Kai Bosworth: Mobilizing through pipeline populism (ep347)
“That neoliberal, technocratic environmentalism is also what we would call depoliticizing... it avoids the more transformative types of policies or solutions that extend outside of the policy realm and are necessary for confronting the climate crisis as we recognize it today.”
In this episode, we welcome Kai Bosworth, a geographer, political ecologist, and Assistant Professor at the School of World Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century, which examines pipeline opposition movements in the central United States and the ways in which they have transformed the politics of climate justice.
Kai researches affect and emotion, radical politics, and materialism, as well as the ways in which space, ecology, and nature are enrolled in social projects of oppression or liberation.
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Transcript:
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Kai Bosworth: Around 2006 and 2007, [I was a] college student and really starting to get involved in what we called at that time, the youth climate movement. Those of us involved in this broad suite of informal organizations really thought that our main goal was to try to pressure the United States Legislature to pass some sort of climate change policy, to pressure the big green groups and environmental nonprofits to take a greater interest in climate change, stopping coal plants and hydrofracking, and to push for a more central environmental justice and climate justice lens in those spheres. We had some victories. I went to school in Minnesota. We stopped a coal plant from being built just over the border with South Dakota, [which was] a really big deal.
Yet when 2009 came along, everything seemed to halt to a crash, an impasse. Barack Obama was elected, but despite having a supermajority in both houses of federal Congress, [lawmakers] were unable to pass any climate change legislation at the international level. The Copenhagen Agreement that was reached as part of the UN climate change process was, in many ways, a disaster. It was the first big step up from the Kyoto Protocol in the late 90s but also didn't seem to include any of the necessary policies that we thought ought to be in there.
As a climate activist, I was curious as to why the mainstream environmental organizations couldn't seem to understand the importance of Indigenous and working-class leadership in these struggles. [They] were the groups who were really pushing the farthest for the kinds of necessary transformations that we would need to collectively address the root causes of climate change. So I took a step back around that period of time and began to think to myself, what were the reasons why this particular climate change activism strategy wasn't working and what other sorts of political formations might exist that could take us elsewhere?
One of the places I worked was where I grew up: in western South Dakota and in Chicago. A number of small controversies grew into gigantic struggles over oil pipelines. First, there was the Keystone One and then the Keystone XL pipeline, and later the Dakota Access Pipeline.
For more than 10 years, I've been trying to think through the concatenation of different [types] of environmentalism that emerged on the Great Plains during this period and what they tell us, both about the possibilities for a different [type] of environmentalism that I describe as populist environmentalism, as well as the limits of that particular frame to fully address some of the questions of radical transformations and decolonization that many Indigenous activists are raising.
Kamea Chayne: Well, this reflects the journey that you just shared, but you begin Pipeline Populism looking at the technocratic and policy-oriented approaches to conservation and climate action in past decades, specifically noting how nonprofit strategies of the 1990s and early 2000s adapted themselves to the norms of third way neoliberalism. To offer a historical context before we go on, can you expand on what this elitism in environmentalism has looked like, touching on how it continues today in the form of the annual United Nations gatherings and who they center as examples?
Kai Bosworth: There are a lot of critiques that one can make of environmentalism and the particular forms that it’s taken in the United States at different moments of time. Oftentimes, if you were to read an environmental history textbook or something like that, the place that you'll first read about is the debates between conservation and preservation and forestry. In the early 20th century, you might read about John Muir and Gifford Pinchot and these different visions of nature—whether it should be protected or used—that principally white men advocated for.
Environmental justice movements have long critiqued the racial and class politics that this particular form of environmentalism took.
For example, creating wilderness preserves that have a vision of nature in which humans are not present, that [are] sterilized of human presence, in part because the assumption is that having humans on the landscape is automatically impure, or something like that. The creation of Yellowstone, for example, required the removal of Indigenous people from the land. This model has been spread to many other parts of the world as well.
This version of environmental elitism has a much longer history [than] the 1990s. There have always been threads of environmental justice movements, as well as a more generic popular environmentalism.
