necessary to organize the process of mobilization.
For instance, it addresses the management of climate refugees, whose numbers are estimated to grow between 25 million to 1 billion by 2050.
Facilitation of their movement will require the creation of coordinated networks of mobility that will involve various sectors and establish necessary infrastructures of access, resource allocation and supply chains anticipated by migratory patterns.
These networks will also involve large amounts of labor for counselling, relocation and social adaptation to new environments.
Repurposement
The terra-collar work implies the transition of active and phased-out industrial infrastructures to carbon capture and storage as well as their repurposement for other climate mitigation activities.
This transition will be enabled by either utilizing the equipment to perform green tasks or adjusting the equipment for new purposes.
As we already find ourselves on a planet terraformed by the work of extractive industries, adaptation to a new climate can not afford to build the facilities from scratch.
Sectors, such as oil and gas, possess proprietary advanced and expensive tools to extract oil and they can be repurposed to store carbon, hinging on the skills that this labor force has.
To keep within 2°C degrees margins, we need an amount of effort equivalent to running these industries in reverse.
Blue and green hydrogen can be produced at the extraction and refining sites, while pipelines and transportation logistics already in place can be repurposed for non-pollutant technologies.
Transition to hydrogen is also the most viable option for countries with little economic incentives to transition to green energy, such as Russia.
Terra-Collar work will also include detecting and planning adaptation for
Production of hydrogen worldwide between 2015 and 2018, with a 2050 projection.
Training
Implementation of these technologies will compel the labor force to adapt to new working environments.
The terra-collar work emphasizes labor reskilling and upskilling, so that workers can obtain literacy to operate technical systems and master practical abilities to perform hands-on tasks.
This skills transition will be enabled through various educational and training programs which will have to be available for continuous upgrade.
The scale of training will involve corporate universities to provide vocational courses, as well as short, modular, and continuous technical training necessary to master the required skill set and carry out the redesigning of various occupational fields.
The academic system built on top of the industrial revolution division of knowledge already shows its limitations to address this issue.
The sector of land use demonstrates how some of these programs are already operating, suggesting the ways in which they can be taken on a larger scale.
Stanford University estimates that there are 950 million to 1.1 billion acres of deserted farmland around the world.
424 million acres could be restored and converted to regenerative agriculture and other carbon-friendly farming systems by 2050 to provide an emissions impact of 14.1billions tons of carbon.
The passive restoration takes a very long time whereas active restoration is expensive and labour intensive.
To feed the growing population and protect forests from deforestation, restoring abandoned cropland is vital and requires massive training programs for the local communities to ensure long-term sustainability.
From low-cost techniques, such as agroforestry, to high-cost, such as precision farming and seed bombing, these strategies will take the lead in transitioning towards an articulated land use as a planned endeavour and create more energy-efficient agriculture allowing for strategic rewilding.
An increase in agricultural efficiency inherently implies less manual labor and thus requires further training programs to ensure rural populations are involved in forestry regeneration and management initiatives.
Carbon sequestration potential of global regenerative agriculture.
Sensing
The terra-collar work is tethered to the materiality of the planet, and this endeavour will be impossible to complete without sensing on a comparable level.
Knowing where to sample, where to deploy limited resources, where to anticipate an emergency, where to repurpose, train and mitigate, requires sensing.
Ecological sensing needs to be translated into the financial assessment.
For instance, the increased data on ecological services provided by marshes, peatlands and mangroves demonstrate the value that these ecosystems retain without being farmed or mined.
Carbon credits and budgeting prompts the development of sampling, accounting and assigning value to non-commercial assets, such as water and mineral cycles.
Therefore, the financial assessment also motivates accuracy in sampling, surveying and synthesising information; requiring high-tech and high-touch trainees to carry out these tasks.
Scale and mobilization have no direction without sensing.
Repurposement and training programs to be implemented will be informed by sensing of the material, population and energy flows, rather than by labor market demands.
This informational process is recursive, allowing the projected timeframes, goal states and efforts required for this terraforming project to be updated.
