Ecofascism Isn't New: White Supremacy And Exterminism Have Always Lurked In The Environmental Movement

Ecofascism isn't new: white supremacy and exterminism have always lurked in the environmental movement

It’s easy to think of climate denial as a right-wing phenomenon, but a growing and ultra-violent strain of white-nationalism also embraces climate science, in the worst way possible.

Several of the recent white nationalist mass killers have described themselves as “ecofascists” and/or have deployed ecofascist rhetoric in their manifestos. The short version of ecofascism is that it’s the belief that our planet has a “carrying capacity” that has been exceeded by the humans alive today and that we must embrace “de-growth” in the form of mass extermination of billions of humans, in order to reduce our population to a “sustainable” level.

In some ways, ecofascism is just a manifestation of “peak indifference”: the idea that denial eventually self-corrects, as the debt built up by a refusal to pay attention to a real problem mounts and mounts, until it can no longer be denied. Eventually, the wildfires, floods, diseases (and ensuing refugee crises) overcome all but the most dedicated forms of bad-faith motivated reasoning and self-deception, and people start to switch sides from denying science to embracing it.

But there’s an ugly side to peak indifference: that denialism can give way to nihilism. As activists seek to engage people with the urgent crisis, they describe it (correctly) as an existential threat whose time is drawing nigh. Once people acknowledge the threat, it’s easy for them to conclude that it’s too late to do anything about it (“Well, you were right, those cigarettes did give me lung-cancer, but now that I’ve got it, I might as well enjoy my last few years on earth with a cigarette between my lips”).

Ecofascism is a form of nihilism, one that holds that it’s easier to murder half the people on Earth than it is to reform our industrial practices to make our population sustainable. Leaving aside the obvious moral objections to this posture, there’s also an important technical sense in which it is very wrong: we will need every mind and every body our species have to toil for generations to come, building seawalls, accommodating refugees, treating pandemic sufferers, working in more labor-intensive (and less resource-intensive) forms of agriculture, etc. etc. The exterminst doctrine assumes that we can know before the fact which humans are “surplus” and which ones might have the insight that lets us sequester carbon, cure a disease, or store renewable energy at higher densities.

But ecofascism isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Pastoralist and environmental thinking has always harbored a strain of white supremacy (the Nazi doctrine of Lebensraum was inextricably bound up with an environmental ideology of preserving habits from “excess” people – as well as the wrong kind of people, whose inferior blood made them poor stewards of the land.

The connection between eugenics and environmentalism runs deep. One of the fathers of ecofascist thought is Madison Grant, who worked with Teddy Roosevelt to establish the US system of national parks, and also to establish a whiteness requirement for prospective US immigrants. This thread of thinking – that there are too many people, and the wrong people are breeding – carries forward with the environmental movement, with figures like John Tanton, who started his career as a local Sierra Club official, but went on to found the Federation for American Immigration Reform and co-found the Center for Immigration Studies, warning Americans to defend against a coming “Latin onslaught,” revealing himself to be a full-blown white nationalist who is revered today as the ideological father of the ecofascist movement.

Meanwhile, the eco-left kept having its own brushes with xenophobia. In the early 2000s, the Sierra Club underwent an internecine struggle to reform its official anti-immigration stance and purge the white nationalists and xenophobes from its ranks. In the early 2010, Earth First had to oust co-founder Dave Foreman as his pro-environmental activism was overtaken by his anti-immigrant activism, with splinter groups like “Apply the Brakes” taking hard lines on borders and immigration.

Today, the ecofascist movement is closely aligned with the Trump administration, through links to Steven Miller and Jeff Sessions. The former executive director of FAIR is now serving as Trump’s citizenship and immigration services ombudsman. Ann Coulter demands that Americans choose between either “greening or browning” their future. Richard Spencer wraps white nationalism in green rhetoric, and Gavin McInnes has directly linked environmentalism to anti-immigration ideology.

Pushing back against this are two complementary strains of environmental thought: the bright greens who see democratically managed, urbanized, high technology as the way through the climate crisis (dense cities enable a circular economy, heal the metabolic rift, and leave more land free for habitat and carbon-sequestering trees); and the climate justice movement, which recognizes that poor, racialized people are the least responsible parties for carbonization, and the most vulnerable to the climate emergency, and emphasizes climate remediation steps that are led by, and responsive to, the priorities of indigenous people and the Global South.

https://boingboing.net/2019/08/19/grand-lorax.html

TRUMP TO CAPITOL MOB: “So go home. We love you. You’re very special.”

I fear it really is time to invoke the 25th Amendment.

Trump apparently doesn’t know when to stop. If he was capable of putting the nation before his own needs, he would have forcefully condemned what his angry followers did in his name today at the Capitol.

Instead, Trump weakly told the Capitol mob to “go home” while at the same time repeating his continued lie that the election was stolen from him.

But I think the thing that really got to me was Trump’s saying to these would-be insurgents,

“We love you.”

Yes, Trump “loves” his “very special” insurgents.

This is particularly galling because the “Law & Order President” had a very different response to the Black Lives Matter protesters:

And how about Trump also telling the mob,

“I know your pain. I know you’re hurt.”

This from a man who has expressed minimal empathy in the past year for the nearly 360,000 Americans who have died of Covid-19.

Here’s the video and transcript of Trump’s appalling speech to the Capitol mob this afternoon:

“I know your pain. I know you’re hurt.

“We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side.

“But you have to go home now. We have to have peace.

“We have to have law and order. We have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt.”

