[ Ecological crisis, rural deindustrialization, and real estate
speculation have created conditions in which the far right thrives.
Combatting the rising right and surging wildfires will take a
progressive green industrial policy, ]
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FIGHTING FIRE AND FASCISM IN THE AMERICAN WEST  
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Patrick Bigger and Sara Nelson
May 1, 2023
Dissent Magazine
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_ Ecological crisis, rural deindustrialization, and real estate
speculation have created conditions in which the far right thrives.
Combatting the rising right and surging wildfires will take a
progressive green industrial policy, _

A homemade sign in Sublimity, Oregon, posted during a wildfire in
September 2020., Photo: Nathan Howard // Dissent Magazine

 

Late in the summer of 2020, forests across the western United States
were on fire. In that year alone, California experienced six of the
twenty largest fires in its recorded history, including the North
Complex Fire, which killed sixteen people and burned more than 300,000
acres. Further north, the Beachie Creek and Lionshead fires merged
near the Oregon-Washington border, ultimately burning more than 600
square miles (an area roughly half the size of Rhode Island) and
killing five people. Across the West, more than 10 million acres
burned—the second-highest annual figure since record-keeping
began—incurring $18.9 billion in economic losses and firefighting
costs. 

In the febrile atmosphere of the looming presidential election and
nationwide racial justice protests, the fire crisis pushed some Oregon
reactionaries into action. Rumors quickly spread
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Portland-based anti-fascists and Black Lives Matter organizers were
setting fires to punish their rural (white) enemies and then looting
evacuated areas. These rumors were boosted across social media and by
a QAnon “drop,” leading militia members to set up armed
checkpoints to search for arsonists. While the militias failed to turn
up any antifa arsonists, they did offer a kind of social
response—albeit paranoid, violent, and exclusionary—to the effects
of climate change. It’s a response that risks becoming more common
as the ecological crisis deepens.

The scope and urgency of the wildfire crisis in the U.S. West are
forcing communities and governments to respond, but the ultimate form
of the response is yet to be determined. Milton Friedman infamously
quipped that “when [a] crisis occurs, the actions that are taken
depend on the ideas that are lying around.” Gaps in state action
have left at-risk communities to formulate their own theories about
the causes and consequences of socio-ecological breakdown, and as the
far right surges across the rural West, it is leaving plenty of warped
ideas “lying around.” Strange mutations and alignments are
starting to take shape
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different factions of the right, including Trumpist Republicans,
libertarian localists, and eco-fascists, against this backdrop of
punishing environmental change—and in many cases they are starting
to take power
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The roots of this problem are far-reaching: more than 100 years of
intensive logging and wholesale fire suppression have made forests
denser, more homogenous, and more dominated by non-fire-adapted
species, decreasing their resilience. These changes are magnified by
the effects of climate change, including drought, extreme heat, insect
infestations, and high-wind events. With the belated recognition that
improved management practices are urgently needed, state and federal
resources are beginning to flow to forest restoration, which involves
thinning and controlled burning. But these interventions are not
coming quickly enough to keep pace with the crisis, nor in ways that
support transformative reinvestment in forest communities
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Long-term declines in the logging industry have left both the land and
people in vast swaths of the country abandoned by the state and by
capital, and a huge mobilization of resources and labor will be needed
to start undoing more than a century of damaging forestry practices.

A green industrial policy for the rural West could invest in
sustainable industries and high-quality jobs, while building on the
existing knowledge and skills of rural communities. Such an approach
must also involve initiatives to strengthen Indigenous resource
governance and support the ongoing revival of traditional management
practices that have been criminalized since Spanish colonization. A
progressive green industrial policy that delivers material
improvements to rural communities is a necessary condition for
battling the far right across the West.

INCENDIARY CONDITIONS

Megafires that cover more than 100,000 acres are now so common they
are no longer tracked as exceptional events by the National
Interagency Fire Center, and 30 million homes
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the United States are at risk from wildfires. This fire regime both
reflects and produces alarming environmental conditions, including a
historic drought that has dried out cities, farms, and forests; smoke
that chokes skies throughout fire season; the billions of tons of CO2
released by fires; and local effects like mudslides, degraded water
supplies, and the loss of habitats for vulnerable species.

These ecological conditions are coupled with the grim social realities
of rural deindustrialization, real estate speculation, and
environmental change. California has lost more than three-quarters of
its saw mills
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the 1980s, and logging jobs across the West
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declined by 40 percent since 1997. Much of the rural West has become
significantly more unequal than it was fifty years ago
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process that accelerated dramatically amid the economic carnage of the
2008 financial crisis, and then again as white-collar migration driven
by pandemic remote work turbocharged rural gentrification
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Many rural communities are suffering from the social problems that
come with deindustrialization: economic precarity, addiction, and
exposure to the criminal justice system have all been exacerbated by
the structural reorganization of rural political economy
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Declining standards of living, with little apparent prospect for
improvement, have created conditions in which the right thrives.
Across the United States, far-right organizations, protests, and
political violence have been on a sharp upswing since 2008. They
accelerated again after the Trump election: incidents of right-wing
political, racist, misogynist, and anti-LGBTQ violence (which have
included the explicitly eco-fascist mass murders in El Paso in 2019
and Buffalo in 2022) have all spiked since 2016
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More recently, there has been a marked rise in armed protests across
the West
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with mobilizations against pandemic public health measures morphing
into support of stolen-election conspiracy theories. As outright
political violence has increased, so has apologism for that violence
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the mainstream right.