You asked about the 1990s, so I want to fast forward a little bit through some of the details, [and] think about particularly how the form of elitist environmentalism gets shored up by what we would call neoliberal politics.
The vision and version of environmentalism that emerged from the 1980s and gained ascendence after that [was driven by] the idea that nature and the problems of environmental degradation are best managed by experts. Those experts, oftentimes in the form of scientists, economists, and policymakers, could best achieve those goals by cooperating with each other, cooperating at the levels of government policy, advocacy, non-governmental organizations, and oftentimes with corporations.
From the advocacy side of things, the argument would go that we can make the biggest impact possible if we get, say, Wal-Mart to change to only using paper stocks. That doesn’t require working at the level of people's desires, we don't have to transform anything fundamentally, and we can show in our year-end reports how much environmental preservation or environmental goods we protected as an organization put that out in direct mail or later an email to those we are going to solicit funds from.
That neoliberal, technocratic environmentalism is also what we would call depoliticizing.
It sees the pathway to a better environmental future as one without conflict, and indeed that ought to avoid conflict and instead seek consensus between governments, corporations, and multiple political parties. Consequently, it avoids the more transformative types of policies or solutions that extend outside of the policy realm and are necessary for confronting the climate crisis as we recognize it today.
Kamea Chayne: This valuation of expertise continues today, right? As shown by a lot of the United Nations convenings and Conference of the Parties and so forth… Although I think it's increasingly being pushed back against and questioned.
Kai Bosworth: To address that part of your question...
We can just think about the spatial politics of any given United Nations climate change summit.
Oftentimes, you'll have delegations from certain governments invited. There will be a whole host of representatives, even from the fossil fuel industry, from coal firms, large corporations, and the like. They set up tables to try and market their new technological solutions.
Then there's a whole area outside—the civil society zone—and that's where people might gather to protest, to conduct direct action. It's seen by those involved inside in the United Nations negotiations as simply the place where young people and non-experts can try to give some moral clarity to what they're going to do inside: hash out the numbers and the details.
It's odd that this continues to this day because we've had twenty-five or twenty-six of these COP meetings, and there are many different meetings in between these as well. When you look at them, there are not a whole lot of success stories. There are certainly reasons for that: struggles over power within the different governments that appear within the process…
There were some principal exclusions that took place. Going back to 2008, 2009, and 2010, that period that I called an impasse, one of the things that was most inspiring to many young climate activists at the time was the leadership that the Bolivian delegation took to simply say, “We're done with this Council of Parties system. We're inviting people to a different conference where everyone can be inside and can be part of the delegation.”
That eventually became the Cochabamba Agreement for a People's Climate Summit on the Rights of Mother Earth.
It isn't to say that the international level can only be the realm of technocrats and depoliticized expertise, but that we need different sorts of relationships and models to think with than the United Nations as it currently exists.
Kamea Chayne: I've been really interested in this idea of understanding the medium as the message or looking to the form as the message. If we look at the recent COP26, there are all these different exclusive zones like the Blue Zone, the Green Zone, and the form that it's taking shape, it's centralized. If we were to look at whose voices are being centered, whose expertise is being valued and propped up and so forth, beyond what's being said and promised, I found it really important to look at how exactly all of this is taking shape and the forms that they're showing up in.
To move on, a large part of your work has been to look at climate populism and how movements in our more recent past have transformed and challenged that elitist approach to envisioning what change must entail and how that can be enacted.
Grounding us in the basics, because I think populism itself is often misunderstood (especially if people have been conditioned by mainstream political narratives) how would you explain what populism is and how do we recognize it taking shape within the more recent climate justice movements that challenged the elitist approaches?
Kai Bosworth: You're certainly right that populism is a difficult concept to think through but at its simplest level...
Populism is just the politics of the people. Politics that takes the people as the principal authors of political democracy who are seeking to, in some ways, reclaim this role from the elites, corporations, corrupt politicians, who have, in some ways, excluded them from political authorship.
