Abstract
Few could claim that the 21st century literature on the impacts of climate change has been short on predictions, or that the ongoing growth in international numbers of climate refugees and immigrants was unexpected. Yet much of political orthodoxy has nonetheless been caught off guard in recent years by the opportunistic success of backward-looking nationalism and right-wing xenophobic authoritarianism, manifested in political figures such as Victor Orbán, Recep Erdoğan and Donald Trump as well as in phenomena such as the Brexit vote. In this engaging volume, Sam Moore and Alex Roberts examine and analyse the past, current situation and possible futures of forms of far-right politics that lay claim to some form of ecological pedigree.
The preceding formulation of ‘far-right politics’ is carefully chosen: despite helping themselves to the cannily catchpenny term ‘ecofascism’ in the book title, the authors actually have a broader focus. The real object of their analysis is what they call ‘far-right ecologism’, conceived as a sort of taxonomic family and defined as: those forms of political behaviour which work on or advocate for the reproduction of capitalist social roles and relations on the basis of ethnic nationalism, racism, xenophobia or antisemitism, often through the application of violent means at odds with principles of formal equality and thus at least publicly unavailable to the liberal state (p. 13).
In terms of structure, the book consists of five chapters which are bookended by an explanatory introduction and a reflective conclusion, with much of the latter geared to justice-based strategies by which the threat of the far right may be countered. Chapter 1 offers an effective and generally well-researched overview of the history of far-right ecologism, beginning with the origins of capitalism, its dynamic of continually cheapening naturalised inputs and its colonial history, noting the ways in which notions of scarcity, transformative initiative and conservation management were intertwined with and informed by the ideas of Locke and Malthus at different times; this leads into their treatment of the racial angle. Imaginatively, they point to the neglected but important figure of Madison Grant, who influenced Teddy Roosevelt’s immigration and National Parks policies while being a convinced racialist and eugenicist. Grant’s 1915 book The Passing of the Great Race was an Aryan supremacist tract that drew enthusiastic praise from Adolf Hitler, thus constituting a key link between American racism and German fascism, and the authors draw the historical story out further to also note subsequent developments in Britain and Italy as well as Germany and the USA, extending all the way to the present day. Observing the consistent ways in which ‘the environmental effects of industrial development were and are displaced onto racialised people, who are then blamed for their environment’s degradation’ (pp. 35–36), they note how these processes inspire environmental justice campaigns on the political left while also being used as justifications for racist forms of exclusion and inequality by the far right. Climate change denialism feeds into this for the latter, for it allows ‘the cataclysmic social effects of natural disasters in the Global South, exacerbated by climate change, to seem like the consequences of racialized ineptitude, and not the effects of unprecedented anthropogenic climate change’ (p. 42). With the historical context set in place, Chapter 2 looks at the contemporary state of play on the far right and the various ways in which nature is conceived there. I found the fivefold categorisation of different forms of climate change denialism, ranging from trend denialism (the claim that there is no net heating going on) through to urgency denialism (the change may be happening, but we don’t need to do anything yet) to serve a helpful mapping function, especially as it is complemented by a helpful examination of the Bolsonaro government which notes the ways in which regimes like those of Bolsonaro and Trump speak with a forked tongue on the subject. Climate change is simultaneously denied as a phenomenon that requires mitigation, but its social symptoms, such as mass migration, are exploited to legitimate increased authoritarian control. Though the authors acknowledge that not all far-right groups are denialists, and indeed devote an interesting section to ways in which such groups as France’s National Rally, Hungary’s Fidesz and India’s BJP have trodden ambiguous paths, they complete the chapter with a broader examination of the authoritarian temptation in environmentalism. This last is exemplified by familiar names such as Ophuls and Hardin as well as more recent figures such as Jørgen Randers and David Shearman, with the observation that the actual track record of authoritarian regimes such as China gives little support to the view that greater coerciveness yields better environmental results. Chapter 3 examines the presence of far-right ecologism online, noting its intertwining with conspiracy theory, masculinist ideology, and racist strands of neo-paganism; while most often among these groups nature is invoked ‘as a regulatory norm for how humans should behave’ rather than as showing ‘sustained interest in the natural world’ (p. 73), there are also strands of supposedly neo-Darwinist primitivism where it is ‘the tension between a natural irrepressible eternal truth and the desperate need to act in a radical fashion to recover it that animates far-right nature politics’ (p. 86, emphases original).
Shifting from shared ideas to resultant activities, the (rather brief) Chapter 4 focuses on the lethal violence propagated and practised on the far right, starting with a discussion of the Christchurch mass killing, where the gunman explicitly described himself as an ecofascist. Noting the prevalence of neo-Malthusian anxieties in the conspiracist Great Replacement Theory, whereby white Europeans are supposedly endangered by differential birthrates, the authors observe two alternative sources of far-right violence, both inspired by an expected crash: ‘a rearguard action to ward off collapse versus an opportunistic strike to bring about collapse’ (p. 93), sometimes operating in the same terrorist group. It is hard to read many of the far-right’s views here without being struck as much by their persistent self-contradictions as by their brutality, and the chapter closes with reflections on the relationship between such violence and its meaning for wider far-right movements. In Chapter 5, perhaps the most interesting of the book, the authors examine the possibility of a genuine ecofascism coming to power under the range of three possible broad institutional responses to climate change, as well as speculating on the future of far-right ecologism more generally. That far-right ecologism is and will continue to be a danger is hard to deny, and in the conclusion, the authors urge a reforged spirit of solidarity in the cause of social justice, a solidarity that requires ‘a particular understanding of our unity in nature’ (p. 133), arguing in eco-Marxist fashion that the fundamental basis of ecological crises lie in ‘humans fulfilling capitalism’s imperative to endless expansion of production and extraction through the cheapening of nature’ (p.134, emphasis original), an imperative that needs to be opposed by ‘attempting to re-common the world’ and ‘oppose ecologies of domination with ecologies of liberation’ (p. 136).
For a short volume, this is an extremely rich work, of which I have only been able to give a general outline here. It will be of considerable significance for scholars of far-right movements and for those concerned with the interplay of ecological politics with authoritarian orientations more generally.