[ How Ecofascists Are Fueling Racism and Deadly Violence]
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NOT A GREEN BONE IN THEIR WHITE BODIES  
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Stan Cox
April 25, 2023
Tom Dispatch
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_ How Ecofascists Are Fueling Racism and Deadly Violence _

, NOAA

 

It’s not often that conservative lobbyists beat the drum for
increased environmental oversight and regulation. But that’s what
happened this month when the far-right Federation for American
Immigration Reform (FAIR), through its legal arm, filed a brief in
federal court demanding
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of Homeland Security conduct an extensive environmental impact study
examining, of all things, immigration policy.

In a press release, the group laid out its reasoning: “Clearly, DHS
desperately wants to avoid the impossible task of explaining, in
detail, why adding millions of illegal aliens to our population does
not harm the environment, or why the harm it does cause is somehow
‘worth it.’”

Ostensibly green rationales for ever harsher immigration policies are
hardly a new phenomenon. U.S. and European anti-immigrant movements
have long used the real need for environmental protection as an excuse
for demanding ever harsher treatment of immigrants. Now, with drought,
flooding, storms, and other manifestations of climate disruption
swelling the ranks of people seeking refuge outside their home
countries, far-rightists are dialing up their evocations of nature to
push ever greater cruelty toward immigrants.

The pervasive theme in such circles is that, in an already
overpopulated America, more millions of dark-skinned immigrants,
having supposedly wreaked ecological destruction in their own
countries in the Global South, are now crossing our borders in ever
larger numbers. They will, so the thinking goes, despoil this
country’s environment, too — and the only way to stop them is by
using ever more violent means. The extremists peddling such propaganda
are coming to be known these days as “ecofascists.” Above all
else, they insist, the United States must maintain white control over
“our” country — you know, the lands that our ancestors stole
from Native peoples who actually knew how to live in harmony with
nature.

In the process, such white supremacists are, without the slightest
sense of irony, increasingly adopting the language of environmentalism
to push both grotesque anti-immigrant bigotry and a broader, genuinely
unnerving far-right agenda.

A CRUELER SHADE OF GREEN

In the past few years, ecofascism has broken into the mainstream news
cycle several times, most notably in connection with a grim set of
mass shootings.

Nineteen-year-old Payton Gendron, who pled guilty to murdering
[[link removed]] 10
Blacks in a Buffalo grocery store last year, explicitly called himself
an ecofascist. In the manifesto he left behind, he wrote
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“For too long we have allowed the left to co-opt the
environmentalist movement to serve their own needs. The left has
controlled all discussion regarding environmental preservation whilst
simultaneously presiding over the continued destruction of the natural
environment itself through mass immigration and uncontrolled
urbanization.”

Urbanization, you see, because you know what kind of people live in
cities. (Wink, wink.)

Patrick Crusius, who killed
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people in an El Paso Walmart in 2019, left behind a manifesto raising
false alarms about a “Hispanic invasion.” He wrote
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“The environment is getting worse by the year. Most of y’all are
just too stubborn to change your lifestyle. So the next logical step
is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we
can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more
sustainable.”

Both men drew inspiration from Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist
who, earlier in 2019, had murdered 51 people at two mosques in
Christchurch, New Zealand. Tarrant wrote a manifesto in which
he declared
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“The invaders are the ones over-populating the world… Kill the
invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the
environment.”

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Buy the Book
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Florid rhetoric notwithstanding, those mass killers did not actually
have ecological sustainability at the top of their minds. They just
put a green veneer on their hatred of immigrants, an increasingly
familiar tactic of the racist right. Philip Santoro, in a rant
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the white nationalist publication _American Renaissance_ in 2017,
slathered on an early and especially rancid coat of green:

“The Left’s ‘green politics,’ combined with support for mass
immigration and opposition to nuclear power, would mean a future of
overcrowding, poverty, and the displacement of whites. When the Left
tackles climate change, it wants to ‘save the planet’ — but
apparently for someone else’s babies. The population explosion in
the global south combined with climate change and liberal attitudes
towards migration are the single greatest external threat to Western
civilization.”

At the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, Frederike
Wegener reported
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on social media, violent extremists increasingly “disguise racist
and nativist ideas behind environmental concerns to lure in young
people and environmental activists,” utilizing slogans like “Love
Nature, Kill Non-Whites” and “Save Bees, Plant Trees, Shoot
Refugees.” Creating an overwhelming sense of imminent ecological
catastrophe, he wrote, can induce nonviolent, climate-conscious
citizens to make common cause with violent nativists.