Support for Republicans
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risen in many rural Western counties over the past twenty years,
coinciding with the party’s drift rightward. According to data from
the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights
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the West has a particularly high concentration of state legislators
who belong to right-wing social media groups. Common themes in these
groups include portrayals of regional big cities
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policy failures and dens of iniquity, rejection of state authority in
some areas (like public health and environmental regulation) alongside
full-throated support for repressive state functions such as policing
and border enforcement, and ubiquitous calls to “save America” or
to put “America first.”

THE FAR RIGHT IN THE FORESTS

The January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol has become the iconic
image of far-right mobilization, but the year before, right-wing
activists had already tried, in some cases successfully, to breach
state capitols or governors’ mansions in California, Oregon, Idaho,
and Washington. There has also been a flurry of environmentally tinged
far-right outbursts over the past decade, including the Bundy
family’s standoffs with the Bureau of Land Management
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grazing rights, which culminated in the occupation of the Malheur
wilderness area in Oregon in 2016. More prosaically, far-right
candidates have won numerable government offices, from county sheriff
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putting important levers of power in the hands of libertarians,
Christian dominionists, QAnon fabulists, and militia members.

Nostalgia plays an important role in the far-right imagination
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and there is no doubt that communities in the West (and elsewhere)
have genuinely lost economic freedoms as industry has declined. These
losses are stacked on top of others, including environmental
regulations that are experienced as austerity
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We can broadly characterize these events as reverberations of the
closure of frontiers [[link removed]]. In
this case, the closure is the end of what Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore
call “cheap nature.”

For 250 years, the U.S. social compact rested on the availability of
cheap land and abundant resources for settlers and their descendants,
which stood in lieu of a robust welfare state. The history of the
cheap-nature frontier in the West started with Indigenous genocide and
the direct exploitation of timber and minerals, and was later
characterized by sprawling suburbanization and dependence on cars. But
this frontier has been squeezed economically and by environmental
policy since the 1970s. Its last vestiges are disappearing as the
ecology itself degrades. The overarching response of the right has
been to attempt to push back by reopening land for resource
exploitation (through privatization) while limiting who has access to
the proceeds by, for example, restricting immigration. 

The far right thrives on the belief that things can only get worse.
Unfortunately, decades of federal public-land policy and developments
in regional and global political economy have provided plenty of
evidence that this is the case. In turn, the right reaches the
conclusion that waning forms of privilege have to be violently
maintained and policed.

Last October, a right-wing sheriff in Oregon arrest
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U.S. Forest Service “burn boss” whose prescribed fire treatment
had charred a rancher’s fence—an incident that signals a simmering
conflict between authoritarian localism and federal authority.
Similarly, a giant New Mexico fire that was touched off by a
controlled burn gone bad
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summer will be used as evidence that the federal government is either
incompetent or actively hostile to the rural West and that communities
must “take back control” and seal themselves off from outsiders.
As the effects, if not the causes, of climate change become of greater
concern on the right, it becomes more likely that we’ll see the
weaponization of emergency. And if reactionary figures are in control
of local and federal government, we could easily see anti-government
militia members turning into paramilitary foot soldiers
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enforce emergency measures against the villains du jour.

NARROW RESPONSES TO THE WILDFIRE CRISIS

The wildfire crisis is so dire that even reactionary state officials
agree on the necessity of action on forest restoration. There is
virtual consensus on the need to reduce forest densities and restore
more diverse forest conditions, but these measures are not being
implemented quickly enough to keep pace with the crisis. The
conservative approach is essentially to devolve land management
authority to states that have less robust labor and environmental
protections, shift the focus to fire suppression, and roll back
environmental protections in order to fast-track private logging and
other forms of extraction—usually carried out by precarious workers
(many of them migrants) with few job protections.

The current liberal alternative to the far right—a “Big Green”
NGO approach to forest management carried out through public-private
partnerships and carbon offsetting—simply isn’t up to the task,
especially given the current low-road trajectory
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much forestry work: most jobs are poorly paid, seasonal, contingent,
and high risk. Even more troubling is the fact that, as
researcher Alex Amend puts it
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“mainstream environmentalism has shown itself to be vulnerable to
‘fascist creep’”: far-right approaches to ecological crisis have
been adopted by otherwise left-leaning environmentalists, along with
concepts that echo the racist, xenophobic roots
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the original conservation movement.

