Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-First Century

True populism in America is found not in anti-immigrant demagoguery or red-hatted rallies, but amid the pot smoke, pig shit, and people found at pipeline protests. In Pipeline Populism, geographer and political ecologist Kai Bosworth locates the title concept's reemergence in a 2014 Willie Nelson and Neil Young concert where “cowboys, ranchers, hippies, activists, elders, T-shirt hawkers, nonprofit leaders, hemp growers, party members, corn and soybean farmers, and children” came together in opposition to the Keystone XL and, later, the Dakota Access Pipelines (51). Bosworth argues those activists reveal how we ought to reconceive “populism” as the “left-populism” of the progressive struggles of the Farmers’ Alliance of the late 1800s, beginning in the Upper Midwest (6). To understand populism's power in rural America and particularly pipeline protest, he asserts the importance of “affective infrastructures,” spatially and situationally defined emotions that create a sense of “the people”: “territorial resentment, resigned pragmatism, heartland melodrama, and jaded confidence” galvanized a left-populist political response to environmental exploitation (4, 202).Place-based resentment in the rural Midwest factored into that populism. As corn prices plummeted in the mid-2010s and TransCanada land agents fanned out to secure concessions from local landowners, one farmer whose land was surveyed forced Bosworth to prove he had a South Dakotan 605 area code, had family in the Rapid City area, was not connected to TransCanada, and was not related to a Republican running for US Senate (56). Subsequent “contradictions for which ‘people’ and ‘land’ were at stake” required confronting South Dakota's settler-colonial heritage (47). “They're treating us like Indians” was a common refrain among those who resented “being trod upon by state and capital alike,” though Bosworth asserts that “populist strategies centered on property rights did not overshadow the resurgence in anticolonial resistance led by Native Nations that takes the protection of water to be incompatible with the dominant property regimes” (76–77, 87). Bosworth argues instead that left-populists fell victim to a reductive, affected “heartland melodrama.” Competing with racialized images of the Chinese and capitalist settler colonies like Canada stunted class-based anticapitalist identities in favor of region-based ones, Bosworth notes, that defended agrarian democracy at the expense of other identities (129, 147). Many pipeline protesters even acknowledged Canadian tar sands’ threat to First Nations while downplaying pipelines’ harm to Indigenous communities of North Dakota and South Dakota (153–54).Those white and Native activists alike who sought to engage the political process were united by feelings of resigned pessimism and jaded confidence. Those citizens felt ignored by the regulatory process of the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission, in which corporate witnesses and politically motivated officials marginalized legitimate concerns. Navigating these meetings, Bosworth narrates how “‘Untrained’ laypeople” were “churned up by a regulatory apparatus that appears to already have all the answers” (108). Little surprise, then, that rural Americans would become antigovernment! But the distinction Bosworth makes between faux-populists on the right and true left-populists stems from distrust of expertise: the Right rejects science because their “common sense” dictates otherwise, but left-populists rejected the “‘depoliticized’ technocratic expertise of mainstream political science and economics, punditry and pollsters, and consolidated or jargony academic knowledges” (173–74). Instead, groups like Dakota Rural Action and the Indigenous Environmental Network developed counterexpertise through watchdog monitoring of the Dakota Access Pipeline, requiring them to marry understandings of environmental regulation with “cultivated ‘observation skills’” (190).This is a personal cause for Bosworth, who joined but did not collect research at the October 2016 Standing Rock protests and acknowledges that “the politics of the blockade deeply condition what, why, and how I think” (44). He wonders, “Despite the rise in a populist genre of political rhetoric and mobilization, is it possible that we are no closer to producing radical, transformative climate action in 2021 than we were ten or fifteen years prior?” (200). Here, his analysis misses one of the key outcomes of the agrarian populism of earlier years: those movements won state and local elections. There is a counterargument that modern gerrymandering and voter suppression in states like North Dakota have rendered such outcomes moot. But, Bosworth notes, “the technocratic game of 1990s-style environmentalism” is also to blame: groups like 350.org and the Sierra Club, one activist alleged, just wanted to list antipipeline protests on fundraising materials without “doing shit” (185–86).For its strengths, Pipeline Populism is better suited for experts or graduate students. There is an irony in noting left-populists’ distrust of “jargony academic knowledges” while framing research in Gramscist and Spinozist terms (174). While Bosworth notes that “the genre's openness and flexibility sometimes presaged internal contradictions, such as grappling with the limitations of democracy in the context of ongoing settler colonialism,” the opaqueness of the jargon required to catalog populist environmentalism may explain its struggles to take hold (6).But Bosworth's research represents an important addition to research on not only the promise of populism or the pitfalls of settler colonialism but also on the infrastructures that bridge those divides. “Drawing on the afterlives of the U.S. agrarian populist tradition,” he argues, “the easy-to-access rhetoric of U.S. American democracy, the language of the global justice movements, and a multiracial populism,” should help scholars of agriculture, rural America, and political populism refocus our attention on “‘the people’” (199–200). Pipeline Populism neither shies away from the hairy question of who “the people” are nor fails to confront the roadblocks to a fuller appreciation of that populace.

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