Deploying bees and trees as a cover for such right-wing policies has a
long history in America. The growth of the anti-immigration movement
over the past half-century in particular is widely credited to a
Michigan ophthalmologist named John Tanton, who, as Paloma
Quiroga wrote
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Wellesley College’s Environmental Synthesis and Communications blog
in 2021, “viewed overpopulation and immigration as a threat to the
environment and to the future of white America — views that are
explicitly ecofascist. In his efforts to thwart immigration, he ended
up creating a vast loose-knit network of anti-immigration groups and
lobbyists, now dubbed the Tanton network
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network has managed to sabotage all attempts to develop humane federal
immigration policies.

Today, the most powerful group in the network is the Federation for
American Immigration Reform, the outfit pressuring the Department of
Homeland Security on the supposed environmental impact of immigrants.
On its website, FAIR dwells
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the evils of population growth — and by that it means only the
growth of “certain” populations:

“Currently, there are 326 million people residing in the U.S., so
immigration alone will be responsible for an additional 78 million
people over the course of just 40 years… Growth of the population at
those levels are certain to impact both the quality of life for
average Americans and the sustainability of the environment. The
threat of overpopulation is not to our economic health, but also to
the present and future quality of life and
environmental sustainability… The progress the nation has made
toward increased conservation and fuel and energy efficiency will
continue to be eroded…”

Connecting anti-immigrant and racist ideas via population growth to
environmental degradation is nothing new. The racism of the
conservation movement’s founding fathers, including John Muir and
John James Audubon, have been widely discussed
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recent years. In the late 1990s, Tanton, at the time still a member of
the Sierra Club, pushed
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that venerable environmental organization to adopt an explicitly
nativist position. That proposal was voted down, but only by a very
narrow margin. In 2004, anti-immigrant members again tried to seize
control of the organization — and once again they failed. In recent
years, in fact, the Sierra Club has forcefully renounced
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former toleration of nativist sentiment within its membership and has
come to actively support immigrant rights.

Ecofascist arguments serve not only as an excuse for abusing
immigrants, but are also being deployed by a broader, more violent
range
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far-right groups and movements on both sides of the Atlantic.
Environmental and anti-industrial calls to action have been a staple
of the leading U.S. neo-Nazi site
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Stormer_, along with several far-right groups, including The Base
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the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division
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as the National Socialist Order), and the Pine Tree Gang
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Far-right political parties in France, Austria, and Germany have
similarly espoused
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merging of “ecological civilization” and “ecocentric
nativism.”

EQUAL-OPPORTUNITY COLLAPSE?

The ecofascists’ use of green rhetoric is, of course, wholly
disingenuous. But frightening as well is the way similar impulses have
crept into the edges of the actual environmental movement, most of
which is still identified not just with the leftward reaches of
American politics, but with nonviolence. Still, in a country filled
to the brim
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weaponry and displaying a growing urge for violence (of which
ecofascism is such a painful example), even those genuinely
encouraging the greening of the planet have, sadly enough, not proven
completely immune to the urge to deploy such tactics.

Last October, I experienced this personally. I gave an online talk
about the role that rationing could play in curbing ecological
destruction. The audience, including members of several West Coast
environmental groups, seemed quite receptive. So, I was shocked when,
as the hour ended, the moderator wrapped by veering into distinctly
weird territory. Resolving the ecological crisis, he suddenly
suggested, might require us to consider the “value” of
“authoritarianism,” or more specifically, of “green fascism, or
maybe green ‘equitable’ fascism.” As the session had already
spilled into overtime, there was no opportunity for me to consider,
much less discuss, how such ideas might have infiltrated a green
movement that had long been peaceable indeed.

Radical movements to achieve a green, equitable society have been
around at least since the rise of groups like Earth First! in the
1980s. In more recent times, however, movements like the Earth
Liberation Front advocated
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or destroying industrial infrastructure as an essential step toward a
more ecologically sound society. For the past decade, the Deep Green
Resistance [[link removed]] movement has gone even
further, insisting that the goal of such sabotage should be the
complete collapse of industrial society. Only a return to
pre-industrial civilization, it maintains, will give the planet room
to heal, while creating opportunities for us to develop autonomous,
egalitarian societies that exploit neither our fellow humans, nor
nature.

