The world is burning. Decades of greenhouse gas emissions have taken a hefty toll on the health of our planet, dramatically increasing the frequency of extreme weather events like wildfires, heat waves, and floods. People are fed up: according to 2021 Pew Research Center data, a large majority of citizens in affluent countries are concerned about the effects of climate change. High-profile protests, such as the “climate strikes” staged by groups like Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future, further demonstrate the extent of dissatisfaction with the state of the climate.
Amid the turbulence lies stark ideological divisions. Some observers have predicted that environmental deterioration could help “launch socialists to unprecedented power” around the world. But this vaunted convergence of environmentalism and leftism is far from inevitable. In fact, environmental activism has long been haunted by far-right thinking. Since the nineteenth century, far-right environmentalists have sought to address environmental problems by scapegoating and punishing members of marginalized groups. Even today, environmentalist talking points have been used to defend policies that would disproportionately target inhabitants of the Global South, including strict immigration restrictions and compulsory birth control. If an equitable, compassionate climate movement is to prevail, it must explicitly disavow this exclusionary tendency. Otherwise, we risk aggravating the inequalities that already plague our warming world.
The association between environmentalism and right-wing politics is often overlooked. A lot of people—which, until recently, included me—aren’t even aware that this relationship exists. After all, Republicans aren’t exactly known for being tree-huggers, and plenty of research documents the connections between climate denialism and conservative beliefs, particularly among Americans. But in reality, far-right environmentalism has ample historical precedent. The American conservation movement, for example, was long guided by racist reasoning. As environmental sociologist Dorceta Taylor observes, conservationists were driven into nature by their frustration with the increasing heterogeneity of American cities. The conservationists’ signature achievement—the establishment of the national parks—was rooted in the forced relocation of Native American groups and the erasure of their cultural history. Sites like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon were seized from Native Americans and advertised to the public as “‘empty,’ ‘pristine,’ land ‘untouched by human hands.’”
Leading conservationists supplied a rationale for this thievery. John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, wrote of the “‘strangely dirty and irregular life’” and “uncleanliness” of Native Americans and reassured park visitors that “most of them are dead or civilized into useless oblivion.” Many conservationists drew a direct line between their environmental activism and ethnocentric beliefs. Charles Goethe, an influential member of the Save the Redwoods League — and, incidentally, one of the league’s eleven known eugenicists — defended his beliefs by tying the “conservation of humans” to the “conservation of other members of the environment.” Just as certain species and landscapes deserved protection, Goethe thought, so, too, did certain kinds of people — that is, people who looked and behaved like Goethe. Other people, however, stood in nature’s way, and anyone who stood in nature’s way had to be cleared out. Goethe and his fellow conservationists were genuinely concerned with the health of the environment, but their prejudices steered this concern down a deeply problematic route, precipitating seizures of indigenous land and attempts to expunge entire populations from the gene pool.
In addition, German nationalists bolstered their ideas with concepts borrowed from environmental thinking. As Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier point out in their seminal text on ecofascism, the term “ecology” was coined by a German zoologist known for his staunch support of racial eugenics and membership in the proto-Nazist Thule Society. Haeckel was influenced by the philosophy of the völkisch movement, an anti-urban, anti-industrial, anti-modern tradition that “preached a return to the land, to the simplicity and wholeness of a life attuned to nature’s purity.” Völkicsh dogma found official expression in Blut und Boden (blood and soil), the Nazi-sponsored idea that “German blood . . . engendered an exclusive claim to the sacred German soil.” Heinrich Himmler appealed to this idea in a decree outlining the settlement of captured Polish lands: “The peasant of our racial stock has always carefully endeavored to increase the natural powers of the soil, plants, and animals, and to preserve the balance of the whole of nature.” The concept of Blut und Boden—which has become a popular slogan among American neo-Nazis—was also weaponized against Jews, who were regarded as “a rootless, wandering people, incapable of any true relationship with the land.”
Far-right rhetoric also appeared in the work of prominent twentieth-century environmental thinkers. Ecologist Garrett Hardin, author of the foundational 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons”, introduced the disgraceful notion of “lifeboat ethics”, which called for the abandonment of “the poor of the world” to stave off resource depletion. Ideas like this—along with his support for eugenics, opposition to immigration, and declaration that “freedom to breed is intolerable”—earned Hardin a designation as a white nationalist by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Hardin was not the only famous ecologist to engage in racist histrionics about the perils of overpopulation. In his hugely influential book The Population Bomb, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich bemoaned the “hellish aspect” of a crowd he witnessed in the slums of Delhi: “people eating, people washing, people sleeping. . . . People, people, people, people.” It was this sight, Ehrlich wrote, that helped him “emotionally” grasp the stakes of overpopulation. One wonders if Ehrlich would have reacted in similar fashion to the crowds of downtown Barcelona or Copenhagen. But racist sentiment aside, there’s a deeper issue with Ehrlich’s tale: he had become so fixated with the state of the natural world that the sight of a large yet unthreatening group of people drove him to revulsion.