Now, part of the reason we've seen so many debates around populism in recent years is that there is what Stuart Hall would call an authoritarian populist tendency in some situations around the world, across the Global North and Global South, to use this rhetorical form of the embattled people positioned against the elites to mobilize people towards reactionary and right-wing ends, towards racism, xenophobia, and anti-globalism. I think that certainly exists in the world. We shouldn't say that it doesn't. But part of the problem is that when we look back in history, populism is a lot more complicated.
The original populist party in the United States was extremely successful in the Great Plains of South Dakota. It absorbed the Democratic Party of one governorship at the height of its fervor. Many populists: farmers, workers, etcetera, who were members of this party thought of themselves as creating a distinctly United States-American socialism.
It was a radical movement at that time. Yet at the same time, even these rhetorical moves that we might think of as more progressive or left-wing had fundamental limits in imagining itself as the people reclaiming power. It always formed its own almost constitutive exclusions, its own simplifications of history, of different things that different people might be subject to based on their social position, race, class, and gender.
We've seen a rise of climate populism in the last 10 years, a reaction against that technocratic, depoliticizing mode of environmental politics—especially in Global North countries where that form of neoliberal environmentalism would have been most prominent. This rhetoric we can see [with] the emergence of things like the People's Climate March, people's climate movement, and some of the green groups that have been pushing for the Green New Deal as a people's policy rather than an elite policy.
Overall, I feel in some ways torn by the existence of this object. Populism is itself ambivalent, and I also feel ambivalent about it. Because on the one hand, this is a huge step up from the dark time of the 1990s. It is politicizing climate change in new ways by highlighting the inequalities that are at the heart of it. Who is harmed most by the ongoing impacts of climate change and resource extraction and who is most responsible for these things? We know that there are deep, deep, deep inequalities between a small share of the global rich corporations and the Global North in particular that are responsible for this crisis.
[But] one of the problems that I've been trying to think through is: does the emergence of climate populism as an attempt to create a mass movement also reorient parts of the climate movement away from some of the more radical, transformative possibilities?
Does the desire to create a movement that is, above all, popular lead people to [it] because of what they imagine is popular or unpopular, [leading them then to] shy away from some of the more exciting, more transformative possibilities? That's the problem that lies at the heart of the question of populist environmentalism for me.
Kamea Chayne: So in pursuit of becoming more popular and appealing to more people and essentially being more palatable, it risks losing the more radical and transformative visions that really will challenge the status quo that might not be so welcome or appealing to people at first because of especially how most people have been educated in this system and the stories that we've been told about how society “should” be and so forth…
One form that climate populism takes is, of course, these marches, these climate protests, and so forth. You share that: "A protest is nothing other than a staged performance... it's meant to demonstrate something to others and to the people who participate in it. So folks are grappling over what the performance is meant to do, who it's meant to be addressing, how its exercise of power works, and the like."
I've been sitting with a lot of these same questions, having participated in and observed these happenings for years, and I have felt that oftentimes they feel like a spectacle for ourselves, especially when they don't actually disrupt nor really cause a strain on the existing economy and centralized system beyond maybe some roads being shut down, and, of course, the police force being mobilized.
So I wonder, how do we make sense of the role of these protests beyond a cultural moment if they alone, more often than not, haven't really resulted in material, systemic, and political transformations?
Kai Bosworth: There's a lot to unpack there. The first thing to think about is that protests and marches are, above all, collective events. What they do at their basic level is work on the people that come to them.
Now they're supposed to do other things beyond that. Ideally, you would think that something like a protest or march might galvanize other people to act, might demonstrate power, and in the case of direct action, might actually stop or reroute some of the very things that you oppose, the flows of money and fossil fuel, etcetera, etcetera.
But before doing any of those things, and before any of the strategic levels, any collective event like this is working on people: it's doing work to tell a story to ourselves, about ourselves, about who we are.
I've been really interested in protests of all kinds, but certainly marches are one of the emblematic types of populist moments where people gather in search of the name for that collective, that “we who are the people who are going to be the subjects of and the authors of the transformation of climate politics.” Of course, we can go through some of the other important parts where this would lead us, because no march or protest of any kind gathers a coherent “we”—it gathers a lot of disparate people from a lot of different social positions and backgrounds who might be viewing the protests in radically, vastly different ways.
[But] at the same time, these sorts of events can be indicative of both that searching for a collective as well as the inability to give a name or a strategic action to that collective. It's almost as if people are searching for mass politics… as if once we found mass politics, then we would have the strategy, when in fact, that puts the cart before the horse.
We have to, in some ways, construct and assemble mass politics with its strategy and its identity along the way.
I would separate certain types of marches and protests. All protests are performative. All protests are performing for others and for ourselves and for stages. But there are certain kinds of protests and marches that seem uniquely unaware of the fact that they are also doing work on the subjects who engage in them.
As someone who's interested in space and spatial politics and the politics of emotion and subjectivity, that's what I'm trying to think through, highlighting the deeply ambivalent. I don't want to necessarily be completely critical and say that such marches are completely a waste of time or useless. But at the very least, they're very deeply ambivalent, and there are two possibilities in comparison to other sorts of political strategies.
Kamea Chayne: You mentioned understanding the collective and the people and foundational to people's movements and populism is the idea of "we the people," especially in the U.S. It's known as something explicitly stated in the U.S. Constitution or elsewhere. The idea of “the people” resonates, though how “the people” is conceptualized is worth deconstructing… As an example, your research has demonstrated how Indigenous nations are often written out of “the people.”
What should we understand about this concept of peoplehood, as what is being constructed in opposition to the elite establishment through populist politics? What does it even mean to find unity as “the people,” when a lot of times our ideals and values and worldviews differ so immensely based on how we relate to the land and to place and to one another?
Kai Bosworth: Going back to neoliberal politics: another way that we might think about its depoliticizing edge is also it being an individualizing edge. Neoliberalism politics is about individual actions—it's about consumption choices, voting, and donating your money—but it's never about collective action. What populism puts back into the frame is the question of collectivity. That is super important.
But at the same time, in some ways, the version of collectivity that “we the people” seems to point us towards is actually one that's almost a meta-individuality. It's a weird, philosophical way of putting it, but essentially, “we the people” has a certain unmarked identity in it.
We know that throughout time and to this day, citizenship in the United States is contested. The rights and privileges that go along with citizenship are exclusive to those who are not imprisoned, and those who are “recognized” migrants. For large portions of history, citizenship was not granted or understood to be extended to Indigenous people, to Asian-Americans, to enslaved people, mostly African-Americans… so it's a very, very limited collectivity.
So what I try to think through is how “we the people” seems to point us towards a desire to be collective, yet that's not the only form that collectivity can take. You can also have forms of collectivity in solidarity across differences.
Solidarity would entail different thinking about our relationships with others. I mean, for me as a settler, it would require thinking about my inheritance and responsibility to the places where I grew up and the Indigenous people, Indigenous nations whose land was dispossessed. Historically, we would have to think about things like reparations to think through solidarity as one mode of being collective.
I understand why people are interested in reclaiming that sense of community and collectivity, but we need to think about whether the historical citations and forms of identification that it enacts are limited in crucial ways.
Kamea Chayne: On a related note, especially evidenced through Pipeline Populism, there's this love of the land, although again, that love is rooted in different things for different people and it orients us towards different political ideologies and ideals based on, for example, whether the motivation to protect the land from, say, pipeline development, may come from a relationship of land ownership and control and domination, or whether it's rooted in something like kinship.
I would love if you could speak to this tension and the crossovers of nationalism, environmentalism, and Indigenous sovereignty, as they might be woven together in pipeline populism by a shared love of place.
Kai Bosworth: The question of land is one of the crucial instances for thinking about how the possibilities of populism emerged on the Great Plains, as well as their limitations.
If you think about a populist strategy for producing climate action in conditions [that are] not of our choosing, the idea would be to try to create a collective that has some shared interest, even though people are coming from different backgrounds, [to gather] as many of us as possible [who] have an interest in preventing this pipeline from getting built.
You need something positive as well. It's not just that we're against the pipeline—we must be for something too.
In [this one situation of] pipeline opposition, there was one person who took a populist line and said, “what farmers, ranchers, Native nations, and environmentalists can all agree on is that we need to defend the land.”
