Browsing by Subject "environmentalism"
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Item The People versus the Pipelines: Energy infrastructure and liberal ideology in North American environmentalism(2018-06) Bosworth, KaiContestation 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 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.Item Romancing the Market, Rationalizing Nature: Transformations in Environmentalists’ Economic Thought, 1960-2014(2019-05) Maung, RebeccaThe purported stagnation of the mainstream American environmental movement has coincided with what many consider the rise of the neoliberal era. My project attempts to track the relationship between the two. Building from the cultural turn in economic sociology, this dissertation examines the American environmental movement: specifically, how environmentalists’ understanding of the relationship between environmental concerns and economic markets has changed between the 1960s and today. Through a mixed-methods combination of content and discourse analysis, I examine how voices presented in the member-directed newsletters of three major American environmental organizations have articulated the ecological advantages and disadvantages of various elements of a free, self-regulating market economy. I concentrate on moments of perceived crisis, including the Reagan administration’s explicitly pro-market and anti-environmental agenda and the specter of global climate change. While environmentalists’ faith in the market increases over time, I argue that perceived crises, both legislative and environmental, shape environmental actors’ acceptance or rejection of the importance of free-market principles.Item To Think Like An Agroecologist: The Greenhorns And New Agrarian Rhetoric(2023-08) Geier Olive, GraceThe concept of agrarianism has a deep history in the United States. Beginning withThomas Jefferson’s vision of an ideal society comprised of yeoman farmer citizens, agrarianism’s implications and uses have evolved over time. Initially an ideology of U.S. American settler colonialism, agrarianism was taken up in later decades by farmers themselves in social movements. In recent decades, agrarian ideology has taken another turn towards agricultural sustainability in what scholars and activists call “new” agrarianism. New agrarianism is concerned with the wellbeing of the entire living system and has shifted towards an ideology that anyone can apply to their lives. Capturing the character and significance of the discursive transformation of agrarianism is an open scholarly project that this dissertation aims to join. I examine how one social movement organization, the Greenhorns, enters into this discourse and uses agrarianism in their efforts to support the movement for sustainable agriculture and changes the nature of agrarian discourse. Through a rhetorical analysis of a variety of their materials, I analyze how agrarianism figures in the Greenhorns’ recruitment, education, and maintenance. My assessment of these materials reveals that agrarian ideology functions as a central discourse as they recruit people and support a broader movement for sustainable agriculture, educate potential recruits to cultivate an activist agrarian farmer, and maintain the social movement they support by harnessing communication as a resource and stewarding an agrarian rhetorical ecology. Despite drawbacks such as the complexities of relying on an ideology with a brutal history and the difficulty of addressing multiple audiences, the Greenhorns’ use of agrarianism demonstrates the utility of the concept in movements that aim to ameliorate environmental degradation. In addition to furthering academic understanding of the rhetorical dimensions of new agrarianism, this dissertation advances understandings of various threads of scholarship in environmental communication and social movement rhetoric.