Far-right environmentalism remains salient in the twenty-first century. In Europe, nativist parties have seized on climate change as a pretext to curb immigration. The fascist British National Party (BNP), for instance, declares itself to be the “only true Green party” in Britain on the basis of its conviction “that overpopulation—whose primary driver is immigration . . . is the cause of the destruction of our environment.” The BNP and its Continental confrères claim that the consumption habits of immigrants, coupled with the mobilization of resources required to support them, constitute an untenable environmental burden. The right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP) asserts that “an immigration stop is the best remedy for the further deterioration of our open spaces.” French National Rally (RN) leader Marine Le Pen, in language disturbingly similar to Blut und Boden, alleges that “Those who are nomadic . . . do not care about the environment; they have no homeland.”
These kinds of statements fly in the face of fact. A comprehensive study by sociologists Carmel Price and Ben Feldmeyer found that “immigration does not contribute to increased air pollution, either directly or indirectly.” A US-focused study by environmental sociologist Guizhen Ma confirms this finding, adding that “immigrants, in general, used less energy, drove less, and recycled more than U.S.-born people.” Despite figuring prominently in the eschatologies of some population scientists, dire predictions about overpopulation have never come to pass. Paul Ehrlich was wrong about the threat posed by population growth—so wrong, in fact, that he infamously lost a bet about it. And there’s no reason to believe that immigration would inevitably lead to overcrowding. So long as women—no matter where they live—are granted the educational and medical resources required to manage their reproductive health, the environmental impact of immigration would likely be minimal. Immigration doesn’t make more people; it just moves people around.
For the most part, it’s climate-induced exigencies that have driven immigration, not the other way around. According to the UN Human Rights Council, an average of 22.5 million people have been displaced by climate-related disasters every year since 2008, a tally that doesn’t include victims of more gradual processes, such as desertification and sea level rise. But these inconvenient truths haven’t hindered the spread of far-right canards about environmentally irresponsible immigrants. Such language has even infiltrated the messaging of ostensibly progressive politicians: Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, leader of the Social Democrats, has cited the environmental impacts of immigration and overpopulation (among Africans, specifically) to defend strict sentencing laws against migrants living in state-provided housing.
It’s conceivable that many of these racist appeals to environmentalism come from a place of opportunism. Fox News host Tucker Carlson, for example, has both decried the environmental impact of “mass migration” and dismissed climate change as left-wing propaganda. Carlson isn’t out to save the planet; he’s out to own the libs and cast aspersions on the downtrodden. But whether or not it’s ultimately sincere, such rhetoric can have devastating real-world consequences. The perpetrator of the March 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings was a self-proclaimed “eco-fascist” who wrote a lengthy manifesto in which he linked climate change to immigration. In August of that same year, another shooter claimed 23 victims at an El Paso Walmart, leaving behind a screed in which he blamed immigrants for pollution. In his own manifesto, the Buffalo shooter proclaims that “The left has controlled all discussion regarding environmental preservation whilst simultaneously presiding over the continued destruction of the natural environment itself through mass immigration.”
Far-right environmentalism has also encouraged violence at a more structural level. The harsh immigration restrictions imagined by Le Pen and Juvin would only worsen the effects of climate change in the Global South. The IPCC’s most recent report deems Africa, South Asia, and Central and South America to be “hotspots of high human vulnerability,” projecting that climate change will impair food security, damage infrastructure, and reduce water access in each of these regions. These conditions, the IPCC predicts, will likely lead to higher levels of involuntary migration—but where would these migrants go in a world controlled by isolationists? A far-right climate movement might even demand compulsory birth control in the developing world. The youth wing of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) recently endorsed this approach, proposing “a one-child policy in developing countries to ‘counter one of the greatest climate problems, overpopulation.’”
A reactionary climate movement, if empowered, would usher in a draconian future for the bulk of the world’s population—and to little avail. Members of poorer nations have contributed comparatively little to the climate crisis; according to Oxfam International, the poorest 50% of the world’s population are “responsible for just 7% of cumulative emissions.” The richest 10%, on the other hand, have contributed 52% of such emissions. An effective transnational climate movement would have to honestly address and attack these disparities. To blame the victims—immigrants, poor people, and inhabitants of developing countries—is both unjust and counterproductive. We should instead focus on the capitalistic and colonial origins of the climate crisis—for, as the IPCC itself points out in its new report, the impacts of climate change have been “driven by patterns of intersecting socioeconomic development . . . inequity, marginalization, historical and ongoing patterns of inequity such as colonialism, and governance.”
What can be done to stem the rise of far-right environmentalism? The IPCC rightfully stresses “the need for international cooperation and . . . governments at all levels working with communities . . . [and] developing partnerships with traditionally marginalised groups.” Climate change is a global problem, and it will require a global response. Appeals to nationalism and isolationism must be met with international resolve. This will require a massive exercise in radical empathy—and if a climate movement is to have any hope of withstanding exclusionary currents, empathy must take center stage. Empathy is the only antidote to the rabid anti-humanism that suffuses the discourse of far-right environmentalists. Whereas a far-right climate movement would pit nature against humanity (or, perhaps more accurately, “other” humans), an empathetic movement would seek to defend humanity and nature alike from the depredations of unchecked industrial capitalism.
Most of all, an emergent climate movement will have to embrace hope if it wants to dispel its baser instincts. Fear, rage, nihilism—these are a demagogue’s favorite emotions, because they are so easily misdirected against innocent bystanders. Apocalyptic fear-mongering shouldn’t be a central plank of the environmentalist platform. Instead, climate activists must emphasize the need for change, the possibility of progress, and the essential worth of every human being.
Image by Markus Spiske is licensed under the Unsplash License.
