The modern environmental movement and the far-right movement might appear to be on opposing sides of the political ideology spectrum. But overlap does exist and researchers say it's growing. Christian Aslund/EyeEm/Getty Images hide caption
The modern environmental movement and the far-right movement might appear to be on opposing sides of the political ideology spectrum. But overlap does exist and researchers say it's growing.
At first glance, the modern environmental movement and the far-right movement including anti-immigrant and white supremacist groups might appear to be on opposing sides of the political ideology spectrum. But overlap does exist.
Researchers say this intersection between the far-right and environmentalism is bigger than many people realize and it's growing.
"As climate change kind of turns up the heat, there's going to be all sorts of new kinds of political contestations around these issues," Alex Amend said.
Amend used to track hate groups at the Southern Poverty Law Center. These days he researches eco-fascism. He says once you start to look at this overlap, you find two big misconceptions.
"One that the right is always a climate denialist movement. And two that environmental politics are always going to be left-leaning," Amend said.
Conservative leaders from Rush Limbaugh to former President Donald Trump have certainly denied climate change in the past.
But today, a different argument is becoming more common on the conservative political fringe.
On the podcast "The People's Square," a musician who goes by Stormking described his vision for a far-right reclamation of environmentalism.
"Right-wing environmentalism in this country is mostly especially in more modern times an untried attack vector," Stormking said. "And it has legs, in my opinion."
"Attack vector" is an apt choice of words because this ideology has been used in literal attacks.
In El Paso, Texas, in 2019, a mass shooter killed more than 20 people and wounded more than 20 others. He told authorities he was targeting Mexicans. He also left behind a manifesto.
"The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations," the shooter wrote. "If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more sustainable."
Abel Valenzuela, local of El Paso, meditates in front of the makeshift memorial for shooting victims at the Cielo Vista Mall Walmart in El Paso, Texas, on August 8, 2019. Paul Ratje/AFP/Getty Images hide caption
He titled that manifesto, "An Inconvenient Truth," which was also the name of Al Gore's Oscar-winning 2006 documentary about climate change.
Anti-immigrant environmental arguments pop up in more official places too like court filings.
Last July, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich filed a lawsuit against the federal government. He claimed that the Biden administration's decision to stop building the border wall was a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.
"I wish people like, you know, the environmentalists cared half as much about human beings and what's going on in Arizona as they do, or they supposedly do, about plant and wildlife, Brnovich said in an interview with KTAR News.
Brnovich argued that because migrants leave trash in the desert, a border wall is needed to protect the environment.
"We know that there's information out there that says that every time someone crosses the border, they're leaving between six and eight pounds of trash in the desert," he said. "That trash is a threat to wildlife. It's a threat to natural habitats."
Mainstream environmental organizations take the opposite view that a wall will harm ecosystems on the border. A federal judge ultimately tossed out Brnovich's case.
Workers reinforce a section of the U.S.-Mexico border fence, as seen from eastern Tijuana, Mexico, on January 18, 2019. Guillermo Arias/AFP/Getty Images hide caption
This strain of anti-immigrant environmentalism may be growing today but it isn't new. And that brings up another misconception that environmental politics are always left-leaning.
The truth is, eco-fascism has a long history, both in the U.S. and in Europe. Blair Taylor is a researcher at the Institute for Social Ecology. He said even the Nazis saw themselves as environmentalists.
"The idea that natural purity translates into racial or national purity that was one that was very central to the Nazis' environmental discourse of blood and soil," Taylor said.
In the 90s when Taylor started reading books about the environmental movement, he stumbled upon some ideas that seemed very wrong.
"There is this earlier very nativist, exclusionary and racist history of environmental thought," Taylor said. "It was very much based on this idea of nature as a violent competitive and ultimately very hierarchical domain where, you know, white Europeans were at the top. So that's been rediscovered, I think, by the alt-right."
Taylor was kind of horrified to learn that in some ways, the environmental movement was founded on ideas of white supremacy.
The word "ecology" was even coined by a German scientist, Ernst Haeckel, who also contributed to the Nazis' ideas about a hierarchy of races. This history applies to the United States, too.
A view of the Lower Falls at the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone National Park on May 11, 2016. Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images hide caption
Dorceta Taylor is a professor at Yale University and author of The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection.
