does America’s current immigration policy play into the world view of Eco-fascists

Readings on Eco-Fascism

Sam Adler-Bell/September 24, 2019

Why White Supremacists Are Hooked on Green Living

Eco-fascism is fashionable again on the far right, thanks to a rise in global temperatures and anti-immigrant nationalism.

Illustration by Delcan & Company + Julia Grayson

On Saturdays, Sarah Dye and her husband, Douglas Mackey, sell seasonal vegetables and eggs at a farmers’ market in Bloomington, Indiana. Sarah stands behind a stall piled high with heirloom tomatoes, basil, okra, and acorn squash. With a towheaded baby in her arms, she greets customers and makes small talk. She and Douglas own Schooner Creek Farm in nearby Nashville, Indiana. They’re crunchy—even for Bloomington, a college town with a distinctly earthy vibe. You’d never guess that in private far-right chat rooms, Sarah goes by “Volkmom.” She posts about home schooling, recommends books by neo-Nazis, and complains about the “strife” faced by “Whites” who live in “non-white” neighborhoods. She also occasionally writes about farming.

Fascists have long shared Volkmom’s preoccupation with green living. The past few years have seen a resurgence of eco-fascist and eco-nationalist themes in the rhetoric of Europe’s far-right parties and in the writings of online radicals. Some, inspired by Netflix’s recent thriller about Ted Kaczynski, have embraced the Unabomber’s nihilist primitivism. Others have adopted Norse aesthetics and a radically anti-humanist version of “deep ecology.” Both the Christchurch and El Paso mass shooters included environmentalist themes in their white-nationalist manifestos.

When writing about eco-fascists, the media often speaks of green politics “masking” a darker racial vision. But most eco-fascists are sincere in their environmentalism. “The common theme,” said Peter Staudenmaier, a professor of history at Marquette University, “is this link between a yearning for purity in the environmental sphere and a desire for racialized purity in the social sphere.” For people like Dye and Mackey, the nation is an ecosystem, and nonwhite immigrants are an invasive species.

The Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil” ­reentered public discourse two years ago, when torch-wielding neo-Nazis chanted it in Charlottesville. But the phrase actually predates the Third Reich. In the nineteenth century, German romantic writers like Ernst Moritz Arndt and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl synthesized naturalism and nationalism. “We must save the forest,” Riehl wrote in 1853, “not only so that our ovens do not become cold in winter, but also so that the pulse of life of the people continues to beat warm and joyfully, so that Germany remains German.”

This philosophy later inspired the Völkisch movement, a youthful revolt against capitalist modernity that preached a return to the land, and to the wholeness, purity, and plenitude of rural peasant life. In the 1920s and ’30s, veneration for the earthbound volk—and hatred for its opposite, the rootless, urban Jew—found their way into Nazi ideology, where they were infused with scientific racism and transformed into a rallying cry. “The concept of Blood and Soil gives us the moral right to take back as much land in the East as is necessary,” wrote Richard Walther Darré, the Third Reich’s minister of food and agriculture. He spoke of Jewish people as “weeds.”

Such theories have a long history in American ecological movements, as well. In the early twentieth century, Madison Grant, a Manhattan lawyer, joined the conservationist efforts of Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir, who had founded the Sierra Club in 1892. These men shared an affinity for scientific racism. Roosevelt praised Grant’s 1916 white supremacist tome The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History as “a capital book.” Another fan, Adolf Hitler, wrote Grant a letter, calling the book his personal “bible.”

For these early American conservationists, the frontier was a place infused with, as the environmental historian William Cronon has written, the vigor and independence of America’s “national character.” Wealthy men like Grant and Roosevelt could escape the “feminizing” influence of modernity in these wild places. Native people were merely inconvenient obstacles. As John Muir wrote blandly in 1901, “As to Indians, most of them are dead or civilized into useless innocence.” This American Völkisch-ness shared with its German cousin a fantasy of conquered territory as the site of national renewal—“wilderness” as the place where the soul of the nation resides.

American environmentalism has worked hard to exorcise eugenics and colonial conquest from its movements. After years advocating stricter border laws and population control, the Sierra Club, for example, adopted a “neutral” policy on immigration in the 1990s. In the past decade, liberal greens have embraced an “environmental justice” framework, striving in their activism to involve the oppressed people who bear the burdens of capitalism’s effects on the climate, air, and water.