It turns out, though—at least what I argue is—that for some people, this meant very, very different things. For landowners, protecting the land meant protecting their rights to private property and joining this movement meant a desire to return to the status quo of American politics, the “normal” way of doing things. For environmentalists, maybe there is a more complicated understanding of land at play. We might think about Aldo Leopold’s land ethic and that tradition of public lands, caring for the land that and thinking about ecological politics. But at the end of the day, that vision of environmentalism has very little to say about sovereignty, about control of land, and who has the right to make these decisions.
So for Native nations, and really the leadership of Indigenous people, and the sharing economy as a whole, the question of pipeline opposition is crucial, [but] their understanding of land is one that's far more politicized. I don't mean to necessarily speak for and about this in an ethnographic, politicized way—I know you've had Nick Estes on your show, who is clearly speaking to some of these issues as well much better than I could…
But the point is simply this: that sovereignty is about Indigenous nations' collective inheritance, relationality, and care for each other and the more-than-human relations that inherit the land, with non-human others, with the land itself, and people as land. [This] would entail a contradiction with the system of private property.
Which is a system that divides the Earth up into little plots and says to each landowner that “you're the sovereign of your territory, you're the one who makes the decisions about what happens on your little plot of land.”
As the old saying goes, the free man is the king of his castle. That's one of the principal metaphors of private property and its western traditions. Incidentally, then this love of one's individual land can extend to the love of one's land, as it's understood to be a fatherland or motherland, as it’s sometimes put in your American traditions, which principally is about the nation.
You can see it creeping in here. Despite the fact that this was ostensibly a progressive environmentalist vision of defense of the land, [there’s also] the possibility of also an exclusive, possessive nationalism, that “this is our land.”
What some pipeline opponents would say is that we “need to keep the Canadians out of it, keep the Chinese out of it. These should be our decisions.” I want to always think about when these statements are made and when these sorts of rhetorical devices are used that are deeply emotional and have a lot of moral weight to them. We always have to go back and think about who is being talked about here? What do we mean by land? Which people are attached to which sorts of land, and with what political effects?
Kamea Chayne: There are so many layers of complexity there in terms of looking at the actual impacts. You write, "if environmental populists are correct in thinking that only through mass people's movements could we adequately and democratically address global climate change, scholars and activists alike must grapple with the tensions and dangers and the desires and ideologies embedded in this genre of politics."
This sums up a lot of what we just discussed, and I want to take this forward by asking, based on history and what we do know, do we understand populist messaging and movement building to be effective in helping us to go farther together in terms of driving the more tangible changes?
If so, does it call for a more materialist lens, an approach that at least temporarily sets aside a lot of the culture wars and fights over political correctness and worldviews and values that oftentimes divide people who have at least some shared material needs? That may be more urgent because perhaps these more immediate collective efforts could benefit more people, although, of course, to different levels.
Kai Bosworth: I think that the question of whether and to what degree populism is effective is very much a partial one.
The populist strategy that I describe here is good at activating people for the first time. [People] who might not think of themselves as political or might be depoliticized by the very real, material, and differentiated effects of global capitalism, especially over the last 50 or 60 years. (Not that they [are] affected longer than that, but we'll just leave that aside for a second.)
But on the other hand, what is more difficult to figure out is whether that political activation only creates a thin politics—one that really is only invested in the question of grievance against those elites, outsiders, or corrupt elements—versus what I've been calling here, “transformative politics.”
I think we may also agree [that] would have to be a materialist politics and some way involve certain kinds of material redistribution of wealth and health and well-being, that I would also argue entails at least some revolutionary situation with some extended event or moment in which our horizons for what we think is possible and what’s possible to be popular are dramatically transformed.
One of the dangers of populism is that it can step on the gas pedal really, really quick—we can think that we're totally winning because we're getting more popular and politicized than we used to be when from another perspective, those changes can seem pretty incremental.
It's difficult to say, for example, that one type of climate politics is better off today than it was 10 years ago.
