The People Know Best: Situating the Counterexpertise of Populist Pipeline Opposition Movements

Abstract

Critical scholarship suggests that environmental populism is either an expression of radical democracy beyond the paternalistic liberalism of mainstream environmentalism (Meyer 2008) or that it is paranoid, irrational, and merely reactive to elite technocratic governance (Swyngedouw 2010). Because both frameworks take populism to instrumentalize knowledge production, they miss how practices of counterexpertise might condition the emergence of left-populist oppositional identities. I argue that counterexpertise is a political activity not by producing an alternative epistemology but as a minor science that contests science from within and in the process shapes left-populist political coalitions. This is illustrated through research on populist responses to the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines in the Great Plains region of North America, where environmentalists, landowners, and grassroots organizers sought to position themselves as experts. Through public participation in environmental review, pipeline mapping projects, and construction monitoring, environmental populists created an educational campaign concerning topics as diverse as hydrology, economics, and archaeology. Developing counterexpertise not only contested the evidence produced by oil infrastructure firms and the state but also consolidated the oppositional identity of “the people.” By examining populist knowledge production within the broader field of contentious politics, I argue that we can better understand it as neither an irrational reaction nor transparently democratic but as part of a processual production of identities of resentment and resistance. One implication is that climate change denial and disinformation spread by the oil industry might be challenged by resituating science for political ends rather than renewing neutral objectivity. Key Words: environmentalism, expertise, oil pipelines, populism.

批判研究主张, 环保民粹主义不是超越温和专制的自由主义下的主流环境保护主义之基进民主的展现 (Meyer 2008), 便是仅只是针对精英官僚治理的偏执、非理性之反动（Swyngedouw 2010）。上述两种架构皆运用民粹主义操作知识生产, 因而忽略了反专家的实践如何可能成为左翼民粹主义的反抗性身份认同的浮现之条件。我主张, 反专家作为一种政治活动, 并非透过生产另类的认识论, 而是在科学内部进行争夺的微科学, 并在过程中塑造左翼民粹主义的政治联盟。此一论点通过研究北美大平原区域中的基斯顿输油管（Keystone XL）和达科他输油管（Dakota Access pipelines）之民粹反应进行阐述, 其中环境专家、土地所有者和草根组织者寻求将自身置于专家的位置。通过环境审查、输油管製图计画、以及工程监督的公众参与, 环保民粹主义者创造了考量水文、经济和考古等多样主题的教育倡议。发展反专家运动不仅对石油基础建设公司和国家所生产的证据进行争夺, 同时巩固了“人民”作为反对者的身份认同。我通过检视更广泛的争议政治领域中的民粹知识生产, 主张不将其视为不理性的反动或显而易见的民主, 而是更佳地将其理解为生产愤怒与抵抗的身份认同的过程中的一部分。其中一个意涵便是, 气候变迁否认主义和石油产业所传播的虚假信息, 或可通过将科学至于政治端、而非重拾客观中立性来进行挑战。 关键词: 环境保护主义, 专家, 输油管, 民粹主义。

La erudición crítica sugiere que el populismo ambiental es, o una expresión de la democracia radical que trasciende el liberalismo paternalista de la principal corriente del ambientalismo (Meyer 2008), o paranoico, irracional y meramente reactivo a la gobernanza tecnocrática de la élite (Swyngedouw 2010). Debido a que ambos marcos toman al populismo para instrumentalizar la producción de conocimiento, ellos no captan cómo las prácticas de contraexperticia podrían condicionar la aparición de identidades opositoras izquierdo-populistas. Sostengo que la contraexperticia es una actividad política no productora de una epistemología alternativa, sino como una ciencia menor que cuestiona la ciencia desde dentro, proceso en el cual configura coaliciones políticas izquierdo-populistas. Esto se ilustra por medio de investigación sobre las respuestas populistas a los oleoductos Keystone XL y Dakota Access en la región de los Grandes Llanos de América del Norte, donde los ambientalistas, propietarios de la tierra y organizadores de las bases buscan posicionarse como expertos. A través de la participación pública en la revisión ambiental, proyectos de mapeo de los oleoductos y monitoreo de las construcciones, los populistas ambientales crearon una campaña educativa relacionada con tópicos tan diversos como hidrología, economía y arqueología. El desarrollar contraexperticia no solo cuestionó la evidencia producida por las firmas de infraestructura de petróleos y el estado, sino que también consolidó la identidad opositora de “el pueblo”. Al examinar la producción populista de conocimiento dentro del campo más amplio de la política de confrontación, sostengo que es posible entenderla mejor si no la consideramos como reacción irracional ni transparentemente democrática, sino como parte de una producción de proceso de identidades de resentimiento y resistencia. Una implicación es que la denegación del cambio climático y la desinformación difundida por la industria petrolera podrían retarse resituando la ciencia más para fines políticos que para renovar la objetividad neutral.

Palabras clave:

• ambientalismo
• experticia
• oleoductos
• populismo

Acknowledgments

The author thanks three anonymous reviewers and James McCarthy for their generous comments.

The author is now a Visiting Assistant Professor at Brown University, Providence, RI.

Notes

1 Prior to the 1950s, populism in the United States was largely understood as a left-wing—even vaguely socialist—form of politics. Yet emergent forms of modernization theory and postwar Keynesian fears of the people attempted to redefine populism as an irrational and anti-Semitic form of politics. This meaning was challenged by U.S. historians, especially Pollack (1976) and Goodwyn (1976, 1978). In Europe, however, populism continued to be associated with the political right such that something like left populism could seem an oxymoron. Jäger (2017) meticulously traced this “semantic drift” in the meaning of populism, with the conclusion that “recent conceptualizations [of populism] may lack an awareness of the implications of the vocabulary it deploys” (311).

2 A similar bifurcation has structured historians’ assessments of the Farmer’s Alliance and the People’s Party. As Postel (2009) wrote, “Historians have tended to cast academic experts in the role of modernizers battling to overcome the inertia of ‘reluctant farmers,’ who were mired in tradition and unconvinced of the value of education” (47). Postel challenged this thesis through evidence of a massive campaign of counterexpertise that fought not against the modernizing ideals of agricultural science but against the method and ends to which they were used.

Additional information

Funding

Aspects of this research were supported by funding from the Social Science Research Council’s Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship.

Notes on contributors

Kai Bosworth

KAI BOSWORTH completed a PhD in the Department of Geography at University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include populism’s possibilities and limits for left political organizing in the context of fossil fuel economies and North American settler colonialism.