“Populist environmentalism” is a loose affective genre which dramatizes the ideological field of climate politics as a binary division between “elites” such as fossil fuel corporations, corrupt politicians, or outsiders who are preventing “the people” as a grassroots democratic force from authorizing an adequate response to cascading ecological crises. Pipeline Populism traces one path through which populist environmentalism emerged and was amplified: from the 1890s People’s Party, to the Farm Aid protests of the 1980s, to a portion of the capacious pipeline opposition movements which emerged in the 2010s. Portions of this recent history have become significant for the strategic arguments of some in “the climate justice movement,” particularly some in its left-populist and coalition-seeking “flanks.” Yet the research in Pipeline Populism contests other aspects through which this political mythmaking cannot account for the failure to adequately cohere a subject or politics, particularly by assuming that that “settlers and Indigenous nations were suddenly locked into a mutually beneficial alliance” (Smiles 2023a).
Pipeline Populism further emerges at a moment when there has been an upswing in reflection on the role of psycho-affective states in radical political movements. Thus I am humbled by the generous readings of this work by four interlocutors who have found the ability to connect the themes I mobilize with otherwise drastically dissimilar political ecologies. This response builds on their commentary and scholarship by further clarifying the specific capacities and utility that these terms might have beyond the context of North American pipeline politics, for both political ecological analysis and for political ecology as an organizing practice.
Populist environmentalism emerged not only from the United States’ liberal tradition, but also from a transnational liberal climate context in which it was also but one strand among many. Marston helpfully points out that the Bolivarian context of the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in 2010 demonstrates “the difficulties of articulating popular nationalism and Indigenous demands for sovereignty/autonomy.” Elsewhere, Marston (2019) has made the important point that it is not so easy to disentangle the present version of state-led natural resource politics, however radical they might appear in aspiration or ideology, from colonial histories. The alliance of Indigenous and left-populist forces in Bolivia is undoubtedly complex and fragile, not least because there is also the question of the context of a world system which seems intent on tearing it apart. But here my point is as much that Cochabamba was something else for the emergent left populist climate left in the United States: a hopeful model, an alternative to the “impasse” that youth climate politics had reached by 2010. It’s hard for me to say for certain the precise role Cochabamba played for the North American climate justice movement, but I think it’s likely that the conference and its output were themselves interpreted as a rosier version even than it appeared at the time (elsewhere I connect to Tadzio Mueller’s [ less-than-hopeful assessment describing the summit as “a tragedy”). Hence the contradiction of populist environmentalism that appears throughout my book: better than some versions of elite climate politics that existed at the time, while still somewhat ill equipped to address the relationships among climate internationalism and (indigenous, but also international) sovereignty.
This is why Indigenous internationalism seems a promising frame of contrast, and which appears sorely lacking in the diagnosis that it is either China or Canada, rather than colonial-capitalism itself, which ought to be problematized. As Smiles puts it elsewhere (2023b), “work by Indigenous scholars not only brings space and place but the interconnected relationships that Indigenous peoples carry within these spatial planes (both discursively, but also geographically, as Indigeneity is global).” This is not just academic practice, but references the variety of real international relations hashed out among Native Nations in the Americas—and with Black and migrant allies here, and movements for sovereignty globally. Such internationalism seeks to carefully balance mutual respect for sovereignty and land relations with the fact that different nations may seek to carve drastically different priorities for survival. Of course, this is massively difficult and not without contradiction. Smiles’ response here references a variety of struggles—the Highway 55 reroute in Minnesota, the effect of capitalist agriculture on water resources, and state efforts to manage Indigenous dissent through “consultation” processes—which themselves further demonstrate how settler colonial processes of territorialization work to partition people from land, land from knowledge, and people from each other. And yet, Smiles argues, at the same time as it is oriented towards a goal of elimination, settler colonialism is composed of varying orientations which “can even conflict with each other.”
