Kai Bosworth on pipeline struggles, movement building, and political ecology

"We can imagine it happening, which just means that maybe there's a lot of work to be done."

Kai Bosworth is assistant professor of international studies in the School of World Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. Kai is the author of Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century, out May 2022 from the University of Minnesota Press.

This interview has been condensed and edited for content and clarity.

In Pipeline Populism, you talk about how you could see in the Dakota Access and Keystone XL anti-pipeline struggles that the Indigenous sovereignty and activism at their core could push people to more radical, more expansive political horizons. Can you say more about that?

Without reducing the leadership of various different Indigenous nations to a homogeneous opposition, I do think that the foregrounding of decolonial politics by the Oceti Sakowin and others in the region really starts from a broader critique of colonialism and a foregrounding of Indigenous sovereignty as one of the main things that pipelines violate. That puts a different political horizon right at the heart of the movement right from the beginning. If you aren't from Lakota territory, you might not be aware of how frequent highlighting violations of Indigenous sovereignty is in the region. Treaties going back to Fort Laramie in 1851 and 1868 have been violated repeatedly. Even the Supreme Court recognizes this to be the case. And yet, Lakota people still continue to fight for return of the land rather than the payoff that's sitting in a federal bank somewhere, the settlement that they were granted by this Supreme Court case.

What Indigenous sovereignty means is complex and it varies from nation to nation. But one thing that we know is that it's certainly different than Western forms of political sovereignty, and even different than Western understandings of democracy, which especially in liberal democracy always have this gap between people's everyday participation in politics and the institutions that channel that and make decisions on behalf of the people who they represent. That difference that is inscribed in liberal democracy really leads us to oftentimes understand these terms—sovereignty, liberalism, democracy, etc.—within frameworks that have a very limited political horizon in terms of: where is our power, where does it come from? What obligations and responsibilities does it lead us with and to, and what does it require us to do as a collective, as people who inhabit a place and a place that's populated with other sorts of creatures as well?

My work tries to grapple with the ways that non-Indigenous people understand themselves in relationship to the leadership of Native nations in pipeline opposition and the way that settlers can stumble in their understanding of histories of dispossession and colonization but are always capable of learning and listening and coming to a different sort of politics through interfacing with and learning from the Oceti Sakowin and other Native nations in the region. Part of the reason why I think this is important isn't just because redress and reparations for the history of settler colonialism are right, but it also shows that there could be a strategic element to understanding how to build coalitions in situations of ongoing colonialism.

One of the things that I'm arguing against is the idea that centering anti-colonialism or Indigenous sovereignty can only ever be an unpopular practice, which is an argument you can hear even on the Left, that if you are talking about Indigenous people and Indigenous land rights, while you might get the support of Native nations, you're mostly just alienating everyone else and that can never win in South Dakota, can never win in the United States. Which leads you to some really perverse political decisions, but also is just incorrect.

If you want to build a mass movement, you have to figure out how to intertwine the kinds of politics and political demands that can actually transform people to come together in solidarity. I don't say that lightly; that's a very, very difficult thing to do. But it's how you actually build movements that aren't just flash in the pan. It's how you build power, by getting people to see in other people's struggles their own struggle, and see that those struggles could be common. 

How do you think about how we can reconcile navigating those challenges and stay in a place where we are meeting people where they’re at while also maintaining the transformative horizon requisite to the actual scale of the underlying problems? 

It’s tough. I want to emphasize that it's very, very difficult to do and it is a matter of constant balancing, reevaluation, almost like a movement social science where you have to constantly check in and see what sorts of powers are increasing, what's working, what's not working, and the like. The number one thing is to always remember that our own imaginations, anxieties, hopes, and assumptions are shaping our evaluations as well.

Let me give an example. We're trying to garner public support in opposition of a fossil fuel infrastructure project. We hold a first meeting, a lot of people show up. There's great energy in the room, people are excited, they're talking. You can feel it in the room that we're actually getting somewhere, we might actually be able to organize some event that impacts the ability of the state or pipeline firm to push this through. You do this a few times, and then maybe you get to a point where one of your meetings has fewer people, you're getting in arguments more, all of a sudden you start doubting yourself and the strategies that you all have collectively come up with, and things all of a sudden seem shakier. It's not just that this is a normal movement cycle or normal campaign cycle, but also that doubt and that anxiety start to work on you and you start to think, Maybe I should've done X, Y or Z instead in order to keep people in the room or keep things going in a certain direction.