In the 2011 book
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Green Resistance_, movement authors Lierre Keith, Aric McBay, and
Derrick Jensen similarly argued
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civilization’s industrial foundation needed to be completely
pulverized, sooner rather than later. Convinced that “the vast
majority of the population will do nothing unless they are led,
cajoled, or forced,” they urged that “those of us who care about
the future of the planet have to dismantle the industrial energy
infrastructure as rapidly as possible.”  Precipitous
de-industrialization is necessary, they wrote, because so little time
remains to prevent an ecological collapse complete enough to render
the world unlivable for humanity. Therefore, “rapid collapse is
ultimately good for humans — even if there is a die-off — because
at least some people survive.” This is jarring stuff, to say the
least, and it has rightly been subjected to withering criticism
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So far, the deep green resistance people have stuck to proselytizing
and organizing, rather than any kind of real-world sabotage. On the
political right, however, incidents of eco-infrastructure sabotage are
indeed on the increase. Over the past year, for instance, there have
been a rash of attacks on power grids
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by right-wing extremists, not environmentalists. A man and a
woman arrested
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February for planning to take down four power substations in the
Baltimore area proved, not surprisingly, to espouse neo-Nazi views.
And successful attacks on two North Carolina substations last December
were also linked
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neo-Nazism and white supremacy. In late 2022, the Department of
Homeland Security warned
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there had been a significant rise in online discussions among
far-right elements focused on assaulting the power grid to trigger
cascading blackouts across the country. That, they believed, could
lead to a governmental collapse and so create openings for a fascist
takeover. (In a country already featuring the Trumpublican Party, this
should be unnerving, even if not exactly surprising.)

Hunter Walker, a reporter for _Talking Points Memo_,
recently obtained a copy
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an online magazine that advocated attacks on power substations and
provided coaching to would-be saboteurs, while announcing, as if they
were greens, “It is our belief that the techno-industrial system
presents an absolute and urgent existential threat to all life on
earth.”   

Walker managed to track down one of the authors who told him that
their aim was indeed to motivate not the far right but “militant
groups of educated anarchists.” As the author acknowledged, however,
the far right is “far better armed” and better prepared for
shooting out transformers “than the Left or post-Left.” That being
the case, the manual’s author added, if the question was whether
“I would accept assistance or ‘alliance’ with any far-right
group, I would hesitate to say no. I would much rather turn the lights
out and then fight them in the quiet dark afterwards.”

This raises a question: Might radical individuals or even groups at
opposite ends of the political spectrum ever converge on the same
violent direct-action tactics?

Brian Tokar is on the faculty and board of the Institute for Social
Ecology in Plainfield, Vermont, which offers
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on ecofascism. I asked him how much overlap he and his colleagues had
noticed between violent, racist, ecofascist movements and nonviolent,
anti-racist, radical environmental movements. Tokar responded, “I
don’t think there’s a lot of overlap, but there’s certainly
enough that it’s deeply disturbing.”

“This goes back,” he said, “to the… eighties when Dave
Foreman
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Abbey [[link removed]] [of the
Earth First! movement] were saying a lot of disturbing things,
including a lot of anti-immigrant stuff — especially Abbey, who was
all about protecting the borders against people who, he said, would
spread pollution. It was just blatantly racist… but there were also
a lot of people who vocally challenged it from the beginning.”

“Fast forward to more recent times,” Tokar continued, “and my
colleagues have documented stories of people who started out in
leftist ecological circles and drifted over into an overtly ecological
neo-fascist or neo-Nazi anti-immigrant kind of politics.” In fact,
the ecofascists’ strategy, he added, “seems to be that if they can
skim off a few people, especially people who have a following, they
can shift the discussion in their direction.”

A FUTURE IN DANGER

I feel confident in predicting that the ecofascists won’t manage to
seize power by taking down the national electric grid. Still, by
fueling human-rights abuses, racial hatred, and deadly violence, their
toxic propaganda has made the United States a more perilous place to
live if you weren’t born white and within its borders. By hijacking
the message of ecological renewal and using it to persecute the
powerless, they could, at a minimum, make it far more difficult for
this country to act boldly in the future when it comes to the climate
crisis and environmental justice. That’s why the message of such
ecofascists has to be verbally shredded wherever and whenever they try
to spread it.

_STAN COX, a TomDispatch
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the author of The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight
Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic
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Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still
Can [[link removed]],
and the current In Real Time
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Books. Find him on Twitter at @CoxStan
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_Follow _TomDispatch _on Twitter
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