Given this fraught terrain, why has it been so difficult (for settlers, for “the left,” for academics) to materially support, or even understand, such efforts for sovereignty? My answer concerns infrastructure, which I see as the shaping and constraining conditions for the emergence of social formations. In some ways, this formulation of infrastructure names the relational inheritance of historical struggles, and thus outlines the grammars and responsibilities for producing “the otherwise” which radical politics tries to enact. There is much fantastic geographical research which centralizes the “material infrastructure” that Marston and Margulies expected from this book. However, in this instance the “material infrastructure” of the pipeline projects largely did not yet exist—it was an attempted conjuring, already fantastical, an unbuilt project. As Carse and Kneas (2019: 9) put it, “Planned, blocked, delayed, or abandoned, such [infrastructure] projects are ubiquitous—the norm, rather than the exception.” Nonetheless, I’d suggest my project still includes a certain kind of materialist inquiry into the infrastructures of populist politics. Yet these infrastructures are more quotidian than the charismatic and fantastical “pipeline” at the center of the struggle: the way fences make the liberal subjects of private property, or how tense and sweaty high school gyms fashion the experience of democratic participation and the “‘social license to operate” for extractive industries across the globe” (Kay 2023). In these situations, an affective infrastructure emerges—which takes the material emergence of affect and organizes it into populist political projects (among others).
Central too to this narrative is a third kind of infrastructure—the old Marxist one. The history and violence of class society forms subjects into classes, which are pitted against one another through drastically opposing interests. It is in the immediate and class interest of fossil fuel CEOs and the capitalist class more generally not just to maintain and grow their own profit rates, but in doing so to also prevent any major political upsetting of the systemic tendency which allows them to accumulate. If capitalism tends towards periodic crises, some of its subjects—proletarians—have an interest in carving out their own survival, ideally as a class, to foster alternatives to this situation. In fact, crisis can beget (but does not guarantee) the possibility of such moments of opening. Yet working-class interest can include simply fighting for a “bigger piece of the pie” of those profits, as Kay’s landowners as well as those I talked to, particularly as that “piece of the pie” is understood to pit them against “foreign” capital. How are we to square such possessive individualism, qua “pillar of liberalism” (Kay 2023), with the belief of some socialists that these “material interests” ought to ground the abolition of class society? How are we to explain this divergence, such that despite the fact that these interests, in their opposition, point towards an immense contradiction or even clash, it does not appear imminent? We must acknowledge the power of capital to wield the state to crush or attenuate dissent, as well as the manner through which quietist forms of ideology alienate many settler subjects from political struggle. Nonetheless, I still believe there is something more at work that glues together the tissue of “the settler colonial structure as a nimble assemblage which can respond to manifold situations that might threaten its hegemony” (Smiles, 2018: 143).
This conceptualization of the “political ecology of desire” also bears some amount of similarity and influence to that of Margulies’ description of “a kind of analysis of environmental change [which recognizes] that desire holds profound capacities for making (and remaking) the world in ways that can produce or accelerate forms of unevenness and imbalances of power across societies, spaces, and species alike” (2022, 242). The psychoanalytic perspective Margulies brings to bear (including on the author of Pipeline Populism – eek!) has been only sparingly used in political ecology. Yet the two of us agree most, I think, that psychoanalysis ought to lead us to consider, as Callard (2003: 308) put it, “intransigence as well as transformation (or perhaps intransigence in the very process of transformation).” Thus I want to caution readers that desire and affect are not salves; the problem for me (perhaps for many of us!) is “what is it in desire that moves us, and in so being moved, might move us as individuals [or transindividuals - !] towards enacting a collective, intersectional, class-minded response to our extraordinarily dangerous climate present” (Margulies, 2023).
