Negotiating the Northwoods: Anti-establishment rural politics in the Northeastern United States

Abstract

While recent scholarship on rural politics in the United States has focused almost exclusively on right-wing populism, capital's power over the land has also spurred nonpartisan resistance. Financialization of forestland ownership in the United States has diversified how companies profit from the land, whether through carbon sequestration, conservation easements, wind tower leases, or mechanized logging. These new sources of profit, though, create fewer jobs than the traditional woods products industries. Based on more than a year of ethnographic research in a forested region of northern New England, I describe an anti-establishment politics spurred by opposition to one of these development projects, an electrical transmission corridor proposed by an international energy company. I argue that the resistance to this project is a response to ‘behind closed doors’ negotiations and the accumulation of power in the hands of a small number of energy companies, timberland owners, politicians, government agencies and environmental NGOs. Scholarship on the resistance to neoliberalism's effects on the rural United States should thus not be limited to a left/right populism framework.