W
hat is environmentalism? A kneejerk response might invoke an affective stance or practice of care towards an idealized and external nature. If you have taken or taught as many classes tracing the history of US environmentalist thought as I have, a parade of elite white men – all of them arguing over the precise relationship of care that ought to be maintained with this external nature – might also march through your mind. But what if environmentalism were articulated with a different subject position – or an alternative ideological formation?
Kai Bosworth’s Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-First Century asks this question provocatively through its exploration of “populist environmentalism,” or an anti-elitist environmentalism of “the people” that congealed across the US Midwest during the long struggle against oil pipelines. Combining rich qualitative evidence and incisive conceptual interventions, Pipeline Populism lends itself to debates within many of geography’s key subfields and offers more points of engagement than could reasonably be tracked here. Although I am tempted to lyricize about the parallels between the stories he tells from the Dakotas and my own experiences growing up in rural Alberta - where the settler relationship to land seems similarly channeled through property rights and resentment - I will instead focus on two of the book’s anchoring contributions: the affective infrastructures that shape political economic processes and the collective subject of populist environmentalism.
I confess that when I started reading the book, I assumed that “affective infrastructures” referred to material infrastructures – an assumption likely shaped by current intellectual trends as much as the prominence of the word “pipeline” in the book’s title. I was wrong, though I imagine the invocation of steel-and-concrete infrastructure drew an intentional parallel between the pipelines and the political affects they provoke. Instead, the concept of affective infrastructures describes how emotions move through collectively established pathways - much as oil might be directed through a pipeline - to create a shared genre of politics and, ultimately, a collective political position.
Each of the chapters works through a distinct affective infrastructure - all of which have excellent names, and some of which have the added benefit of sounding like nostalgic 90s bands: territorialized resentment, resigned pragmatism, heartland melodrama, and jaded confidence. Bosworth writes provocatively that “as infrastructures, affects condition political collectivity, but they do not determine its outcomes” (9). This allows him to explore the constitution of populist subjecthood as a contingent process, its outcome neither necessarily radical nor necessarily reactionary, shaped but not determined by the infrastructures through which it has come into being and through which it continues to operate.
Expanding on Lauren Berlant’s (2011: 53) point that “affect theory is another phase in the history of ideology theory,” Bosworth stages a particularly convincing argument about the need for a sustained engagement between affect theory and historical materialism. Indeed, I would hazard that this is one of the first books that convinced me of the practical importance of understanding an affective terrain in order to interpret or intervene within economic processes. Much like a robust theory of ideology, Bosworth’s affective infrastructures provide a framework to explore political economic processes beyond the objective interests of individuals and the objective conditions of capital.
Escaping the long shadow of ideology theory’s poststructuralist critique, which suggests that invocations of ideology necessarily imply an objective set of interests shrouded by false interpretations of the world, Bosworth writes that “people are not in fact easily duped but only appear to be so as participants and products of the various infrastructures that compose us. We can and should want to transform these infrastructures” (209). It is to his credit that 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.
It is through these affective infrastructures that Bosworth arrives at the constitution of a collective subject of populism. This populist subject, importantly, does not pre-exist the moment of its political activation, but is rather called into being in moments of perceived threat. This is also a territorialized subject, as inseparable from the places in which as the conditions under which it emerges. In the case of the populist opposition to pipelines in the Midwest, the affective infrastructure is geographically specific: remembered histories of progressive organizing through the Farmers’ Alliance of the late 1800s; affective attachments to land-as-property; and a general sense that “America’s heartland” is under imperial attack all congeal under the banner of “we the people.”
Importantly, Bosworth underscores that this collective subject emerges from settler colonialism and yet also refuses to completely dismiss its political potential within a broader climate movement. More specifically, Pipeline Populism circles around the question of what “we the leftists” ought to be thinking about populism. Bosworth walks a very thin line throughout the book, refusing to characterize populism in general as either disease or cure, instead gesturing to instances of progressive populist formations even as he builds a delicate critique of the populist environmentalism he encounters in the US Midwest. He tackles the question head-on in the conclusion, when he clarifies that environmental populism must be understood as a transitional genre with a “limited utility in bringing together formerly depoliticized individuals and transforming them through a collective political project” (204). Bosworth calls on climate activists and leftists to stop ignoring “the people” and instead focus on constructing “the people” differently. If we can accept that the collective subject of populism emerges through contingent processes, then we can also get involved in shaping those processes rather than assuming we know the outcome a priori.
Because most of my research has been in Bolivia, and because Pipeline Populism (like many books) gestures several times to the Bolivian example when summoning a rosier picture of what the subject of environmental populism could look like, I feel compelled to comment on the limits of even this “actually existing” left populism. Twice in the Introduction, Bosworth invokes the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, which was held in Cochabamba in 2010, as part of inventories demonstrating the ascendence of populist environmentalism globally and its potential to articulate with Indigenous politics. It is heartening that a distinction is made between Bolivia’s populist and Indigenous movements, which came together to support the election of former president Evo Morales, but it is also worth underscoring that the gap between the two groups was already large in 2010 and has continued to grow in subsequent years. At the Cochabamba climate change conference, the well-known highland Indigenous federation CONAMAQ (Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del Qullasuyu) hosted an unauthorized 18th mesa (workshop) in parallel with the 17 official mesas (Postero, 2013: 89). Concerned specifically with socio-environmental conflicts aggravated by the Morales administration’s investment in resource extraction, this “rebel workshop” highlighted the difficulties of articulating popular nationalism and Indigenous demands for sovereignty/autonomy even in a context where half the nation identifies as Indigenous.
This is not a critique of the premise that populism can and should be understood as a useful transitional genre: I agree wholeheartedly with Bosworth’s position that, when it comes to climate activism, popularity is never a bad thing. But I do think environmental populism in Bolivia is as complex and politically ambiguous as it is in the Dakotas, and certainly should not stand in as a success story. Indeed, it would be fascinating to consider how environmental populisms in the two places compare, given their different colonial histories and structurally different positions within the world economy.
In a moment when both left and right populisms are on the rise, Pipeline Populism offers insights into how to think about constructing a truly popular environmentalism – what it might look like and what work it would entail. Indeed, the book could be described as a field guide for climate activists unsure whether or how they might engage with populist movements. It does not necessarily start with meeting “the people” where they are at, but instead by reimagining who “the people” could stretch to include, and what worlds they might build together.
References
Berlant L (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Postero N (2013) Protecting Mother Earth in Bolivia: Discourse and Deeds in the Morales Administration. In: Cooper JM and Hunefeldt C (eds) Amazonía: Environment and the Law in Amazonia - A Plurilateral Encounter. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, pp.78-93.
Andrea Marston is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University. Her research explores the political economy and cultural politics of natural resource extraction and energy politics, primarily in Latin America. Her book, Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia, will be published with Duke University Press in 2024.