“It’s a very tough period of time. There’s never been a time like this where such a thing happened. Where they could take it away from all of us. From me, from you, from our country.

"This was a fraudulent election. But we can’t play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace.

“So go home. We love you. You’re very special.

“You’ve seen what happens. You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil.

“I know how you feel. But go home and go home in peace.”

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witchvspatriarchy

4 years ago

For anyone not keeping up, Trump held a rally earlier today, told his supporters to storm the Capitol building with him, then went to hide in the White House.

Protestors tore through 4 layers of barricades and are fighting cops to get into the Capitol building. A possible bomb was spotted and the Madison and Cannon buildings have been evacuated while a bomb squad was called in. And just now the Capitol has gone into lockdown.

But also Pence issued a statement that he is not doing anything with the electors and McConnell denounced Republican senators’ efforts to stop counting the electoral votes.

And as I was writing this, the protesters breached the Capitol and Pence was pulled from the Senate chamber.

Tags

fuck

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witchvspatriarchy

3 years ago

Feminism is believing Johnny. It is believing victims. He is literally going against the patriarchal status quo by doing this. What Amber is doing is setting back women so far. I would rather die than fall for those obvious white women crocodile tears. The evidence is right there bitch

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witchvspatriarchy

5 years ago

dead

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femininity and strenth do not cancel each other out

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witchvspatriarchy

3 years ago

I think I'll just rant about this so tw for transphobia and some swearing ahead

•••

I'm SO damn sick of people defending JKR. From the "It wasn't that bad" to the cis(!) people saying "What she said wasn't transphobic", fuck all of that.

And fuck cis people making it all about themselves when trans people talk about how harmful JKR is.

The first person I ever came out to as non binary was my best friend at the time. Not even a week later she talked to me about how much she loved Harry Potter and all. Which was fine by me, she's allowed to like whatever the hell she wants, I can't police her.

However, personally, it makes me uncomfortable to talk about JKR's stuff cuz her views just bother me. So, I just said "Sorry, but I personally try to stay away from Harry Potter and JKR in general because she's a terf".

Cue: Cis person making it about themselves.

"Oh so you say I'm transphobic?" "Harry Potter meant a lot to many people when they were younger, do you just want to take that away from them?" "Stop calling me a TERF, I'm not." "You're really overreacting here."

Mind you, I never once said that the people who like Harry Potter hate trans people. I just said I don't like JKR because she's a TERF.

She went on to defend the life out of it like "It's not gonna change that much if I support it anyway" "It means so much to me, I don't wanna just stop consuming it" "Just separate the art from the artist" "Well, I can't control my hyperfixations" all that stuff that you constantly hear from people trying to justify themselves.

There was no "I acknowledge that JKR is bad and while I still want to enjoy the series, I try to do so in a way that doesn't support her" or anything. In the end, I was the one apologizing to my friend because I dared to "imply she's a bad person".

And it's not even just her who acted that way - every time I see someone criticize JKR, the comments are flooded with these people getting defensive and angry at the person speaking up about it.

It's incredibly tiring when I as a non binary person have to constantly apologize for making cis people uncomfortable just because I try to speak up against a TERF - not against them, just against JKR.

-------

I'd like to also take two points that are constantly being raised because they're starting to get tiring.

"Separate the art from the artist", "death of the author" and "Hatsune Miku wrote Harry Potter":

It isn't that damn easy. Death of the author doesn't work because JKR is still alive and well, and probably will be for at least another 15 or so years. That woman is only 56 years old. She's gonna be around for a while. And for that time, she will continue to profit off every cent you spend on official HP merch, on her books, her movies and games. You keep giving her a platform that she can continue to use for her blatant transphobia.

Additionally to that, you don't need me to tell you that her transphobia isn't the only issue with her and her works, because lots of people from those groups have ready explained the racism and antisemitism in a far better way than I ever could. You can't entirely filter out her harmful views. You can't separate art from artist because that means you'll stop critically consuming her works because "well Hatsune Miku wrote those books so it's nothing bad." No. If you HAVE to consume her stuff you better acknowledge that it's not all sunshine and rainbows and be honest with yourself.

"It's my hyperfixation, I can't control that":

I want to make it clear first that I'm ND myself. I know how hyperfixations work. I know it's not the same for everyone.

That being said, stop using you being ND as an excuse. It's not.

Because unless your hyperfixation is "Giving money to transphobic people", the same applies to you - You don't have to actively give her money. You're allowed to have your hyperfixations, but being ND doesn't mean you can't consume content in a responsible way.

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witchvspatriarchy

5 years ago

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quarantine coronavirus covidー19 pandemic amlo is an idiot the worst president mexico ever had

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witchvspatriarchy

4 years ago

Jojo Siwa Explains The Risk Of Coming Out Publicly She Felt When Talking To Her Girlfriend Beforehand,

Jojo Siwa explains the risk of coming out publicly she felt when talking to her girlfriend beforehand, but then emphasizes how happy she is that she did! 🌈❤️

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witchvspatriarchy

5 years ago

joaquin phoenix just slayed my life

what a PERFORMANCE

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joker I LOVE IT the joker joaquin phoenix joker 2019 it was awesome i wanna watch it again

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witchvspatriarchy

5 years ago

Listen I would die for Jameela Jamil

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big female energy women of wonder

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witchvspatriarchy

5 years ago

After a shitty 5 months things are starting to look good... I have an audition to be a singer at a cruise, any suggestions on what I could sing? I have no idea the kind of music they play at cruise ships 😅

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personal advice is appreciated please give me suggestions advice is welcome

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