A Social Ecology of Freedom Against Ecofascism
Written by Janet Biehl. Excerpt from the book Ecofascism Revisited: Lessons from the German Experience (New Compass Press, 2011), authored by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier.
A combination of nationalism, authoritarianism, and yearnings for charismatic leaders that is legitimated by a mystical and biologistic ‘ecology’ is potentially socially catastrophic. Just as the völkisch movement ultimately was channeled into the Nazi movement, so too new social movements that appeal to these concepts must be mindful of their potential for political and social catastrophe if they are channeled into a dangerous political direction that draws on mysticism.
A love of the natural world and alienation from modern society are in themselves innocent and legitimate ideas, and it was by no means a historical necessity that they be permutated into a justification for mass murder. Nor is ‘ecology’ limited to an interpretation as a social Darwinist racial jungle, or politicized along tribal, regional, and nationalist lines. Nor is ‘ecology’ inherently an antirational, mystical concept. Finally, the ecological crisis can hardly be dismissed; it is itself very real and is worsening rapidly. Indeed, the politicization of ecology is not only desirable but necessary.
Although this article has focused on the ‘ecological’ right in the [German] Federal Republic, ‘ecological’ fascism is hardly limited to that country. In Britain, a wing of the National Front issues the cry, “Racial preservation is Green!” In the United States, the notorious white supremacist Tom Metzger remarks:
I’ve noticed that there’s an increased number of young people in the white racialist movement who are also quite interested in ecology, protecting the animals from cruelty and things like that, and it seems to me that as we are becoming more aware of our precarious state, the white man, the white woman’s, state in the world, being only about 10 percent of the population, we begin to sympathize, empathize more, with the wolves and other animals. [1]
His colleague Monique Wolfing agrees: “Well, naturally. They’re in the same position we are. Why would we want something created for ourselves and yet watch nature be destroyed? We work hand in hand with nature and we should save nature along with trying to save our race.” [2] The noted U.S. deep ecologist Bill Devall, who is certainly not a fascist, has allowed anti-immigration themes to enter his views: He notes with apparent relief that while “population is beginning to stabilize in Western Europe and North America,” there is a caveat — “in-migration.” Devall chastises those who would “justify large-scale in-migration to Western Europe and North America from Latin America and Africa” as guilty of “misplaced humanism.” [3]
What is clearly crucial is how an ecological politics is conceived. If the Green slogan “we are neither left nor right but up front” was ever meaningful, the emergence of an ‘ecological right’ defines the slogan’s bankruptcy conclusively. The need for an ecological left is urgent, especially one that is firmly committed to a clear, coherent set of anticapitalist, democratic, antihierarchical views. It must have firm roots in the internationalism of the left and the rational, humanistic, and genuinely egalitarian critique of social oppression that was part of the Enlightenment, particularly its revolutionary libertarian offshoot.
But an ecologically oriented politics must deal with biological phenomena warily, since interpretations of them can serve sinister ends. When ‘respect for Nature’ comes to mean ‘reverence,’ it can mutate ecological politics into a religion that ‘Green Adolfs’ can effectively use for authoritarian ends.
When ‘Nature,’ in turn, becomes a metaphor legitimating sociobiology’s ‘morality of the gene,’ the glories of ‘racial purity,’ ‘love of Heimat,’ ‘woman equals nature,’ or ‘Pleistocene consciousness,’ the cultural setting is created for reaction. ‘Ecological’ fascism is a cynical but potentially politically effective attempt to mystically link genuine concern for present-day environmental problems with timehonored fears of the ‘outsider’ or the ‘new,’ indeed the best elements of the Enlightenment, through ecological verbiage. Authoritarian mystifications need not be the fate of today’s ecology movement, as social ecology demonstrates. But they could become its fate if ecomystics, ecoprimitivists, misanthropes, and antirationalists have their way.”
Footnotes:
[1] Tom Metzger, quoted in Elinor Langer, “The American Neo-Nazi Movement Today,” Nation (16–23 July 1990), pp. 82–107, at 86.
[2] Quoted in Langer, “American Neo-Nazi Movement,” p. 86.
[3] Bill Devall, Simple in Means, Rich in Ends: Practicing Deep Ecology (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 1988), p. 189.
Leave a Reply