All of this is also shaped by the media landscape and environment that we live in—online certainly—in which streams of information are also influencing and trying to get us to evaluate and understand our potential anxieties and political failures due to one or another thing. I'm confused as to, for example, how much influence things like polling data have had on what people think good strategy is in terms of political organizing. But maybe that's mostly just an online conversation and actual organizers don't really care.

I hope not [laughs].

[laughs] Yeah. In any case, if you are an organizer, you know that you always have to be doing this work of evaluating and figuring out what's working or not in situations that are really adverse, that are pitched against us, and in which our success is not only not guaranteed, but might also be unlikely. Bringing in that recognition of the anxiety and doubt as well as hope and excitement of political organizing I think can help explain how we sometimes end up in knotty situations where people on the Left start to think that a left politics is impossible. That leads to either despair or burnout on the one hand, or to adjusting our politics so far towards what we imagine to be the regular person, who inevitably is white and working class and has only vaguely left of center economic interests, but has no interest in anti-colonialism or trans rights or whatever else the Left might be committed to. And our imagination of this person starts to orient our politics.

I don't think that person actually exists, but the bigger problem is just that we always have to be aware of the way that these emotions are shaping our politics in meaningful ways. The more that we can reflect on this, the better that we can build movements that actually use those emotions to gain power and as indexes of the power that we’re gaining, rather than let them lead us towards a politics that is actually not effective or lead us away from politics because we're so despairing and so burnt-out.

When it comes to “defensive” struggles, like fighting against pipelines, I feel like it is easier to see and understand where to contest them, but figuring out what to do when you're going on “offense” seems much harder because it's less clear what that actually means in practice. How do you think offensive and defensive struggles are connected, and how can we make those connections to not only fight against the oppressive, exploitative, existing state of things, but build something different? 

I think a lot of this is similar in some key and interesting ways to the situation that Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes trying to organize against new prison construction in California where not everyone's ready to be an abolitionist, but we can figure out how to talk to people about the local situation, how the prison would impact them, how the forecasting might actually not come to pass, and begin to transform people that way. What's interesting is that even in so-called defensive struggles, there's also always a de-alienation or a work of imagining and enacting a desire for a different future that's going on.

I think this is most self-evident in something like the blockade at Standing Rock, or like Occupy perhaps as well. Which, for all their messiness and all their faults, were attractive to a lot of people as an indication of a desire for a different sort of world. In the case of Standing Rock, not only a desire for a world that actually could recognize that water is life or something like that, but that could actually build the sorts of institutions and ways of life that would not be based on the incredibly bloodsucking capitalist version of value and private property that is capable only of either privatizing and profiting from or using as a sink for waste.

That's one way of conceiving how the transformative horizon could work in these things, but the problem is always the middle time. How do we get from here to there? What are the sorts of transition steps that you can build into movements that can gather around common enemies, but also orient us toward common futures? If I had a great answer, I would be out doing it in some kind of way [laughs]. I'm as subject to the doubts and anxieties as everyone I'm talking about.

The thing that I'm learning as I get slightly older and have been involved in a couple of different kinds of organizing campaigns is how important it is to just show up and be committed to a place and listen to elders, fold in newcomers, and build those relationships and really try to keep those up as the infrastructure for whatever might happen next. Because we don't know what's going to happen next, if a global pandemic happens or if a hurricane happens, or if a pipeline that you've been fighting for five or 10 years like this MVP pipeline suddenly gets fast-tracked because a war in Ukraine is shaping natural gas prices and all of a sudden all the regulatory hurdles that you had fought over get jumped through the Defense Production Act or something like that. That hasn't happened, but that's something that Joe Manchin wants to happen.

To the extent that that can be built out and fleshed out, then you can start to give names to that utopian horizon or the positive project of transition. Maybe that's where it happens. The way that I frame it sometimes is that we also have to remember that all the predictions from everyone, from the IPCC to Shell Oil to the economic forecast and all this stuff, all of that is a version of utopian thinking and science fiction as well. It's just that various people in institutions believe it hard enough that they're able to bring it into existence. Which isn’t to say that we just need to believe harder or something, but build institutions that can actually work to enact the better futures that we want right now rather than in some imagined 2050 or 2075.

