ABSTRACT
The Bakken Pipeline Resistance Coalition is an Iowa-based grassroots group that began organizing against the Dakota Access pipeline in late summer 2014. In this chapter, we analyse how the Coalition shifted dominant agricultural narratives and unified a new environmental resistance narrative in the state. Dakota Access completed construction of the controversial pipeline in Iowa in the summer of 2016 and oil began flowing in spring of 2017, yet the Coalition, to date, continues to organize resistance through grassroots organizing. These efforts successfully reframe previously polarizing narratives about agricultural production and pollution to a more inclusive, broader-reaching narrative centring the commons and uniting pipeline opponents from across existing rural/urban and political divides. We identify and analyse three strategic processes used by the Coalition to create cultural narrative shifts: creating space for new claims-makers, elevating the commons, and aligning values with regional and national campaigns against extractive energy. The Coalition’s intentionality in creating space for a multitude of voices and a variety of perspectives helped the movement to grow beyond the landowners with farms in the pipeline’s path. These new voices reframed the narrative about Iowa’s farmland from defensiveness to one of protection. Finally, the Coalition aligned Iowans’ anti-pipeline struggle to extractive energy campaigns beyond Iowa through an emphasis on the importance of u. Together these processes created a narrative-shifting arena that transformed the symbolic landscape.
