While it’s easy to overuse the term “ecofascism,” applying it to things that don’t necessarily deserve it (the debate might be a little like the one I’ve been following over whether Putinist Russia qualifies as fascist), it’s important for anyone involved in environmental issues to have a sense of where the term does apply and how it reflects a longer tradition.
Anti-fascist theorist Shane Burley has produced a bibliography, shared on Twitter, that presents a solid and up-to-date starting point for getting this background (even if a few of its sources do occasionally overreach).
If what you want is something lighter in weight and breezier in substance (i.e., cartoonish and introductory), there’s the Anti-Creep Climate Initiative’s Against the Ecofascist Creep. Here’s some background on it.
But if you want something more in-depth and analytical, I recommend Sam Moore’s and Alex Roberts’s new book The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right (Polity, 2022), which Burley mentions only in passing. The book is relatively short (136 pages plus notes), but captures many dimensions of “far-right ecologism,” which, despite the book’s title, is the authors’ preferred term. As Balša Lubarda notes in a review in Environmental Politics, this term better captures the range of phenomena we can expect to grow at the right end of the political spectrum as climate change intensifies.
The book was completed during the Covid pandemic, and the authors perceptively point out in their introduction that what they call “climate systems breakdown” — a much better term than the oversimplified “global warming,” but also less ambiguous than “climate change” —
might actually look much more like the pandemic did: mass death events, sudden stresses on global supply chains, abrupt and previously unthinkable changes to everyday life, massive discrepancies in vulnerability across class and racial groups, a generally increased anxiety, racially displaced blame, the tightening of surveillance regimes, a sudden return to governments acting exclusively and aggressively in their national and class interest, the mainstreaming of conspiracy culture, talk of the end of globalization, a retreat to protectionism, unprecedented measures that suddenly seem entirely necessary, the sudden collapse of livelihoods for billions of the world’s poor, and a deep economic shock worldwide. (2-3)
The authors perceptively analyze the interplay between three forms of right-wing response to climate systems breakdown: “fossil capital,” with its heretofore commitments to climate change denial; authoritarian conservatism, with its “securitization” of the environment; and the looming arrival of far-right “climate collapse cults,” as presaged by mass murderers like the Christchurch mosque attacker, the El Paso mass shooter, and the recent Buffalo shooter.
As a “severe risk multiplier,” climate systems breakdown will affect human societies in variegated ways. In their conclusions, the authors discuss the concepts of nature that feed far-right politics as well as their alternatives, and the “robust” forms of solidarity — across human societies, “at and across borders,” to the “more-than-human world,” and “across huge time-scales” — that a more just politics will need to insist on. Regarding the first, they write,
Any climate politics will mobilize an idea of nature. Throughout this book, we have noted ways in which images of nature have been mobilized by far-right actors: the idea of a pristine, inexhaustible nature that underpinned the expansion of colonial exploitation, the proposition of a mystical relationship between an ethnic group and a landscape, the application of methods of animal breeding to human reproduction, and both the absolutization of the rights of humans and their total denigration. We must resist those ideas of nature that are hierarchical, parochial, tied to a certain race or divided into essentially killable and unkillable parts. (130)
As alternatives to these, they note a variety of sources for a more adequate politics of nature:
Where might we find a better understanding of nature? The sources are many and varied: indigenous knowledge, the conceptual resources developed under the frameworks of social ecology and ecosocialism and, perhaps most importantly of all, biology and climate science, as well as a critical understanding of their histories. (130)
Regular readers of this blog will know of some others that could be added to this list, including process-relational philosophies, variations of liberationist Mahayana Buddhism, and other conceptions.
In contrast to the common predilection to pose climate change and the Anthropocene as matters of “humanity versus nature,” the authors write:
It is not, perhaps, a relationship between ‘humans’ and nature that we should understand as the cause of our predicament, but the relationship between human activity and nature. And it is not human activity as a whole that we need to contend with but humans fulfilling capitalism’s imperative to endless expansion of production and extraction through the cheapening of nature: extracting oil and rare earth minerals, radically simplifying ecologies to afford extraction, burning the Amazon for cattle farming and so on. (134)
The “cheapening of nature” is indeed is at the heart of the Anthropocene predicament, and I think the authors are correct that what is needed in response are “ecologies of liberation” that are “planetary” in scope, though I would add that must also be local and regional in application. The book’s great virtue is that it shows that a just climate politics must be aware of the unjust climate politics it will have to oppose and overcome at every level — local, regional, national, and global.
Here’s an interview with the two authors on Nick Breeze’s rather doomish ClimateGenn podcast:
