Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century by Kai Bosworth

Introduction by
Lauren Gifford and Levi van Sant
Published
December 11, 2023
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One of the many contributions of Kai Bosworth’s Pipeline Populism is that it not only takes the emotional dynamics of climate politics seriously, but also analyzes a richer range of affects beyond hope and despair.

I

n late September of 2023 the New York Times organized a day of live journalism called Climate Forward, explicitly framing the event as a discussion of “Hope and Despair on a Boiling Planet” (Gelles 2023). The organizers argued that there is reason to be both “exceedingly optimistic” and still “deeply concerned” about planetary futures. Many of the Climate Forward speakers, including Al Gore, voiced these same sentiments. Numerous criticisms could be raised about the Climate Forward event, but it captures well the fact that hope and despair are the two most commonly-acknowledged emotions in discussions about global climate change. For many commentators, this is where the attention to climate feelings ends. One of the many contributions of Kai Bosworth’s Pipeline Populism is that it not only takes the emotional dynamics of climate politics seriously, but also analyzes a richer range of affects beyond hope and despair.  

Bosworth’s book focuses on the emergence of pipeline opposition movements in the upper Midwest region over the period from 2008-2016. It situates these movements within a regional history of populism and the emergence of “populist environmentalism” as a strategy for confronting fossil fuel combustion and the climate crisis. “Populist environmentalism,” in short, is a genre of ecological politics in which “the people” are taken to be the primary political actors, but for whom democracy has been corrupted by a nefarious elite. The description of populist environmentalism, as one among several varieties of environmentalism, provides a major insight for public scholarship which has, instead, tended to portray environmentalism as primarily a venue for elite interests.

In addition to scholarly debates, Pipeline Populism’s political arguments emerge from, and are directed for, the public climate justice movement (as can be demonstrated by public-directed interviews and podcasts Bosworth has conducted since its publication). And it is not an outsider critique. The book is rooted in  Bosworth’s involvement in the Youth Climate Movement, with personal origins in South Dakota and Minnesota. In particular, Bosworth seeks to bring to light two crucial insights for climate justice movements and organizations. Bosworth demonstrates how populism tended to reproduce limits in how Indigenous sovereignty movements were understood. Yet the book  also shows how non-Indigenous South Dakotans could be transformed by working with Native Nations like the Oceti Sakowin Oyate. Second, Bosworth brings  geographical analysis of affect and emotion to bear on the practical problem of political organizing. He demonstrates the importance of reflecting on anger, resentment, resignation, jadedness, courage, humor, and joy in place-based climate justice movements. These arguments are practical tools for climate justice organizing.

Empirically, Pipeline Populism analyzes several ways that the public interacts with pipeline firms and government bodies, describing the emotional experiences of activists and lay members of the public who come to oppose pipeline construction in the region. It describes the repetitive experience of attending public participation or consultation meetings, in which farmers, ranchers, and others testify in three-to-five-minute speeches about the potential harms or benefits of the pipeline. Bosworth describes how members of the public come to feel resentment towards these meetings, all the while continuing to engage in them despite feelings of resignation. Bosworth’s attention and care to members of the public, who themselves often feel forgotten or unheard, elevates these forms of testimony to a more central place in our understanding of climate politics—particularly in rural America.

In this review forum, four interlocutors engage with Pipeline Populism and relate it to their own scholarship and research. Andrea Marston locates the international politics of populist environmentalism, considering whose sovereignty is included or discounted in the imagination of North Americans. Deondre Smiles addresses how settler colonialism operates as an assemblage of structures which can come to conflict with each other even if they have shared premises. Kelly Kay reflects on how the affective infrastructures of populism come to reproduce “pillars of liberalism.” Jared Margulies describes how desire comes to produce “psychic twists” in settler subjectivities, creating opportunities for more capacious subjects of climate justice. In an author’s response, Kai Bosworth considers the multiple modalities of “infrastructure” at work in the book’s somewhat tragic analysis of populist environmentalism–while eyeing how such analysis contains practical implications for radical organizing.

Lauren Gifford, PhD is a critical human-environment geographer exploring intersections of global climate change policy, conservation, markets and justice. She is Associate Director of the Soil Carbon Solutions Center and joint faculty in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability at Colorado State University.

Levi Van Sant is an assistant professor of environmental studies at George Mason University. His research analyzes the politics of agriculture, land, and conservation in the US South.

essays in this forum

Affective Infrastructures of Populist Environmentalism

This book opens a new conceptual realm for scholars whose commitments to historical materialist analyses of environmental politics may have otherwise prevented them from dipping their toes into the currents of affect, longing, and desire.

By

Andrea Marston

The ‘It’ of Populism—A Review of Kai Bosworth’s Pipeline Populism

Although their efforts were ultimately in vain, Bosworth’s narrative shows the ways in which groups are able to create a counter-territorialization of discursive spaces, if not physical spaces, as they hoped.

