Bookchin used the term to describe increasingly misanthropic tendencies within Deep Ecology, a strain of environmentalism that ‘ascribed an equivalent value to human beings and nonhuman nature, and rejected the premise that people should occupy a privileged place in any moral reckoning’.13 Bookchin was responding to Earth First! co-founder David Foreman’s suggestion that US aid to Ethiopia during the famine was merely delaying the inevitable. Much better, he said, would be to ‘let nature seek its own balance’.14 Bookchin was also responding to an article from the pseudonymous ‘Miss Ann Thropy’, writing in the Earth First! Journal in support of the HIV virus. ‘If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring the human population back to ecological sanity’, wrote the pseudonymous author, ‘it would probably be something like AIDS’.15
This tendency still exists within environmentalism, or at least appears to. Recently, it was summed up neatly by a single image from the early COVID-19 pandemic: ‘Corona is the cure, humans are the disease.’ This last example, however, is more complex: soon after its propagation, it was found to be the output of a decentralized far-right propaganda group called the Hundred Handers, who were attempting to destabilize and mock environmentalist movements.16 However, the most dangerous of all, Bookchin argued, were the new forms of ‘Malthusianism’ and overpopulation discourse. We discuss this tendency further in chapter 1.
Other people have also similarly been called ‘ecofascists’, perhaps most prominently some of the rioters at the storming of the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021.17 Here, the term refers to what has been more aptly called ‘conspirituality’, a mixture of ‘wellness’ beliefs, conspiracy theorizing and appeals to the natural world.18 We address this tendency further in chapter 3.
‘Ecofascism’ is also what the Christchurch mosque attacker called his ideology. He used it to justify murdering 51 Muslims. A few months later, the same justification was used in the killing of 23, largely Latino or Latina, people in El Paso. This book arrives in the long tail of these shootings and is in part an attempt to systematize and explore some of the complicated anxieties that emerged in the wake of these atrocities.19
So how do we define ‘ecofascism’? We must first take a step back. What is ‘fascism’? Our definition attempts to synthesize the insights of the literature, hewing closely to the mid-twentieth-century historical phenomenon rather than trying to extract a trans-historical ideal type.
Fascism is a political form that seeks to revolutionize and reharmonize the nation state through expelling a radically separate ‘Other’ by paramilitary means.20 Because it seeks to legitimize itself through a self-declared intimate connection with a homogeneous ‘people’, it also requires a dense mass-associational society.21 This allows it to circumvent liberal democratic forms of legitimacy. Because its notion of the homogeneous people is totalizing, it seeks to recruit all of life, both in the sense of ‘private life’ and the ‘natural world’, into its project and thus develops a voluminous and highly normative nature politics.22 This vast nature politics is a consequence of the prior encroachment of capitalism into life, also in the senses of ‘private life’ and ‘the natural world’. Thus, fascism is intensely interested in the interface between humans and the natural world, and the ordering of social relations according to nature’s laws. However, because its account of capitalism is mystified and racialized, it does not consistently oppose capitalism’s incursions into life, but ascribes different aspects of this incursion different racial characters. Drawing from nature the bleak lessons of scarcity, competition and dominance, it affirms the ‘natural’ character of racial struggle and the superiority of its own race within it.
The dominance of a few white nations globally in the time of fascism’s appearance was a consequence of the globalized system of capitalism in its colonial form. Yet, at the same time, capitalist expansion destroyed the natural environment and destabilized social relations. One of the most pronounced tensions in fascist thought is, therefore, its ambivalence towards capitalism: it is the source of much that fascism finds appalling, and yet, as the real motor of the domination that fascism affirms, it cannot be entirely rejected. Fascism responds to this ambivalence with a normative racial vitalism: the dominance that capitalism affords is affirmed and naturalized while at the same time its destructiveness towards aspects of nature (and the social relations embedded in nature) is criticized. One effect of the colonial stage of capitalist development is affirmed, the other rejected. We will explore this contradictory response in greater depth in the following chapter.
Fascism in power made use of the authoritarian instruments that the state had accumulated during prior periods of crisis and colonial expansion.23 In doing so, it favoured the interests of the ruling classes. However, it also used these instruments to express its nature politics and attempt to live out nature’s diktats. The homogeneous notion of the people outlined above demands purification, both to destroy the organized working class and the nation’s supposed racial enemies. In its movement, party and state forms, fascism therefore tended towards violence.
It thus has an ideological aspect, a set of political techniques, a dependency on particular historical conditions, and an implicit class aspect, which only partially subsumes its other aspects.24 To restate: fascism is a political form that seeks to revolutionize and reharmonize the nation state through expelling a radically separate ‘Other’ by paramilitary means.
Ecofascism names one aspect of the wider fascist politics: that part which most emphatically tries to affirm its natural basis, whatever the contradictory results thereof. However, we don’t think ‘ecofascism’ is useful for describing any present political actor, except a few on the margins. The main reason is simply the declining utility of the term ‘fascism’. Each of the political forms mentioned in the definition of fascism above (independent mass associational forms, paramilitarism, state authoritarianism, racial politics) certainly exists in places around the globe at the moment, but in each instance, they are only partially coordinated. In many places, their interests are opposed. Of course, this need not be the case forever. The last chapter of this book is an exploration of ecofascism’s potential re-emergence through the climate crisis, but perhaps the main purpose of the book as a whole is to convert popular worry about ‘ecofascism’ into more clear-eyed opposition to the forms of racialized power that are wielded over and through the environment, be they ‘fascist’ or not.
If most of what we discuss is not ‘ecofascism’, then what is it? Other terms have been suggested, such as Jonathan Olsen’s ‘right-wing ecology’, which contains three parts: eco-naturalism (nature as the blueprint for social order), eco-organicism (nature and society viewed as an organism) and eco-authoritarianism (illiberal politics as the best solution to the environmental crises) as its foundational elements.25 As others have argued, Olsen’s focus on Germany makes it difficult for us to extrapolate this to other contexts.26 ‘Far-right ecologism’ has also been used to suggest a link between the natural imaginary of the far right and its social imaginary.27
We also use ‘far-right ecologism’ in this book, although our definition is slightly different. As with our definition of ‘ecofascism’, we must take a step back and answer another question. What is politics? Politics is the struggle to produce or reproduce a set of social roles and relations. Our definition of ‘far right’ locates a particular position within this struggle. More a taxonomic family than a species, we define it 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’. Because of its generality, ‘the far right’ doesn’t have one particular organizing form.
‘Far-right ecologism’