Today, however, eco-fascism is once again gaining purchase. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian extremist who murdered 69 young Labor Party members in 2011, referenced Madison Grant in his manifesto. The Christchurch shooter echoed Riehl, linking the “preservation” of land to the “preservation” of cultural “ideals and beliefs.” Nonwhites from the Global South, he wrote, are overproducing and “invading” Europe and America to despoil the West’s natural inheritance. To “save the environment,” the invaders must be “kill[ed].” His writings inspired the El Paso shooter, who wrote, “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.”

Contemporary eco-fascists see the border as the dividing line between those who deserve protection and those who deserve nothing. Christian Parenti, author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, calls this the “politics of the armed lifeboat.” In a 1974 essay on “lifeboat ethics,” the ecologist Garrett Hardin argued that the lucky few aboard the “lifeboat”—a wealthy country in a world with dwindling resources—will only survive if the many drowning in the water are denied entry. Pentti Linkola, a Finnish deep ecologist whose theories are increasingly popular with contemporary eco-fascists, puts this point starkly: “When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.”

The U.S. government has already predicted this outcome. In a 2003 study on the likely geopolitical effects of an “abrupt climate change scenario,” Pentagon researchers wrote that wealthy nations will respond by constructing “virtual fortresses around their countries, preserving resources for themselves,” and hardening their borders “to hold back unwanted starving immigrants.” While mainstream conservatives deny that massive climate dislocation is imminent, and liberals hold out hope for tech-managerial solutions, eco-fascists and nationalists are at least being realistic about the future.

These groups perversely lay the blame for climate catastrophe at the feet of the global poor. But liberal environmentalists often make a similar mistake; they blame “humankind” for the impending disaster. In reality, multibillion-dollar extractive industries—and the carbon-spewing corporations of the Global North—bear far more blame than most individuals. The only realistic and moral answer is a global green new deal. Hand-wringing about the sins of “humanity” will never solve a climate crisis created by capitalism. Only an uprising of the global working class can bring the world closer to a solution.

What Is Eco-Fascism, the Ideology Behind Attacks in El Paso and Christchurch?

Fears of climate change, immigration, and overpopulation are driving a new wave of violence.

By Luke Darby

August 7, 2019

GQ Magazine

Shortly before Patrick Crusius murdered 22 people and injured more than two dozen in El Paso, Texas, he declared in a manifesto posted on the website 8chan that he was trying to stop a "Hispanic invasion of Texas." But there was also a distinctly environmental theme to his screed: part of a lesser-known far-right strain called eco-fascism.

The El Paso shooter named his manifesto "An Inconvenient Truth," presumably after Al Gore's 2006 climate change documentary. "The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources," he wrote. "If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more sustainable." He also blamed America's consumer culture for environmental damage:

Fresh water is being polluted from farming and oil drilling operations. Consumer culture is creating thousands of tons of unnecessary plastic waste and electronic waste, and recycling to help slow this down is almost non-existent. Urban sprawl creates inefficient cities which unnecessarily destroys millions of acres of land. We even use god knows how many trees worth of paper towels just wipe water off our hands. Everything I have seen and heard in my short life has led me to believe that the average American isn’t willing to change their lifestyle, even if the changes only cause a slight inconvenience.

Crusius also claimed that he was inspired by the shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand, who killed 51 people at two mosques and, in his own rambling manifesto, referred to himself as an "eco-fascist." He described immigration as "environmental warfare," and claimed "there is no nationalism without environmentalism."

The shootings in both El Paso and Christchurch, New Zealand are the latest examples of a new kind of ecoterrorism. According to the FBI, ecoterrorism is "the use or threatened use of violence of a criminal nature against innocent victims or property by an environmentally-oriented, subnational group for environmental-political reasons, or aimed at an audience beyond the target, often of a symbolic nature." For many, this likely evokes the image of tree-huggers with bolt-cutters, like the Animal Liberation Front which started breaking into animal testing labs in the '80s, releasing test subjects and destroying equipment.

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That's probably the image White House advisor Kellyanne Conway was trying to conjure up when she told Fox News viewers to read the Christchurch shooter's manifesto for themselves: some demented hippie more in line with PETA than Donald Trump. "He said he’s not a conservative, he’s not a Nazi, I think he referred to himself as an eco-naturalist or an eco-fascist," she said.

But eco-fascism is not the fringe hippie movement usually associated with ecoterrorism. It's a belief that the only way to deal with climate change is through eugenics and the brutal suppression of migrants. The movement's founding father was Madison Grant, who started the first organizations dedicated to protecting California redwoods and American buffalo. He was also a staunch supporter of race science who, as president of the Bronx Zoo, put Ota Benga, a member of the Mbuti tribe kidnapped from Congo, on display in a cage with apes in 1906. He published The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History in 1916, warning of the decline of the "Nordic" race, and wrote elsewhere that his generation had "the responsibility of saying what forms of life shall be preserved." His racial theory inspired Anders Breivik, the man who massacred 77 people at a Norwegian youth camp in 2011. But his fusion of white supremacy and environmental conservation also lingers.