So this is why rather than simplistically denouncing or championing populist environmentalism within environmental politics, I seek to understand why it emerged when and where it did, and with ambivalent consequences for the broader anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggles I take to be necessary in this moment. I think there is a “practical importance of understanding an affective terrain in order to interpret or intervene within economic processes” (Marston, 2023). Indeed, I have been surprised at the number of geographers and political ecologists who have said to me some version of, “Oh, now I finally get why affect matters!” But in a book with a “hefty introduction” (Margulies 2023), are there any practical takeaways for movements or militants?
Since the publication of this book, I’ve come to think of my effort as akin to Mike Davis’ (1986) attempt to understand the lack of mass socialist participation in a coherent, avowedly anti-colonial movement in the United States—and thus something of a tragic analysis. Therein we can find what Kay (2023) specifies as the conjunction of “whiteness” with “a deep and enduring respect for private property and for the capitalist system as an arbiter of value(s).” Yet tragedy is not destiny; indeed, it can contain political pedagogy in its ability to reveal strategic lessons about the terrain which we inhabit and which constitutes us. I do not mean to suggest that we simply learn to love our symptom by dithering in the sad passions of apocalyptic melancholia. Rather, it is that a more adequate understanding of the causes of our desires might lead us to better organize such causes differently. I can understand the appeal of populist environmentalism and what I describe in the book as “the desire to be popular” as a position against “the radical” (Bosworth 2022: 206)--I want us to win, too! But I am worried that invocations of popularity as guiding strategy hew towards the inertial present “not of our choosing” and its pathways for channeling desire into self-deadeningly liberal or even fascistic ends.
I hope this book puts tracing historic affect in the practical toolbox of political ecology, not (only) as academic inquiry, but as “a way of studying, and of doing political organizing, and of being in the world, and of worlding ourselves” (Gilmore, 2022: 491). We have to be able to understand the struggles of our capacious selection of ancestors—in the places where they struggled, with their visions of “abundant futures” (Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg, 2015) or “abolition ecologies” (Heynen and Ybarra, 2021)—because such memories and spaces are part of what sustains us. If Spinoza offers us something, it is that such investigation and reflection—when organized, i.e. when made infrastructural—can increase our powers of acting in concert. However paradoxically discordant such unity might seem, this is a way of ordering and orienting ourselves which some of these ancestors have named communism.
References:
Carse A and Kneas P (2019) Unbuilt and unfinished: The temporalities of infrastructure. Environment and Society 10 (1): 9–28.
Callard F (2003) The taming of psychoanalysis in geography. Social & Cultural Geography 4(3): 295-312.
Collard R C, Dempsey J and Sundberg J (2015) Manifesto for abundant futures. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 105(2): 322-330.
Gilmore R W (2022) Abolition geography and the problem of innocence. In: Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. London: Verso, pp. 471-495.
Heynen N and Ybarra M (2021) On Abolition Ecologies and Making ‘Freedom as a Place.’ Antipode 53(1): 21–35.
Kay K (2023) Populist environmentalism and the pillars of liberalism. Society and Space.
Margulies J (2022) A political ecology of desire: Between extinction, anxiety, and flourishing. Environmental Humanities 14(2): 241–264.
Margulies J (2023) When desire gets in the way of the pipe. Society and Space.
Marston A (2019) Strata of the state: Resource nationalism and vertical territory in Bolivia. Political Geography 74: 102040
Marston A (2023) Affective infrastructures of populist environmentalism. Society and Space.
Mueller T (2012) The People’s Climate Summit in Cochabamba: A tragedy in three acts. Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 12(1/2): 70–80
Smiles, D (2018) “…to the Grave”—Autopsy, settler structures, and indigenous counterconduct. Geoforum 91: 141–150
Smiles D N (2023a) A review of Pipeline Populism by Kai Bosworth. Society and Space.
Smiles D N (2023b) Reflections on the (continued and future) importance of Indigenous geographies. Dialogues in Human Geography, available here.
Kai Bosworth is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, and the author of Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century. His ongoing research examines political ecology as a strategy of “disalienation”, particularly in groups who engage in underground and subsurface natural resource protection.