We don't have those international agreements that we would need. We don't have those policies in place in the United States. But on the other hand, there is another desire for different, transformative popularity that seems far more possible today than it did 10 years ago, and that's a desire for that transformation to be popular, a desire for the kinds of reorganizations of space and infrastructure and opportunities for flourishing that the slogan “Water is life” seems to speak to.
The blockade at Standing Rock of the DAPL pipeline, even though it was unsuccessful in stopping that pipeline from being built, opened up a wider range of political desires, for different forms of collectivity and certainly different forms of materialist analysis than were present in what I would describe as more centrist, more liberal forms of environmental populism that still are attached to things like nonprofit funding agencies and a desire to be popular that's registered in the number of emails that you have signed up.
Kamea Chayne: Looking forward, to help us further think outside the box, you shared: "The best adherents of the Green New Deal point towards not a historic nor contemporary set of policies associated with the "New Deal," but instead the mass struggle that forced their passage. The problem isn't simply that the New Deal had certain unintended racial effects (which we can now correct) but that the Deal was itself a capitulation and capture of the more radical agitations of the moment. If mass agitation and struggle are to be in our minds, the subjects we create must be more transformative than "the people" allows. This means holding out space for organizations—councils, cadres, and mutual aid organizations—not frequently associated with popular mobilization."
With this in mind, what does it mean for us to envision change beyond the idea of "the people," and what lessons would you encourage our listeners to walk away from this conversation with?
Kai Bosworth: The lesson is always, whether you're looking back [or] comparing to deeper historical moments, to think about the balance sheet of the present: the successes, failures, and more ambivalent moments that you might experience, to always be conscious of the range of powers that you or your group has and is situated within.
When we look back at the New Deal, we shouldn't be thinking about what's in the policy, what was passed. We should be thinking about the broad range and the explosiveness. If you see a range of different types of organized and unorganized actions that regular people were undertaking on a day-to-day basis for five, ten, or fifteen years, and in some cases, much longer. To bring that into the present, then having x number of people reply that they're going to come to your march on Facebook is in itself a measure of the power that the event or the group has to shape the political parameters of the situation.
Where power comes from isn't just a calculation of the number of people. It's the ranges of the capacities, of how those people acting together can pursue some type of action. Any group's power extends as far as that which it can do.
We can seem powerless at one moment: we can seem atomized, alienated, apart from each other, caught in these cycles of performative politics. Yet, at the same time, when folks come together in collectives and experiment, they can enact all different sorts of alternative futures very quickly that would have been unimaginable to us even a couple of weeks prior.
I don't know if I have advice because I'm always grappling with these problems. These are problems to be thought through. If I had solutions, I would just be doing them.
But one method for thinking about how to grapple with those problems is to always keep in mind that simple question that one’s collective power extends as far as what you can do. You should always be pushing and thinking about what do we have the power to do, and also learning the lesson of what you don’t have the power to do, and learning from your failures, and thinking about it as clear-headed as you can.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an impactful publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Kai Bosworth: Yeah, one book that I think fits quite nicely with this conversation that your listeners might appreciate is Winona LaDuke's collection of essays that's called To Be a Water Protector: The Rise of the Windigoo Slayers. LaDuke really thinks quite poetically about this question, “What's the spark that brings people together and how can we sustain it? What institutions do we have to think through?” I really like that.
Kamea Chayne: What personal mottos, mantras, or practices do you engage with to stay grounded?
Kai Bosworth: We always have to keep in mind that our horizon is a certain transformation of the world. We want more than this to be the same or to be stuck in a holding pattern. We have to have a certain optimism of our will in thinking that, and knowing that we have to change it.
Kamea Chayne: And what are some of your biggest sources of inspiration right now?
Kai Bosworth: My number one biggest source of inspiration continues to be young people and being in conversation with young people, because I'm constantly and consistently floored by their capacity to analyze and understand the stakes of the situation we're in and to do so with a clear-headed and deeply political, deeply radical analysis.
Kamea Chayne: Kai, thank you so much for so generously sharing your knowledge and learnings with us here. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Kai Bosworth: Just keep fighting the good fight.