Eco-fascism relies heavily on a concept called "deep ecology," the idea that the only way to preserve life on Earth is to dramatically—forcefully, if necessary—reduce the human population. It's best summed up by "lifeboat ethics," as eco-fascist and radical ecologist Pentti Linkola put it: "When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides."

Eco-fascists today believe that the size of the human population is not only putting a strain on natural resources, but also that masses of displaced people will be a threat to state and cultural stability in a seemingly inevitable post-climate change world. Like more garden variety white nationalists, they believe that allowing migrants into the U.S., or other "white" nations, is suicide. Or, to borrow a phrase that crops up in far-right memes and neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, "Save trees, not refugees." Writing for the New Statesman in 2018, Sarah Manavis described eco-fascism as growing online community awash with tree and mountain emojis, plus runic symbols taken from Heinrich Himmler's SS, the Nazi Party's paramilitary organization. The umbrella term "eco-fascism" covers a lot of different ideas, but Manavis found some consistent themes, including "veganism, anti-multiculturalism, white nationalism, anti-single-use plastic, anti-Semitism, and, almost always, a passionate interest in Norse mythology."

Climate change is already one of the biggest drivers of human migration. Some experts point to simultaneous droughts in the Middle East combined with grain shortages in the other parts of Asia as some of the main factors leading to the civil war in Syria, a conflict that has displaced 13 million people both internally and externally, since it began. And according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, in 2017 alone more than 18 million people were displaced in their home countries by extreme weather. The number of climate refugees worldwide will only grow as climate change increases drought, food insecurity, and conflict. A June report from the U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights found that "even if current targets are met, tens of millions will be impoverished, leading to widespread displacement and hunger."

Some far-right parties in Europe are already trying to capitalize on all this, as environmental reporter Kate Aronoff described in an article for Dissent. France's borderline fascist National Assembly party is claiming that a hardened border is vital environmental policy. Hungary's president is calling for aggressive climate change action specifically to stop migration. As Aronoff puts it, "The horror of climate change isn’t in the intrinsic violence of hurricanes or heat waves, but in the ways societies choose to deal with and prepare for them." While the U.S. Republican Party is one of the last entities in the world that denies the reality of climate change, it can be just as monstrous for political parties to admit that it's real but embrace the eco-fascist solution, which is, essentially, genocide.

If governments don't deal with climate change—if they fail to address it now or prepare for the worst outcomes later—then attacks like the ones in El Paso and Christchurch will likely come more often. The extremists will try to take matters into their own hands.

Eco-fascism: The ideology marrying environmentalism and white supremacy thriving online

The online movement has roots in neo-Nazism – and a violent edge worth taking seriously.

By Sarah Manavis

The New Republic

September 21, 2018

“I believe that both the state and the state’s citizens have the right to use all means necessary to save the environment, including murder and sabotage,” one user wrote. “Murder is okay in this case, as combating climate change is sure to save more lives than it could ever hypothetically destroy.”

“To be fair, the Third Reich was one of the earliest governments to make conservationism a major focus,” wrote another.

“What really pisses me off is how everyone associates deep ecology with Communism and far left ideologies, which are deeply rooted in industrialization. It was Nazi Germany that was environmentally aware not Soviet Russia, with the rabid industrialisation,” one said.

In a brief, archived thread nine months ago on the Reddit forum r/DebateFascism lies this conversation that, to many, will seem like a bizarre niche within the online ideological movement of the alt-right. But in fact it was an early sign of a growing online community. Meet the eco-fascists: the nature-obsessed, anti-Semitic, white supremacists who argue that racial purity is the only way to save the planet.

Numerous eco-fascists refused to speak to the New Statesman, but Dan (a pseudonym) agreed to answer my questions via direct message. While he would not give any personal information, not even the country he resided in, and would only speak to me anonymously, he did provide insight into eco-fascist principles. Some of his messages have been edited for typos.

“[Eco-fascists] have put the wellbeing of our earth, nature and animal on the forefront of their ideology,” Dan says. “It’s someone who has also turned away from industrial and urbanite society, seeking a more close to earth way of life.”

