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hat will it take to organize a “project of social revolution for a more robust climate politics”? While this is the question Kai Bosworth leaves readers with at the very end of Pipeline Populism, to arrive at it, Bosworth does something quite different than a number of recent interventions (such as those by Kohei Seito, Matt Huber, Adrienne Buller, among others) similarly concerned with questions of climate change, revolutionary struggle, Marxist readings of the environment, and how, in Kai’s words, we might “achieve a socialist politics of equality and emancipation on and for this planet” (209).
True, Bosworth trots out a lot of the familiar thinkers found in any number of books published in the last couple of years on radical responses to climate change, degrowth, and socialist environmentalisms. Marx, for one, certainly looms large across the text, but he is not alone. Most distinctive to Bosworth’s project is his abiding interest in the work of 17th century Jewish-born Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who he draws on throughout the four primary chapters and hefty introduction to explore the relations between affect and politics, and politics’ many affects.
Spinoza gives Bosworth an extremely helpful scaffolding for theorizing affective infrastructures, and offers him a way to ask, “Why is it that the aspirations of populist environmentalisms seem to resecure aspects of liberal, racial capitalism when many involved in such movements wish to surpass these? And why did populist pipeline opposition emerge alongside but separate from revolutionary socialism or anticolonialism?” (36-37). The answer for Spinoza, and Bosworth, has everything to do with desire, and so while Kai draws on Marxist ideology critique, he needs more than an analysis of the political economic conditions that foreground resistance to pipelines to analyze the forms of emergent environmental populism that he centers.
By way of example, Bosworth describes how pipelines came to be seen by white settler landowners as “…perforations of their individual piece of property” (66) in a way that activated them as political subjects on the grounds of defending their imagined sovereign rights to land as property. Thinking with desire, we can see how this is also about perforations of an individual’s sense of self, the subjectivity of the white settler and the political and economic pact that ranching and farming are imagined as representing as a link to land vis a vis private property ownership. Strain on these links cause psychic twists, frictions that Bosworth shows us not only lead towards nondeterministic social and political responses and affects, but strain on the very sense of the white settler sense of self as a coherent character emplaced in the western ranch landscape.
Through desire we can begin to analyze, imagine, and identify, in Lacanian terms, the quilting point (point de capiton) through which an emergent left-environmental populism finds purchase and (in)coherence with diverse environmental subjectivities at the level of the individual. What does it mean for the subject to become a climate activist, and how does this role of climate activist as signifier affix in different ways across varying subjectivities? The suture that both binds and bleeds where conservative ranchers, climate activists, and Indigenous organizers meet on the terrain of pipeline resistance is unsurprisingly unstable. This is a complex and contested landscape read dramatically differently through the diverse lenses of Native activists, settler ranchers and farmers, and large, liberal-oriented environmental NGOs who are all engaged in mounting forms of resistance against both the Keystone XL Pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline, as wonderfully narrated by Bosworth.
But Bosworth also brings Spinoza into the contemporary moment, especially through the important work of the late Lauren Berlant (2011), among other Marxist and affect theorists, to say nothing of his extensive engagement with quite a few contemporary geographers. I chose to dwell on this subject of theorists that feature in Pipeline Populism in this review at the outset because Bosworth does such an admirable job weaving between centuries old theory and more contemporary thinkers, translating the often very difficult texts of Spinoza in a way that really works. Where in other hands this engagement or tacking between affect theory and pipelines might have felt disjointed or stilted, Bosworth stitches his way between theory, politics, and political struggle in a manner that is truly commendable.
