The People Versus the Pipelines: Energy Infrastructure and Liberal Ideology in North American Environmentalism a Dissertation
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The People versus the Pipelines: Energy infrastructure and liberal ideology in North American environmentalism A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Kai Bosworth IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Arun Saldanha June 2018 © Kai Bosworth 2018 i Acknowledgments Bruce Braun, Vinay Gidwani, and Ajay Skaria have accomplished an astonishing task by funneling my unending but rather disjointed enthusiasm for reading into an actual research project. Their kindness and generosity in attending to my wayward thought and practice has been remarkable. For advising me to “think until it hurts,” Arun Saldanha has my perpetual appreciation. For pushing my thought and politics to and beyond its limits, I must especially thank Out of the Woods, the Antipode Geographies of Justice crew, the Anthropocene Campus folks, and World of Matter. The Natural History Museum, especially Beka Economopolous, Jason Jones, and Steve Lyons, reshaped my understanding of politics and aesthetics in irreversible ways. Intellectual passion emerged from a series of conversations with an itinerant and patchwork community of geographers: Nic Beuret, Jesse Goldstein, Elizabeth Johnson, Anja Kaangeiser, Angela Last, Harlan Morehouse, Rory Rowan, and Stephanie Wakefield. Jeff Jenkins, Gabriel Piser, Levi van Sant, and Brett Zehner provided forms of support at important times during the course of research and writing. The broader Minneapolis intellectual community, now or soon far aflung, formed the condition of possibility for laughter and survival alike: Morgan Adamson, Ateeb Ahmed, Nikhil Anand, Jake Barney, Tony Brown, Valentine Cadieux, Cesare Casarino, Charmaine Chua, Jacqui Daigneault, Stacy Douglas, Sinan Erensü, Joshua Eichen, Joe Getzoff, Anjali Ganapathy, George Henderson, Mingwei Huang, Jen Hughes, David Hugill, Simi Kang, John Kendall, Aaron Mallory, Laura Matson, Stuart McLean, Chase ii Morgen, Devika Narayan, Sara Nelson, Julie Santella, Lisa Santosa, Stephen Savignano, Liz Schneider, Mike Simpson, Hillary Waters, and Ned Wilbur. More collectives: Human/Non/Human, Spinoza Scholarship Group, the Theoretical Humanities Collective, Theory Reading Group. A special mention must go to Lalit Batra, Laura Cesafsky, Julia Corwin, Spencer Cox, Jessi Lehman, and Bill Lindeke. I would have happily continued my Ph.D. for another eight years if you all hadn’t left. Finally, I absolutely would not be where I am today without the guidance of Roopali Phadke and Stephanie Rutherford. Sara Braun, whose time, knowledge, and labor was irreplaceable. My parents, from whom my dedication to the world emerged. My mom deserves particular thanks for saving and mailing me hundreds of local news articles. This research was conducted on the traditional and occupied lands of the Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, Ponca, and Ojibwe people. I hope it can contribute a small part towards understanding and dismantling such occupation. This project is dedicated to the friends, interlocutors, and comrades here, there, and around the world who can’t be named. You know who you are, and I hope this contributes to our solidarity. iii Abstract Contestation of the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines gathered in resistance a coalition of progressives, farmers and ranchers, environmentalists, and Native Nations. While these groups appear united in opposition to the pipeline, the principles and strategies of the grassroots at stake in this emergent environmental movement have been more heavily contested than recognized by existing literatures. While long-standing rifts certainly still exist between mainstream liberal environmental organizations and radical movements for environmental justice, I argue that the ideological field of contemporary environmentalism cannot be understood without taking into account the emergence of environmental populism. Populism is the ideology and political formation that takes “the people” as the principle and proper political actor. A mass movement of the people is positioned in opposition to corporations, corrupt institutions, and elites, all of whom trample upon their rights to participate and decide environmental futures. How does pipeline populism, as a collective social phenomenon, emerge from and transform contemporary ideologies of environmental politics? What consequences does it have for the political nexus of global climate chaos, racial capitalism, and ongoing settler colonialism? If we are right to think that only through people’s movements can we adequately and democratically address global climate change, scholars and activists alike must understand the underlying tensions in the desires and ideologies of what is meant to be “the people’s climate movement.” The People versus the Pipelines: Energy Infrastructure and Grassroots Ideology in North American Environmentalism addresses these questions by examining the internal tensions within populist ideologies in the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Iowa. Intervening in iv interdisciplinary environmental scholarship and political theories concerning the relationships among ideology and desire in populist politics, this project develops a conceptual and methodological framework that understands environmental populism as emerging from resentment towards dispossession, democratic public participation, and expert knowledges. Through interviews, participant observation, and cultural and media analysis, I demonstrate how environmentalist practices are shifting from appeals to state institutions toward a movement of the people. I argue that while environmental populism attempts to take leave of elitism, its aspirations to ground property, democracy, and expertise emerge from liberal affective infrastructures and congeal into a political activism that can reproduce Euro-American, settler colonial, and nationalist tropes. This research intervenes in interdisciplinary debates in environmental studies, political ecology, and political theory by questioning the role of environmentalism in sustaining a politics of exclusion through a left-populist ideology. I take up the complex problem of race and legacies of colonialism in movements against fossil fuels to demonstrate the sustained manner in which confronting structures of oppression elides liberal social justice movements. In making this argument, I show that the persistence of race and settler colonialism is not merely an effect of culture, history, or the state, but is also embedded in the liberal structures of contestation frequently upheld by political ecologists, including public participation, landed private property, and local and regional grassroots political formations. This research has implications for scholars and activists interested in contemporary environmental and climate justice, for political theories and public discourse on populism, and for those concerned with the intersection of race and settler colonialism in environmental politics. v Table of Contents Acknowledgments ......................................................................................................................... i List of Figures ............................................................................................................................ vii List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................................ viii Chapter 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 Environmental populism and the challenge of planetary politics ................................................ 1 21st century environmentalism ..................................................................................................... 4 Desire, ideology, and politics ..................................................................................................... 11 Genres of liberalism ................................................................................................................... 16 Oil, infrastructure, and populist politics ..................................................................................... 19 Research Design ......................................................................................................................... 21 Plan of Dissertation .................................................................................................................... 28 Chapter 2. Populism and political desire in spatial and political theory ................................................ 32 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 32 Populism’s discontents ............................................................................................................... 37 Populism as radical democracy .................................................................................................. 42 Populism as post-political consolidation .................................................................................... 51 Populism’s political ambivalences ............................................................................................. 57 Affective infrastructures of racial capitalism and settler colonialism .................................................. 63 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................