That seemingly benign focus expresses itself as an ideology that embraces and combines modern-day neo-Nazism with environmentalism – and a belief that going back to ancient geographical roots is the answer to society’s biggest problems. Eco-fascists believe that living in the original regions a race is meant to have originated in and shunning multiculturalism is the only way to save the planet they prioritise above all else.

Although eco-fascism can manifest in different ways (just like any umbrella ideology), there are consistent sets of beliefs that crop up among eco-fascists. They include veganism, anti-multiculturalism, white nationalism, anti-single use plastic, anti-Semitism, and, almost always, a passionate interest in Norse mythology. Most Twitter profiles of self-defining eco-fascists are a bespoke cocktail of alt-right memes, pictures of forests and cabins, hatred towards Jews, and rants about animal rights. Between calls for a racial purity and plastic bans, most accounts have tweets or retweets honouring Thor, celebrating Tyr Day, or glorifying Sunna, the Norse Sun Goddess.

Dan claims that the link to Norse mythology represents shared “aesthetics” between white eco-fascists and white Norse heroes, and that Norse mythology’s nature imagery and “forefather worship” suits the ideals of eco-fascists, who see themselves as fighting for the earth, as well as white supremacy.

There are a number of key characteristics within the eco-fascist community, from rhetoric to specific character usage, that make them easily identifiable on social media. Tree, earth, or mountain emojis are parked next to almost every eco-fascist’s Twitter name, often accompanied by a Norse/Proto-Germanic rune – most commonly Algiz, “ᛉ” or “ᛦ”, known as the “life” rune. Algiz was used in postwar Germany as a symbol of the neo-Nazi movement in place of the actual Nazi symbols that were banned. This was drawn from its use by Heinrich Himmler’s SS. He intended it to be the logo for the notorious Lebensraum – the programme for a master race. The policy was used to justify the oppression, deportation and ultimately murder of Jews and Eastern Europeans in order to make room for those the Nazis identified as part of a German, “Aryan” race. Lebensraum was at the centre of Nazi Germany's ultimate aims.

Eco-fascists claim the rune’s historical meaning and modern appropriation work as a perfect marriage of their beliefs; a respect for all “life” (nature, animals, and white people) as well as neo-Nazi principles. Eco-fascists will often share images of the rune online, in and amongst forest scenes or as a silhouette over rural images.

Another way to identify an eco-fascist is their tendency to use phrases associated with the Third Reich, but interspersed with references to the earth – such as the infamous “Blut und Boden” or “Blood and Soil”. The language captures the eco-fascist desire to have nations that are only full of people they claim are indigenous to that region (blood) and the demand for a geographically-bounded home that is preserved through environmentalist principles (soil).

“I would say that the Blood and Soil philosophy of Walther Darré is something we all share,” Dan says, referring to the Argentinian-born Nazi who was obsessed with the idea of a Nordic race and the ideological force behind Lebensraum. “There can be no folk without its lebensraum, just as there can't be any lebensraum without the folk.”

“By the use of the word lebensraum I don't mean that we seek to conquest,” he says. “Only to maintain and care for the land passed on by our forefathers.”

Mentions of “forefathers” function as a dogwhistle for “whiteness” in eco-fascist discourse, often included alongside calls for “our race” to “reclaim our homeland”. It also functions as a call to end multiculturalism and deport those deemed not to have ancestral ties to that country (Dan refused to reveal which country he was from).

Multiculturalism is, of course, a bête noire for eco-fascists. Many argue, like the far-right generally, that opposing multiculturalism is a way to respect a specific heritage. But eco-fascists have a further preoccupation: multiculturalism (and in turn, overpopulation of certain “white” areas), they claim, is destroying the planet.

“Pride for one’s race, culture, and bioregion is a crucial part of eco-fascism,” Dan says. “Races with a culture of disrespect for the dignity of animals and nature are indeed viewed by most as inferior and vile. Who would be okay with such traits?” Dan does not elaborate on which races he was referring to, or how Western European abattoirs and chicken factory farms fitted into this viewpoint.

“We want our homeland to ourselves,” he says.

Within the eco-fascist community, I noticed a hashtag being bandied around by a few accounts, #EFDS, that I couldn’t interpret. Dan explained that, “EFDS is the acronym for Ecofascist Death Squads. It’s a meme – I guess you could call it - on the fact that the world is overpopulated. In the words of Pentti Linkola ‘The worst enemy of life is too much life: the excess of human life.’” Linkola, a Finnish ecologist, blames overpopulation for environmental degradation and is sceptical about democracy.