Taylor's research helped reveal parts of American environmental history that had not been widely known.
"We see a taking of Native American lands to turn into park spaces that are described as empty, untouched by human hands, pristine, to be protected," Taylor said.
"Environmental leaders are very, very at fault for setting up this narrative around, you know, untouched spaces. And to preserve them, Native people must be removed, the lands taken from them and put under federal or state protection ... so this is where the language of preservation really crosses over into this narrative of exclusion."
Taylor read the notes and diaries of early American environmentalists and learned that the movement to preserve natural spaces in the U.S. was partly motivated by a backlash against the racial mixing of American cities.
"White elites, especially white male elites, wanted to leave the spaces where there was racial mixing," she said. "And this discomfort around racially mixed neighborhoods infuses the discourse of those early conservation leaders."
John Muir was a Scottish-born American naturalist, engineer, writer and pioneer of conservation. He campaigned for preservation of U.S. wilderness including Yosemite Valley and Sequoia National Park, and founded The Sierra Club. Universal History Archive/Getty Images hide caption
The connections between environmentalism and xenophobia in the U.S. are long and deep. In recent years, some prominent groups, including the Sierra Club, have begun to publicly confront their own exclusionary history.
"We're not just going to pretend that the problem's not happening. We're actively going to do the responsible thing and begin to address it," said Hop Hopkins, the Sierra Club's director of organizational transformation.
The organization went through its own transformation. In the 20th century, the group embraced racist ideas that overpopulation was the root of environmental harm.
In fact, in 1998 and again in 2004, anti-immigrant factions tried to stage a hostile takeover of the Sierra Club's national board. They failed, but the organization learned a lesson from those experiences you can't just ignore these ideas or wish them away.
"We need to be educating our base about these dystopian ideas and the scapegoating that's being put upon Black, indigenous and people of color and working-class communities, such that they're able to identify these messages that may sound like they're environmental, but we need to be able to discern that they're actually very racist," Hopkins said.
It's common to come across people who say they believe in the environmental movement and the racial justice movement, but don't believe the movements have anything to do with each other. That disbelief is why Hopkins said he does the work he does.
That work goes beyond identifying the racism and bigotry in the environmental movement. It also means articulating a vision that can compete with eco-fascism. Because as climate change increases, more people will go looking for some narrative to address their fears of collapse, says Professor Emerita Betsy Hartmann of Hampshire College.
"If you have this apocalyptic doomsday view of climate change, the far-right can use that doomsday view to its own strategic advantage," Hartmann said.
In that way, the threat of eco-fascism has something in common with climate change itself.
The problem is visible now and there is time to address it, but the longer people wait, the harder it's going to be.
Read this article:
The far-right's vision of environmentalism has long roots in the US - NPR
- The Grotesque Slander of Comparing Gaza Protesters to Neo-Nazis - The New Republic - April 29th, 2024 [April 29th, 2024]
- Joe Alt Is A Strong Fit For The Los Angeles Chargers - Sports Illustrated - April 29th, 2024 [April 29th, 2024]
- How The Manosphere Of Alt Right Content Targets Boys - BuzzFeed - April 29th, 2024 [April 29th, 2024]
- Say Hello To Joe Alt, Future Hall Of Fame Right Tackle - Barstool Sports - April 29th, 2024 [April 29th, 2024]
- An Alt-Right Icon Just Gave the Single Dumbest Seinfeld Take Ever - Cracked.com - April 4th, 2024 [April 4th, 2024]