The retrograde, exclusionary tendencies of liberal environmentalism
fuel the “jobs vs. environment” deadlock that has long plagued
North American environmental politics
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The forests of the U.S. West have been a particularly entrenched
battleground in this conflict. During the infamous “Timber Wars
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and ’90s, environmentalism became a scapegoat for the ongoing
ailments of the timber industry and the attendant abandonment of
working people. In turn, there is still substantial hostility among
many grassroots environmental groups toward any timber extraction.

Policymakers in Washington, D.C., and Western states are finally
beginning to reckon with the magnitude of the wildfire crisis. But for
decades, “fire borrowing”—the practice of paying firefighting
costs by drawing from elsewhere in the Forest Service budget—eroded
funding for forest restoration. New funding models and additional
investment through the Federal Wildfire Crisis Strategy
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the Inflation Reduction Act, and state appropriations all represent
small steps toward safer forest landscapes and communities. More
funding aimed at landscape-wide restoration—around $5 to 6 billion
per year
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needed to make a meaningful dent in the restoration backlog across the
West. And that is without considering the investments in housing,
transportation, job training, and healthcare that are needed to
stabilize and revitalize rural communities.

RURAL ECOSOCIALISM

A left approach to the wildfire crisis would prioritize ecological
repair through investments in rural landscapes and communities under
the banner of forest restoration. This restorative framework would not
produce a new frontier to be exploited but would instead support the
care work required to heal and sustain life. This means supporting
ecological health while rejecting the nostalgia and xenophobia that
the right serves up in place of material answers to material
questions.

This is a critical challenge and a worthwhile fight—not only because
the stakes of the wildfire emergency are so high but also because
overcoming the stalemate of the long Timber Wars would be a critical
win in the larger struggle for green industrial policies. Improved
land management policies would be a powerful proof-of-concept for a
Green New Deal in rural communities across the country that have been
used, abused, and abandoned by capital—and often by the state as
well. Green industrial policy could mobilize people and resources to
care for forests that may be facing irreparable change
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creating hundreds of thousands
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long-term, well-paid jobs—not only in “woods work,” but in
manufacturing, energy, transportation, and a variety of sectors that
utilize biomass removed from overstocked woodlands. This kind of
program would require pro-worker policies
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support sustainable industries, long-term employment, and safe working
conditions.

A holistic industrial policy for ecological forest management would
include investment from public infrastructure banks
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use the waste products of forest restoration to support new rural
industries—such as biomass energy generation
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power new manufacturing capacity for advanced wood products
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Workforce development policies and programs could create career
pathways for formerly incarcerated firefighters (who represent the
most diverse segment of the firefighting workforce) and prioritize
tribal enterprises and worker-owned cooperatives. In all these areas,
effective democratic governance of land management is critical to
ensure that the manifold benefits of forest restoration and reduced
fire risk accrue to everyone in forest communities, but particularly
to those who have been harmed by previous regimes of forest
management. This is important both as a matter of equity and as a
political objective to alleviate conditions that contribute to
far-right drift. 

The crisis in rural communities also presents possibilities for
community-driven development that links social and ecological health.
For instance, in 2009, federal legislation aimed at encouraging
dialogue between groups that had long been at odds with one another
facilitated the formation of forest collaboratives
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which loggers, environmentalists, tribes, and community leaders can
work toward community management of forests with multiple goals in
mind. Some environmental groups have pointed to the undue influence of
logging interests in these collaboratives, enabled in part by the
Forest Service’s model of funding restoration work through timber
sales. But relationships and collaborative practices developed within
these groups, when supplemented with additional resources for rural
community and economic development, could help create conditions for
building coalitions in support of green industrial policy.

The West is not the only place where socio-ecological breakdown,
rooted in decades of environmental degradation and state abandonment,
is fueling reactionary politics. From fisheries in New England to
Midwestern farmland and areas struck by water crisis in the Southeast,
the contradictions of the end of cheap nature are reaching critical
levels. The Green New Deal and other visions for ecosocialism have
largely focused on cities, giving less attention to non-human nature
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rural places. But workers in forestry, agriculture, and other rural
industries occupy a pivotal position at the intersection of social and
ecological systems. It is critical for the left to articulate a
strategy that mobilizes the place-based knowledge and experiences of
working-class rural communities to address their needs. If we don’t,
the right will.

_[PATRICK BIGGER is the Research Director of the Climate and
Community Project._

_SARA NELSON is the Research Manager of the University of British
Columbia Centre for Climate Justice.]_

* wildfires
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* fascists
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* Rightwing
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* Right-wing agenda
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* MAGA
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* Climate Crisis
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* ecological disaster
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* ecological solutions
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* Rural deindustrialization
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* Deforestation
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* real estate speculation
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* US Green Infrastructure;
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* GND
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* Green New Deal
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* Rural America
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* American West
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* Western states
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