This Malthusian take on the impact of population growth underpins almost the entirety of eco-fascism. Many eco-fascists are also eugenicists who believe that a culling of the population, and specific races within that population, is the only way to ensure that the planet survives. While not all eco-fascists go as far as supporting mass murder, most hold that immigration has caused overpopulation in their countries and insists that the only solution is to deport those they deem non-indigenous.

“The multicultural experiments have swarmed, for instance, the European continent and boosted the population,” Dan claims. “It weighs down our society and forces it to mass produce more products and destroy nature to make way for new living areas. Not to mention the increase in waste such a population boost has brought.”

“The import of these non-Europeans have brought in people who do not share the same respect for nature and especially not animals. Nor do they have the connection to the soil that the natives have.”

Many of the issues that fascinate that alt-right as a whole make their way into eco-fascist discourse, but with an environmental spin. One story in particular that has piqued the interest of the community recently is the killing of Mollie Tibbetts, the 20-year-old murdered in the American state of Iowa while out for an evening jog in July 2018. The man charged with her murder, Cristhian Rivera, has pleaded not guilty and the trial is ongoing. However, the alt right has been preoccupied by the revelation that Rivera may be an illegal immigrant from Mexico, with even Donald Trump weighing in on Twitter, in a video commenting: “A person came in from Mexico illegally and killed her. We need the wall.”

“Mollie Tibbetts is yet another beautiful white woman who has fallen victim to multiculturalism and immigration. We should have a day of rememberance [sic] for every single one of our people that have been killed by diversity,” wrote one eco-fascist on Twitter. When Tibbetts’ father asked for race and immigration status to be left out of the conversation, another eco-fascist responded by tweeting a meme of a car hitting a fork in the road, the car labelled “Mr. Tibbetts” dramatically pivoting away from a sign reading “Murdered Daughter” and towards one reading “Tacos”. To eco-fascists, the murder of Mollie Tibbetts is not an isolated act of villainy, but confirmation that people leaving their own “racial nation” will lead to the downfall of white people – and that white people are necessary to protect the white-inhabited natural spaces they hold so dear (eco-facists have surprisingly little to say about the Native Americans displaced from the land that now makes up the US).

While abhorrence for almost all non-white Western European cultures is crucial to eco-fascism, anti-Semitism is by far their preferred form of online racism. Many eco-fascists online constantly praise Adolf Hitler, claim white people have been forced into “semitic egalitarian slavery”, promote Holocaust denial, and proudly brandish images of themselves wearing swastikas. This is, of course, amongst mentions of “lebensraum”, “blood and soil”, and use of neo-Nazi runes.

The godmother of this strand of the alt right is arguably Danielle Savoy, whose Twitter account is popular with eco-facists, and has the Twitter bio: “Vegan in the Style of Savitri Devi #MakeEcologyDeepAgain #GreenWing”.

Savitri Devi, dubbed “Hitler’s Priestess” after Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s biography of the same name, was a disciple of Nazism, who believed that Hitler was an “avatar of God” sent down to Earth to save humanity (a reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu). She was a major proponent of deep ecology, the belief that all life has value in itself independent of its usefulness to humans, and became an active animal rights activist alongside her passionate Nazism. During World War II, she and her Indian husband gathered intelligence for the Nazi government in Calcutta. Despite her name, which was adopted in later life, Devi was a Greek-French-Italian European (she changed it after moving to India, in the belief that the country’s discriminatory caste system could keep Aryan purity alive).

The links between Devi’s views and eco-fascism are supported by the fact she’s enjoyed something of a renaissance amongst members of the alt-right in the last several years.

Although focussed on anti-Semitism, eco-facists express a broad range of other racist statements as well. They regularly post pictures of idyllic forest and valley scenes, calling on white people to flock there as a new “ethnostate”. A common practice is to refer to non-white people by the latin versions of animal names. For example, one term used to refer to black people is “Australopithecus” – the technical term for a two million year old, extinct ape.

More plainly, and more succinctly, some eco-fascists just post images, or quote tweet videos. of non-white races harming the environment or just living and existing in predominantly white countries, with simple phrases such as “kill them”.

While many active online communities exist to share gripes, many often don’t have any idea what the solution to their problems should be. Eco-fascism does not have that problem, but the solutions that extend from its ideological routes are chilling.

“If we keep on going like we are we will swallow all resources and seize all uninhabited land to make room for us,” Dan says. “The diminishing of the world population is the only thing that would guarantee the survival of our earth.”

“Human survival is tied to the survival of our earth. The sacrifice of a few so that life can prevail is what is needed.”

Underneath the pictures of idyllic country scapes and environmentally-friendly rhetoric, eco-fascists are pushing a murderous, racist ideology in the name of protecting the planet.