NICHE New Book — Pipeline Populism

Pipeline Populism accounts for the potential of such a form of political struggle, while also describing how populism at times served as a limit to imagining the horizons of climate justice.

How contemporary environmental struggles and resistance to pipeline development became populist strugglesA lively genre of environmental politics has grown in the last decade across the US and Canada: a populist environmentalism. Eschewing the technocratic and policy-oriented depoliticizations of the Big Greens of the 1990s and early 2000s, populist environmentalism instead envisions a mass mobilization by “the people” to reclaim democracy from corrupt politicians and environmental NGOs, fossil fuel corporations, and sometimes-imagined foreign outsiders. Espoused by thought-leaders like Naomi Klein and picked up by the Sunrise Movement, populist environmentalism promised to unite otherwise fractured and diverse constituencies such as Native Nations, settler farmers and ranchers, and environmentalists into unlikely alliances in pursuit of broad social transformation. My book, Pipeline Populism, accounts for the potential of such a form of political struggle, while also describing how populism at times served as a limit to imagining the horizons of climate justice.

Read the article by Kai Bosworth at NICHE.