- Ireland & Wales Rugby Fans Take On Alt-Right On Twitter - Balls.ie - February 18th, 2024 [February 18th, 2024]
- Doja Cat Reacts to Backlash Over Alt-Right Comedian T-Shirt: 'It Didn't Affect the World' - TooFab - December 19th, 2023 [December 19th, 2023]
- Doja Cat Responds To Backlash Over Alt-Right T-Shirt: 'It's Not An Attack' - HipHopDX - December 19th, 2023 [December 19th, 2023]
- Marvel and DC Writer Mark Waid Rejects Mark Millar's Call To Root Out Comic Book 'Cancel Pigs', Dishonestly Paints ... - Bounding Into Comics - December 19th, 2023 [December 19th, 2023]
- Maudlin Strangers unveil intense alt rock banger Im Not In The Right Mind [Video] - EARMILK - December 19th, 2023 [December 19th, 2023]
- The Dark Economics of Russell Brand - WIRED - September 23rd, 2023 [September 23rd, 2023]
- Pro-Kremlin Propagandist Ties to White Nationalist Movement ... - Southern Poverty Law Center - September 23rd, 2023 [September 23rd, 2023]
- Opinion | How to Argue Against Identity Politics Without Turning Into ... - The New York Times - September 23rd, 2023 [September 23rd, 2023]
- Anna Wintour: 'I just have to make sure things are being done right' - Financial Times - September 23rd, 2023 [September 23rd, 2023]
- Opinion | Donald Trumps Abortion Shell Game - The New York Times - September 23rd, 2023 [September 23rd, 2023]
- How to Treat Right-Wing Violence in the U.S. - The New Yorker - August 30th, 2023 [August 30th, 2023]
- Scalise, No. 2 House Republican, Says He Has Blood Cancer - The New York Times - August 30th, 2023 [August 30th, 2023]
- Emails reveal Secret Service contacts with Oath Keepers - Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington - August 30th, 2023 [August 30th, 2023]
- How Trump's Election Lies Left the Michigan G.O.P. Broken and ... - The New York Times - August 30th, 2023 [August 30th, 2023]
- Alt Right: A Primer on the New White Supremacy | ADL - March 2nd, 2023 [March 2nd, 2023]
- The Dangerous Subtlety of the Alt-Right Pipeline - March 2nd, 2023 [March 2nd, 2023]
- The Alt-Right Manipulated My Comic. Then A.I. Claimed It. - March 2nd, 2023 [March 2nd, 2023]
- Richard Spencer: Five Things to Know - Anti-Defamation League - February 20th, 2023 [February 20th, 2023]
- From Alt Right to Alt Lite: Naming the Hate - Anti-Defamation League - February 18th, 2023 [February 18th, 2023]
- Alt-right Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com - February 18th, 2023 [February 18th, 2023]
- What Is QAnon, the Viral Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theory? - January 8th, 2023 [January 8th, 2023]
- Benedict XVIs Most Powerful Influence on the Catholic Church Came Before He Was Pope - The New Yorker - January 6th, 2023 [January 6th, 2023]
- Netflix Removed Kanye's 'Harmful Alt-Right Beliefs' From David ... - November 23rd, 2022 [November 23rd, 2022]
- Where Are All the Women on This Alt-Right, Anti-Choice, Toxic ... - November 23rd, 2022 [November 23rd, 2022]
- Forbes Gets Punked - Labels FTX Former CEO's Girlfriend a "New Darling ... - November 23rd, 2022 [November 23rd, 2022]
- Alt-Right Picks Wrong Side in Dutch Farm Crisis - November 23rd, 2022 [November 23rd, 2022]
- La Mirada Chamber Invited Alt-Right Racist to Moderate School Board ... - October 30th, 2022 [October 30th, 2022]
- Hate & Extremism | Southern Poverty Law Center - October 30th, 2022 [October 30th, 2022]
- America First Political Action Conference - Wikipedia - October 25th, 2022 [October 25th, 2022]
- Pepe the Frog - ADL - October 25th, 2022 [October 25th, 2022]
- Paul Joseph Watson - Wikipedia - October 25th, 2022 [October 25th, 2022]
- Jack Posobiec - Wikipedia - October 25th, 2022 [October 25th, 2022]
- QUIET - Wikipedia - October 25th, 2022 [October 25th, 2022]
- Shintaro Abe - Wikipedia - October 25th, 2022 [October 25th, 2022]
- #FireMcMaster, explained. How alt-right media and a handful of | by ... - October 23rd, 2022 [October 23rd, 2022]
- Right-wing politics - Wikipedia - October 23rd, 2022 [October 23rd, 2022]
- Real Viking History and the Imagined White Supremacist Past | Time - October 23rd, 2022 [October 23rd, 2022]
- More Toxic, Alt-Right, QAnonism | No Minister - October 23rd, 2022 [October 23rd, 2022]
