The Rise of Ecofascism

Climate Change and the Far Right

Sam Moore, Alex Roberts

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781509545384, 9781509545377
• eBook ISBN: 9781509545391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The world faces a climate crisis and an ascendant far right. Are these trends related? How does the far right think about the environment, and what openings does the coming crisis present for them?

This incisive new book traces the long history of far-right environmentalism and explores how it is adapting to the contemporary world. It argues that the extreme right, after years of denying the reality of climate change, are now showing serious signs of reversing their strategy. A new generation of far-right activists has realized that impending environmental catastrophe represents their best chance yet for a return to relevance.In reality, however, their noxious blend of conspiracy, hatred and violence is no solution at all: it is the 'eco-socialism of fools'. Only a real commitment to climate justice can save us and stop the far right in its tracks.

No-one interested in the struggle against right-wing extremism and the crusade for climate justice can afford to miss this trenchant critique of burgeoning ecofascism.

1
A history of far-right ecologism

‘Always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!’ (W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘The Souls of White Folk’)¹

Humans and environmental change

Humans have always been an environment-making species.² By 3,000 years ago, our impact was worldwide.³ And, for almost as long as there have been environment-making practices, there have been environmental crises, of massively varying scope and form, from local deforestation to soil erosion and declining food availability to the interlocking global crises of today.

These crises have frequently contributed to transformations in the balance of political power. The end of the Roman Climatic Optimum seemingly intensified the Western Roman Empire’s existent problems.⁴ In Medieval Europe, climatic change underlay the malnutrition that made the Black Death such a devastating blow. In turn (in western Europe) the sudden drop in the labour supply as peasants died en masse made labour power more valuable. Peasants rushed to the towns, triggering an extended period of class struggle, and, ultimately, laying much of the groundwork for capitalism.

In the modern era, crises are inextricably bound up with the dynamics of capitalism. As Raj Patel and Jason Moore have theorized, capitalism relies on the continual cheapening of naturalized inputs.⁵ This doesn’t make capitalism’s relation to nature one of pure destructiveness, but means it seeks to put nature to work for it, at an ever-accelerating rate. For this reason, it might be better to call our current era not the ‘Anthropocene’ (which defines this period of our planet’s history in terms of effects caused by all humans, apparently without distinction), but the ‘Capitalocene’.⁶ It is not humanity in general that has caused our contemporary environmental crisis, but the specific economic system of capitalism.

As capitalism’s demands on nature expand, tensions appear between those who want to conserve a given ecology and those who want to utilize it in different ways. Deciding what constitutes a crisis is therefore socially contested and the experience of it is differentiated by class, race and gender, as well as many other forms of social distinction. For some, a crisis might appear as social with environmental implications, for others as an ecological crisis which cascades into a crisis of governance, and for a few as a symbolic crisis whose solution requires the reimposition of a ‘naturalized order’.

Some responses to crisis have utilized components of what would become far-right politics: asserting strict racial hierarchies of care for, access to, power over, or positions within nature. Often, these stratifications have served an economic role as well as a symbolic one, which forced the revaluing of parts of nature and groups of people. All too often, this means an aggressive cheapening, such as by the denigration of Black enslaved peoples’ right to life and freedom, or the systematic devaluation of women’s labour. These responses restore a ‘natural order’ and defend property ownership.

We name as ‘far-right ecologism’ those forces that seek to produce and enforce racial hierarchies in and through natural systems. It is not one singular project, but a diverse array of responses to crises.

Just as nature is put to work in the expansion of capitalism, so too are concepts of nature put to work in its justification, invoked flexibly in response to the imperatives of profit and governance. Some aspect of nature is proclaimed its fundamental law: the distinction between the ensouled and the automatic, nature’s capacity to model ideal social relations, its scarcity, its givenness by God, its ability to select, its racial character, its tendency to degrade, its distinction with the realm of culture, its competitiveness, its production of hierarchies, its morality or conversely its amorality, its tendency towards balance, its obfuscation by modernity, its threateningness and so on. This aspect comes to stand in for the whole of nature: it becomes nature’s ‘eternal lesson’. Yet, when these concepts of nature come to be cashed out in practice, they are often scaled down to more mundane projects: the defence of charismatic megafauna, or particular trees, particular landscapes and so on.

In far-right ecologism, ‘nature’ mutates between a bottomless resource, an exotic threat, a final explanation, a weapon and a regulatory ideal. As a weapon, it is dangerous. As a regulatory ideal it is volatile, because two opposed conceptions of nature conflict in this idealization. On the one hand, ‘nature’ is the central regulatory ideal of society, whose ultimate triumph is guaranteed. On the other hand, the far right believes that nature has been obscured in fact. And the process of resolving this contradiction, of reaffirming ‘nature’, often involves the violence of nature’s most ardent exemplars: a particular race.

How have ideas of nature been deployed historically to produce forms of racial domination? We proceed in roughly chronological order, outlining the major themes of successive periods: colonialism, fascism and the postwar period. We start with colonialism, not because it was identical with fascism but because it was a historical period and form of capitalism that laid the groundwork for the contemporary global distribution of power through a massive expansion in capitalism’s ability to metabolize natural inputs and justified itself through racist ideas claiming some basis in nature.⁷ Situating the contemporary far right in the long tail of colonialism allows us to stop imagining that all far-right politics is fascism while also letting us see how the death camps of Europe were only possible after their technological development in the colonies.

Colonial nature-management

Capitalism was not born in the cities, but the European countryside. It converted serfs to wage workers and expelled people from the land.⁸ Sometimes, in enclosing land that had been held in common, ecological justifications were used. Temporary measures to combat soil erosion turned into permanent enclosures.⁹ At the same time, the reach of capitalism was expanding around the globe, gathering more and more of the planet into itself, and putting nature to work.

From the beginning, colonial expansion faced an environmental critique. The land drying out as trees were felled was widely feared because it could cause famine. However, the mechanism was not well understood. Christopher Columbus warned against the deforestation of the newly discovered ‘West Indies’ because it might reduce rainfall.¹⁰ Despite these fears, in practice, colonialism engendered widespread ecological destruction, an effect which stimulated the Western awareness of ecological change and necessitated rapid experimentation with conservation.¹¹ ‘Climate change’, after all, ‘represented a major potential threat to colonial economic projects’.¹² Rather than preserving nature for its own sake, these early colonial efforts at con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. A history of far-right ecologism
• 2. The far right and nature now
• 3. Online far-right ecologism and far-right movements
• 4. Deadly ecofascist violence
• 5. Towards ecofascism proper?
• Conclusion
• End User License Agreement