By

Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles

Populist Environmentalism and the Pillars of Liberalism

As a fellow scholar of property, political economy, and rural communities, I was particularly struck by the ways that whiteness, as well as a deep and enduring respect for private property and for the capitalist system as an arbiter of value(s), circulate through the narratives told in the book

By

Kelly Kay

When Desire Gets in the Way of the Pipe

Pipeline Populism is a guide to populist desires, an inquiry into “the mysterious spark” 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.

By

Jared Margulies

Populist Environmentalism: Between Disaster and Climate Justice, “the People”

This response builds on the commentary of four interlocutors and their scholarship by further clarifying the specific capacities and utility that the concepts mobilized in Pipeline Populism might have beyond the context of North American pipeline politics, for both political ecological analysis and for political ecology as an organizing practice.

By

Kai Bosworth

Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century by Kai Bosworth

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S

cholars and practitioners of urban planning need to rethink the field’s futures at this important historical juncture: some might call it a moment of truth when there is little left to hide. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many cracks, contradictions, and inequalities that have always existed but are now more visible. This also includes the global vaccine apartheid that is ongoing as I write these words. Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

  • Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
  • Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
  • They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining.
  • I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

  1. Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
  2. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
  3. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

What’s a Rich Text element?

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I

n late September of 2023 the New York Times organized a day of live journalism called Climate Forward, explicitly framing the event as a discussion of “Hope and Despair on a Boiling Planet” (Gelles 2023). The organizers argued that there is reason to be both “exceedingly optimistic” and still “deeply concerned” about planetary futures. Many of the Climate Forward speakers, including Al Gore, voiced these same sentiments. Numerous criticisms could be raised about the Climate Forward event, but it captures well the fact that hope and despair are the two most commonly-acknowledged emotions in discussions about global climate change. For many commentators, this is where the attention to climate feelings ends. One of the many contributions of Kai Bosworth’s Pipeline Populism is that it not only takes the emotional dynamics of climate politics seriously, but also analyzes a richer range of affects beyond hope and despair.  

Bosworth’s book focuses on the emergence of pipeline opposition movements in the upper Midwest region over the period from 2008-2016. It situates these movements within a regional history of populism and the emergence of “populist environmentalism” as a strategy for confronting fossil fuel combustion and the climate crisis. “Populist environmentalism,” in short, is a genre of ecological politics in which “the people” are taken to be the primary political actors, but for whom democracy has been corrupted by a nefarious elite. The description of populist environmentalism, as one among several varieties of environmentalism, provides a major insight for public scholarship which has, instead, tended to portray environmentalism as primarily a venue for elite interests.

In addition to scholarly debates, Pipeline Populism’s political arguments emerge from, and are directed for, the public climate justice movement (as can be demonstrated by public-directed interviews and podcasts Bosworth has conducted since its publication). And it is not an outsider critique. The book is rooted in  Bosworth’s involvement in the Youth Climate Movement, with personal origins in South Dakota and Minnesota. In particular, Bosworth seeks to bring to light two crucial insights for climate justice movements and organizations. Bosworth demonstrates how populism tended to reproduce limits in how Indigenous sovereignty movements were understood. Yet the book  also shows how non-Indigenous South Dakotans could be transformed by working with Native Nations like the Oceti Sakowin Oyate. Second, Bosworth brings  geographical analysis of affect and emotion to bear on the practical problem of political organizing. He demonstrates the importance of reflecting on anger, resentment, resignation, jadedness, courage, humor, and joy in place-based climate justice movements. These arguments are practical tools for climate justice organizing.

Empirically, Pipeline Populism analyzes several ways that the public interacts with pipeline firms and government bodies, describing the emotional experiences of activists and lay members of the public who come to oppose pipeline construction in the region. It describes the repetitive experience of attending public participation or consultation meetings, in which farmers, ranchers, and others testify in three-to-five-minute speeches about the potential harms or benefits of the pipeline. Bosworth describes how members of the public come to feel resentment towards these meetings, all the while continuing to engage in them despite feelings of resignation. Bosworth’s attention and care to members of the public, who themselves often feel forgotten or unheard, elevates these forms of testimony to a more central place in our understanding of climate politics—particularly in rural America.

In this review forum, four interlocutors engage with Pipeline Populism and relate it to their own scholarship and research. Andrea Marston locates the international politics of populist environmentalism, considering whose sovereignty is included or discounted in the imagination of North Americans. Deondre Smiles addresses how settler colonialism operates as an assemblage of structures which can come to conflict with each other even if they have shared premises. Kelly Kay reflects on how the affective infrastructures of populism come to reproduce “pillars of liberalism.” Jared Margulies describes how desire comes to produce “psychic twists” in settler subjectivities, creating opportunities for more capacious subjects of climate justice. In an author’s response, Kai Bosworth considers the multiple modalities of “infrastructure” at work in the book’s somewhat tragic analysis of populist environmentalism–while eyeing how such analysis contains practical implications for radical organizing.

Lauren Gifford, PhD is a critical human-environment geographer exploring intersections of global climate change policy, conservation, markets and justice. She is Associate Director of the Soil Carbon Solutions Center and joint faculty in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability at Colorado State University.

Levi Van Sant is an assistant professor of environmental studies at George Mason University. His research analyzes the politics of agriculture, land, and conservation in the US South.