Clearly, for the more theoretically inclined, there is much to enjoy in this text. At the same time, Bosworth is doing much more than extending Marxist-Spinozist theory into the world of anti-pipeline activism to make a case for what it will take to organize a climate revolution. While that would be an interesting project, instead, what Bosworth offers readers—and here I think all geographers will rejoice—is a rigorously grounded field guide of the best kind, though not exactly the guide to pipeline populism as one might imagine. As he acknowledges in his preface, Kai was wary, even ‘overwhelmed’ at the thought of becoming ‘the pipeline guy’ (ix). This admission is a telling one, and further speaks to Bosworth’s choice to engage with theory that binds the personal and political through the realm of affective infrastructures (these infrastructures for Bosworth, it should be made clear, are not the literal infrastructures of pipelines, but rather “how affect might condition forms of political organization” (Bosworth 2023: 54). At the same time, it is interesting to consider what it was more precisely that was ‘overwhelming’ in the idea of framing the project more directly through the materiality of pipeline infrastructure as also affective and affecting. It would be interesting to imagine how this project might have evolved differently if Bosworth had stuck with the literally affective infrastructures of pipelines rather than the infrastructures of political organizing of resistance to them he does here.
Instead, Pipeline Populism is a guide to populist desires, an inquiry into “the mysterious spark” (to use Winona LaDuke’s phrase Bosworth writes with) that undergirded the unexpected mass protests and pipeline resistance and struggle at Standing Rock against the Dakota access pipeline on the one hand, and the mysterious spark Bosworth is fixated on articulating that might lead beyond an environmental left-populism and transitionally towards a more profoundly revolutionary climate politics (LaDuke, 2020: 95). In taking us into the landscape of pipeline struggles, Kai offers us four affective moments to consider: territorial resentment, resigned pragmatism, heartland melodrama, and jaded confidence. It is important to note, and Bosworth says so at the outset, this is not an ethnography of Indigenous protest or struggle, nor a study of decolonization, nor a detailed accounting of the coalitional protests at Standing Rock. Instead, as these affective moments suggest, Bosworth takes us into perhaps some of the most boring places of pipeline politics of all, to glean the makings and thwarting of potential environmental revolutions from the ground floor of public meeting spaces across the Plains and endless paperwork.
These sites of ethnographic study include the pages of environmental impact assessments, public consultation meetings, thousands of pages of comments on pipeline proposals, and into the quieter spaces in which we can imagine Bosworth sitting at a farmhouse table in South Dakota talking to men and women about how they became politically activated and engaged in mounting resistance to pipelines. Bosworth’s close attention to the everyday spaces and moments through which a ‘public’ emerges and finds coherence is so key to his analysis. What better site for research than a dreary and soul-crushing public meeting in which frustrated citizens repetitively express their discontentment, fears, and anger over a pipeline damaging the land they steward without their consent, knowing all the while that the performance of doing so only will serve to check a box in the corporate handbook of land theft that says that public consultation occurred.
While public consultation meetings might sound less sexy than the front lines of the Standing Rock blockade, Bosworth’s book is so well written and structured I found myself time and time again visually imagining the steamy, over-crowded school auditorium or cafeteria where corporate emissaries and state officials sitting at a folding table on a small stage are getting assaulted with question after question from frustrated constituents and only offering the occasional empty word salad corporate-non-answer back. This is to say, read this book, it is wonderfully written and comes from such a clear place of desire to imagine a radically different climate future and what moves in each of us—or not—to engage in political struggle for the planet, and consequently a collective future. I end on this note of movement because ultimately this is what this book asks of the reader: what is it in desire that moves us, and in so being moved, might move us as individuals towards enacting a collective, intersectional, class-minded response to our extraordinarily dangerous climate present.
References
Berlant L (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bosworth K (2022) Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bosworth K (2023) What is ‘affective infrastructure’?. Dialogues in Human Geography, 13(1), 54-72.
LaDuke W (2020) To Be a Water Protector: The Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.
Jared Margulies is assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Alabama, where he leads the Critical Conservation Geography Collective. His work focuses on the political ecology of human-wildlife relations, wildlife trade, and biodiversity conservation. His first book, The Cactus Hunters: Desire and extinction in the illicit succulent trade, is out in November 2023 with University of Minnesota Press.
