Bookforum interview with Kai Bosworth: "What the People Want"

Extending the horizon of environmentalist politics beyond public participation, scientific expertise, and a regulatory state is both possible and necessary for a decolonial climate movement. 

How contemporary environmental struggles and resistance to pipeline development became populist struggles

In his new book, Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-First Century, scholar Kai Bosworth investigates the rise of environmental populism alongside the Indigenous-led protests of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. In showing how anti-pipeline struggles grew to include broader coalitions of protesters, Bosworth digs into the motivations of the rural white settlers involved in these struggles, discussing different notions of property, the desire for autonomy, and ties to place and community. But he warns that mass participation itself should not eclipse decolonization and defunct pipelines as political aims. Instead, Bosworth argues that political desires are malleable, and that collective social struggle can transform individual attachments. Extending the horizon of environmentalist politics beyond public participation, scientific expertise, and a regulatory state is therefore both possible and necessary for a decolonial climate movement. 

Read the interview with Kai Bosworth at Bookforum.