How are you thinking about the current US political terrain and what's going on? Maybe where some pressure points might be or anything that gives you hope, that you feel is going in the right direction. 

I think that it's pretty clear that we're in this weird interregnum moment. And these moments where it seems like there's a pause are great to go back and reflect and think and read some history and consider what might be coming next. That's a lot of what I've been doing over the last year and a half or so. Like a lot of people, I’ve been really interested in considering how we can get some sort of power from the global working class’ positions along the logistics and supply chain side of things. Everything from the Amazon union vote in New York to some of the struggles taking place over ports and logistics in China and Southeast Asia can be sites where new and interesting forms of power might be able to be enacted.

There are serious questions over this because these distribution and logistics crises are felt in bread and food prices, grain prices, and in oil prices. Those things are touch points for ambiguous political movements, whether it's the Yellow Vests or the protests in Kazakhstan or or whatever we're going to get out of these current high gas prices. They’re opportunities for reaction, for deregulation, for entrenchment as much as they could be opportunities to build political power. I think that sometimes there is a tendency to focus on logistics and supply chain stuff to the exclusion of other forms of politics, so I don't necessarily want to suggest that. But pipeline struggles are transportation and logistics struggles in a lot of ways, they’re struggles over the infrastructure through which oil will be transferred from one point to another. So I've been trying to consider and question how our lessons and understandings from blockades and logistics struggles might interface with maybe some of these things that are happening at ports, with Amazon, with some of the other sorts of situations where what's at stake is just getting food and materials from point A to point B.

I don't have a super clear idea of where any of this might be headed. But there's a way that we can imagine these logistics struggles reinforcing each other and getting out of just being about either labor or social reproduction or circulation, but actually interfacing and intervening and spurring each other in some way. We just haven't reached a critical mass where there's enough either geographical concentration or enough overlap in communication among these different forms of contestation. But we can imagine it happening, which just means that maybe there's a lot of work to be done.

To maybe get a little bit more specific, where do you think the US Left should be putting our energy right now?

My role is more to raise questions than make prescriptions; I don't want anyone to think that that's what I'm doing. But I do think that figuring out what's going on wherever you are and the history of what's going on wherever you are is a really great step. I've been trying to do this in Richmond, which is a difficult place for me to pop into having been in the Midwest for most of my life. Trying to listen to people around here has been where I’ve been putting my energy, trying to hear about the history of struggles over parks and public space, obviously race and racism, policing, and struggles over housing. But wherever you are, that could look very different. I don't want to say this is a politics of localism, but it's a politics that unfolds from the commitments that people have in wherever they are, that starts from that and then builds on top of that.

One thing that I think was missed in the most recent cycle of struggles from 2016 to 2020 is that sometimes there was an attempt to bypass that foundation, to try to jump directly into the state and into federal power, when there are real opportunities to be had. Which isn't to say that people aren't doing this, but we always need to attend to the struggles and the histories on the ground wherever we are. That seems to me like a good basis or foundation for whatever you want to do, or whatever sorts of radical politics, transformative politics you want to build. That can be a good place to start.

A good geographer’s way of thinking about it.

One way of putting it that I've been thinking about is: what is political ecology if you think about it not as an academic discipline, but a practice? What is the practice of making an ecology political? It's about both investigation of your surroundings and their histories, and struggles that informed them both in a long horizon. So in a place like Richmond, thinking back to the histories of colonization and slavery as well as to struggles against colonization and against slavery and against Jim Crow or whatever else, and how they still inform whatever is happening here today.

Then as soon as you start doing that, you can start to pick out little details that become interesting about the way that the river is used as a transportation hub, as a site of labor unrest, as a waste sink, as well as a site of rehabilitation of the species that live in our city. If ecology is anything, it's a science of relations that pays attention to the details. So a political ecology would be a science of political relations that pays attention to the details and begins to attend to them and try and build off of them to jump scales and develop connections wherever else you are finding similar sorts of situations or movements.

What if we were political ecologists, not as academics, but as people who made the ecologies around us political? And said, “I'm not going to let the river just be a river, I'm going to let the river be a site of political struggle for me and my comrades,” and impart that vision and that meaning upon it to those around us and make it into something that we care for, care about, and want to be responsible to, to all of its histories and all of its diversity. That just seems like a really interesting and different way of thinking about politics to me. I'm not saying I know what to do with it, but it's kind of cool, isn't it?