I
n Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-First Century, Kai Bosworth sets out to understand the actually-existing nature of left populist climate and anti-pipeline movements in the United States. Beginning from the notion that populism is a “transitional genre” (203), he argues that populist movements bring together previously depoliticized individuals, transforming them through their participation, and that affect plays a critical role in that process. Populism, thus, in this formulation, is not an identifiable object in the world or a fixed social formation—it is distributed, non-teleological, and impermanent. In support of this argument, Bosworth introduces the concept of affective infrastructures, by which he means to highlight “how emotion emerges from political-economic contexts and material landscapes, non-deterministically conditioning political struggles” (38). While the book makes many important contributions, a handful of which I will outline in greater detail below, the use of affect and, in particular, the engagement with Spinoza as a means of nuancing and blunting some of the structuralism and determinism inherent in Marxian theories of ideology is a positive one, and it goes far in explaining how people fall into and out of environmental social movements.
Each of Bosworth’s chapters consider the topic of left populist environmentalism through one of the major “pillars of liberalism,” including “property, democratic participation, nationhood, and scientific expertise” (202), tracing a distinct affective infrastructure through each theme. 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, particularly in Chapter 1. This chapter considers the role of land agents and surveyors in engaging with private citizens to acquire rights to route the Dakota Access Pipeline—either through negotiated easement agreements or eminent domain. One element that resonated with me was the chapter’s engagement with an informant named Dan, a farmer in South Dakota who was upset after feeling like he was being “lowballed” (63) by land agents who were tasked with providing financial compensation to landowners along the pipeline’s path. Dan’s concern for liberal pillars over land itself is made apparently in the fact that he is not upset about the fact that his deep attachments to his land or to place could be disrupted, but as a “businessman” (63) himself, he wanted to make sure he was getting what he perceived to be his fair share from the pipeline’s construction. This is to say that his concern was not with land loss per se, but with the potential loss of property value or future revenue streams.
While Dan represented an exceptional landowner in his drive for what he perceived as fair compensation and subsequent support for the pipeline, the coming together of ordinary citizens into a transitory but affective populist formation in the region relied on a slippage between the categories of land—a fundamentally relational concept that exceeds any particular political-economic formation—and the settler understanding of individualized and bounded private property rights (75). This conceptual imprecision was required for a diverse constituency of individuals to unite around what they saw as a unified struggle, but also reinforced settler subjectivities rooted in whiteness.
When I first began fieldwork for my current project—which is on institutional investment in US timberland (Kay 2022)—I assumed, incorrectly, that regular people would be horrified to learn that large portions of the land in their communities were being gobbled up by nameless and faceless absentee owners. Instead, I encountered something similar to what Bosworth adeptly describes at various points in his first chapter—a deep reverence for capitalism and private property. I found in my own fieldwork that non-activist community members almost always responded to questions about the new owners by highlighting their support for private property rights, even when ownership change has led to the closure of mills, a declining tax base, or the locking up of land that would otherwise have been available to ordinary citizens for public recreation and non-timber forest products—outcomes that were ultimately harmful.
One exception that I’ve seen in my own work, and which Bosworth compellingly covers in Chapter 3 of the book, is the interface between xenophobia and private property rights. The chapter compellingly shows how a range of actors were able to foment resistance to the pipeline by leveraging narratives that the pipeline is not benefitting Americans because it is moving Canadian oil across the US to be exported for Chinese consumption. I’ve noted in my own research a strong respect for the private property rights of investor-landowners, however a very notable and meaningful exception is often made for foreign land ownership. While the area where I work in Georgia had a long legacy of vertically-integrated ownership of both timberland and mills by companies like Georgia Pacific and Weyerhaeuser, the breakdown of this linked system of ownership has meant that much of the land in the area is owned by European pension funds, and the local mills have mostly been bought by Canadian companies like West Fraser and Interfor. This fact is brought up frequently, and people often talk about the need to regulate this type of ownership, even though, for example, Canadian and US pension funds use the same management companies, so the only distinct difference has to do with their foreignness.
Finally, the third major contribution of Bosworth’s book that I want to highlight is his sustained engagement with public comments and public testimonies as data sources. Chapter 2 traces an affective infrastructure that he terms “resigned pragmatism” as a means of understanding why people continually participate in public participation meetings, even as they become increasingly cynical about the ability of these forums and processes to provide true democratic outcomes. One of the aspects of this chapter that was so compelling to me—in addition to naming and identifying the affect that motivates this type of behavior—was that Bosworth both engaged with the comments themselves as a source of data, but also engaged in participant observation at events that welcomed public comment and considers the process of giving comment itself as part of his analysis.
As a key process for maintaining what is frequently termed “social license to operate” for extractive industries across the globe, understanding these public consultation forums and the specific affects and subjectivities that they incite is extremely important. Bosworth compellingly demonstrates that these meetings often coalesce publics through the continued participation of individuals who may have otherwise not had relationships with one another, and thus play a role in actively generating an activist consciousness around pipeline opposition. Further still, the chapter compellingly explains what makes and keeps people emotionally invested in what are often very long and tedious processes of resistance. Having used public commentaries on environmental impact statements in my work in the past (Kay et al. 2023), I’d never considered digging in to the more affective and emotional dimensions of who was submitting these comments, where, why, and how they would link that process to a broader notion of environmental activism. I think this is a promising and major contribution of the book that many scholars should and will engage in their fieldwork around environmental consultation.
References:
Bosworth K (2022) Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Kay K (2022) Locating timber in ‘institutional grade investment geographies.’ Dialogues in Human Geography (12)1: 164-166.
Kay K, Knudson C, and Cantor A (2023) Plantation pasts, plantation futures: resisting zombie water infrastructures in Maui, Hawai’i The Journal of Peasant Studies, 1-24.
Kelly Kay is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at UCLA. Her work is concerned with the political economy of the environment, and she is currently writing a book on institutional investor-ownership of timberland in the US Pacific Northwest and Southeast.
