Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-First Century

287 Pages·2022·2.964 MB·English

by  Kai Bosworth

PIPELINE POPULISM
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PIPELINE
Grassroots Environmentalism
POPULISM
in the Twenty- First Century
KAI BOSWORTH
University of Minnesota Press | Minneapolis | London
Portions of chapter 1 were originally published as “‘They’re Treating Us like
Indians!’ Political Ecologies of Property and Race in North American Pipeline
Populism,” Antipode 53, no. 3 (2021): 665– 85. Portions of chapter 4 were origi-
nally published as “The People Know Best: Situating the Counterexpertise of
Populist Pipeline Opposition Movements,” Annals of the American Association of
Geographers 109, no. 2 (2019): 581– 92; reprinted by permission of the publisher,
Taylor and Francis Ltd., http://www.tandfonline.com.
Copyright 2022 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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ISBN 978- 1- 5179- 1105- 8 (hc)
ISBN 978- 1- 5179- 1106- 5 (pb)
A Cataloging-i n- Publication record for this book is available from the
Library of Congress.
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
UMP BmB 2022
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments vii
Abbreviations xv
introduction Affective Infrastructures of
Populist Environmentalism 1
1. “This Land Is Our Land”: Private Property and
Territorialized Resentment 51
2. “Keystone XL Hearing Nearly Irrelevant”:
Participation and Resigned Pragmatism 89
3. Canadian Invasion for Chinese Consumption: Foreign Oil
and Heartland Melodrama 125
4. The People Know Best: Counter- Expertise and
Jaded Confidence 163
conclusion The Desire to Be Popular 199
Notes 211
Bibliography 221
Index 251
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PREFACE AND
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
How should we understand the changing— and frequently
ambivalent— role of environmentalism in shaping political responses to
fossil fuel infrastructure? It is easy to conceive of the current situation
through a political and moral opposition: on the one hand, we have bad
forces like oil companies, and on the other hand, we have an embattled
righteous collective protagonist. It is the people versus the pipelines, a
classically populist setup. Such narrative structures can be helpful in
sharpening the divide between friend and foe, which some theorists
take to be the heart of political activity and group identity. However,
the contention of this book is that such narratives are too crude, as the
story is more complicated and dynamic. Understandings of friend and
foe change over time; collectives must be forged and can be rather un-
stable. Historical, economic, and material contexts shape who might
become enrolled in such political activity, for what reasons, and with
what baggage. The political stakes of opposition can paper over deep
contradictions in the visions and demands of any given group. Attend-
ing to populist environmentalism as one orientation in a dynamic, pro-
cessual field of stylistic conventions and differential forms of opposition
helps us understand how it has reshaped climate politics, with aspira-
tional consequences as well as missteps and limitations. I will unpack
this argument throughout the rest of this book, hoping to convince that
populist environmentalism is an adequate descriptor of one tendency of
pipeline resistance and contemporary climate politics, a helpful analytic
vii
viii Preface and Acknowledgments
for diagnosing the shortcomings of the cycle of climate justice struggles
from 2009 to 2016. In this short preface, I reflectively situate this argu-
ment within my own political, economic, historical, and intellectual
context.
I first learned of the Keystone pipeline system in 2007 or 2008
when a group of students from the University of South Dakota in Ver-
million visited Minnesota and shared an account of their battle against
the Keystone I system. As a student at Macalester College in Saint Paul,
I was involved in political organizing with other youth around the
country interested in halting new fossil fuel infrastructure while affirm-
ing a vision of an environmentally just future. We had delayed and ul-
timately canceled the construction of the Big Stone II coal plant just
over the border in my home state of South Dakota, a huge regional
victory. We were also working with several national groups in the Youth
Climate Movement— such as Power Shift, the Energy Action Coalition,
and the Sierra Student Coalition— to try to push federal climate legisla-
tion and to constitute a left environmental justice edge to older, more
inertial green groups. We thought (perhaps with youthful naivete) that
we were pushing these organizations—a nd the movement more
broadly— toward better recognition of the necessity of working-c lass,
Black, and Indigenous leadership in the climate struggle and the inex-
tricability of addressing inequality in any framework addressing climate
change.
Despite some crucial victories, however, many of us increasingly
became disaffected with the nonprofit- influenced orientation toward
lobbying and legislation. Our fears seemed to bear out in experience, as
the Obama administration’s weak push for bipartisan climate legislation
failed and the Copenhagen Accord of 2009 included no mandatory tar-
gets. Meanwhile, organizing within the Youth Climate Movement was
thornier than expected. The second Power Shift conference in 2009
brought over ten thousand youth to Washington, D.C., to plan and
strategize how to exert our power. But despite the increased focus on
environmental justice issues led by groups like Van Jones’s Green for All
and the intertribal Black Mesa Water Coalition, Power Shift was a dif-
ferent experience for some Indigenous activists. One session meant to
create space for Indigenous participants alone was resisted by schedul-
ers, resulting in several hundred non- Indigenous people packing the
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
room. An emotional and tense talkback ensued, in which Indigenous
youth described to the diverse young audience the persistent ignorance
of the broader climate movement toward the horizons of Indigenous
struggle. By contrast, the multifaceted movements present at the 2010
U.S. Social Forum in Detroit shimmered with possibilities.
Together these experiences prompted me to turn toward research to
try to understand the persistent racial structures of environmentalism in
popular movements, on the one hand, and the history of environmental
injustice in South Dakota, on the other. I held a brief summer intern-
ship at the Minneapolis office of Honor the Earth, a tribal environmen-
tal justice advocacy organization, where I contributed to a project to
uncover the debilitating effects of the U.S. military on Indigenous lands
(see LaDuke and Cruz 2013). At the same time, I increasingly heard of
resistance to new oil pipelines and uranium mining in the Dakotas,
along with a push for wind power by Indigenous leaders. This led me to
conceive of an academic research project that might further uncover the
history and present of western South Dakota as an energy landscape
“sacrifice zone” (LaDuke and Churchill 1985). Over the years, the me-
andering project transformed several times as the resistance to Keystone
XL (KXL) grew: Was it a study of liberal strategies of environmental
governance, of the biopolitics of environmental racism in settler colo-
nialism, of the limits of pluralistic multiculturalism, of the nexus of
state violence and oil economics? I was overwhelmed by the thought of
becoming “the pipeline guy,” so I was thankful to find at conferences
more and more scholars studying aspects of these pipeline resistance
movements (McCreary and Milligan 2014; Grant 2014; Holmes 2017;
Kojola 2017; Pasternak and Dafnos 2018; Spice 2018; Estes 2019;
LeQuesne 2019; Benton-C onnell and Cochrane 2020; Simpson and Le
Billon 2021). The emergence of this network of scholarship allowed me
to focus on what I finally remembered was the initial object of study:
environmentalism. This focus means that less attention is given in this
book to conservatives and the political right, the state, the oil industry,
and Indigenous-l ed resistance as some readers might expect. This is cer-
tainly not because these do not need attention, and I do address some
of these aspects elsewhere (Bosworth, forthcoming; Bosworth and Chua
2021).
The economic context of this research also shaped my approach. I