Ecological Populism: Politics in Defense of Home: Winner of the CNPS 2020 Christian Bay Best Paper Award.

Populism has been hotly debated for decades, yet both political scientists and environmentalists have largely neglected its potential to galvanize popular support for the environmental movement. I argue that everyday experiences of being at home in one's environs, which I call "ecological belonging," can inspire a politics of self-defense in which everyday people act politically to defend their homes, broadly conceived, against the economic norms and institutions that threaten them with destruction. Drawing on the legacy of the American farmer-labor Populists of the late 19th-century, I call this politics in defense of home "ecological populism." Rather than rejecting the label of populism in light of its authoritarian and xenophobic varieties, I argue that environmentalists should embrace a pluralist and egalitarian populist politics to counter developmentalist policies that threaten to destroy the habitats and dwellings we call home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]