- Steve Bannon's influence on conservative politics: Expert on alt-right explains - University of Colorado Boulder - October 23rd, 2022 [October 23rd, 2022]
- Alt-right - Wikipedia - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- Alt Right: A Primer on the New White Supremacy - Anti-Defamation League - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- How the Alt-Right Happened - American University - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- Alt-right pipeline - Wikipedia - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- Richard B. Spencer - Wikipedia - October 6th, 2022 [October 6th, 2022]
- incel Meaning & Origin | Slang by Dictionary.com - October 6th, 2022 [October 6th, 2022]
- red pill Meaning & Origin | Slang by Dictionary.com - October 6th, 2022 [October 6th, 2022]
- Just The News - Media Bias/Fact Check - October 6th, 2022 [October 6th, 2022]
- The Download: TikTok moral panics, and DeepMinds record-breaking AI - MIT Technology Review - October 6th, 2022 [October 6th, 2022]
- Roe vs. Trump in the Michigan Midterms - The New Yorker - October 6th, 2022 [October 6th, 2022]
- PhD student examines clash of masculine identities on internet hate site - University of Toronto - September 27th, 2022 [September 27th, 2022]
- Clickbait extremism, mass shootings, and the assault on democracy time for a rethink of social media? - The Conversation - September 27th, 2022 [September 27th, 2022]
- By Reading Brainwaves, an A.I. Aims to Predict What Words People Listened to - Smithsonian Magazine - September 15th, 2022 [September 15th, 2022]
- A Case of Rhabdomyolysis in a Young, Morbidly Obese, Asthmatic Woman With COVID-19 - Cureus - September 11th, 2022 [September 11th, 2022]
- Mothers of the movement: Leadership by alt-right women paves the way for violence - The Conversation - September 11th, 2022 [September 11th, 2022]
- An antidemocratic philosophy called 'neoreaction' is creeping into GOP politics - The Conversation - August 2nd, 2022 [August 2nd, 2022]
- How Stop the Steal Captured the American Right - The New York Times - August 2nd, 2022 [August 2nd, 2022]
- Alt Right: A Primer on the New White Supremacy - June 24th, 2022 [June 24th, 2022]
- Will Tehama Sheriff Candidates Ties to Alt-Right Extremists Alarm ... - June 24th, 2022 [June 24th, 2022]
- Racist Great Replacement Conspiracy Went From Alt-Right to Mainstream - June 24th, 2022 [June 24th, 2022]
- Trump and his mob tried to overthrow American democracy and threaten to try again - Ohio Capital Journal - June 24th, 2022 [June 24th, 2022]
- Pacifism is the wrong response to the war in Ukraine - The Guardian - June 24th, 2022 [June 24th, 2022]
- How Culture Went Back to the Middle Ages - ArtReview - June 24th, 2022 [June 24th, 2022]
- FoxO3 restricts liver regeneration by suppressing the proliferation of hepatocytes | npj Regenerative Medicine - Nature.com - June 24th, 2022 [June 24th, 2022]
- The Alt-Right Has Its Very Own TV Show On Adult Swim - June 11th, 2022 [June 11th, 2022]
- The Nation: "The Libertarian Party Goes Alt-Right" - June 11th, 2022 [June 11th, 2022]
- Milwaukee business owners don't all want the RNC - Wisconsin Examiner - June 11th, 2022 [June 11th, 2022]
- Alt-Right Incels at Deep State Daily Stormer Site Celebrate Buffalo ... - June 3rd, 2022 [June 3rd, 2022]
- Alt Right Journalist Whos Lost Every Lawsuit Over Banned Accounts ... - June 3rd, 2022 [June 3rd, 2022]
- PBS, Lincoln Project Label DeSantis, Press Secretary 'Alt-Right' - June 3rd, 2022 [June 3rd, 2022]
- Johnny Depp-Amber Heard Verdict: The Actual Malice of the Trial - The New York Times - June 3rd, 2022 [June 3rd, 2022]
- How To Keep Meat Juicy With Science : Short Wave - NPR - June 3rd, 2022 [June 3rd, 2022]
- What Do Female Incels Really Want? - The Atlantic - May 17th, 2022 [May 17th, 2022]
- 'Well be here again': How tech companies try and fail to prevent terrorism - Protocol - May 17th, 2022 [May 17th, 2022]
- Republican and more Republican: Idaho shifts ever rightward - The Guardian - May 11th, 2022 [May 11th, 2022]
- Listen up! Here are the finalists of the 2022 Student Podcast Challenge - GBH News - May 11th, 2022 [May 11th, 2022]