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On January 6th, 2021, at the behest of Donald Trump, insurrectionists stormed the United
States Capitol building. Spearheading the charge was this man. Referred to as the Qanon Shaman,
images and theories about this man blanketed the internet in the days following the attempted coup.
Conservatives and Republicans painted him as some paid actor hippy climate activist.
But these theories were obscuring the truth of who the Qanon Shaman really is. A truth that
reveals the dark history of environmentalism and a terrifying strain of white supremacist
thought that is now growing in far-right circles. This...is the story of eco-fascism.
Deep Rooted Racism In the early 1900s, conservation was taking hold
of the American imagination. The forefathers of the early environmental movement like John Muir,
Gifford Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt were carving out wild spaces in the United States for the
enjoyment of all Americans. They established the first wilderness area in Yosemite National Park
and worked to create policies protecting wild animals. At least, that’s how I learned it in
school. These men however, were far from the defenders of life we paint them out to be.
In fact, they were pretty much the opposite. John Muir wrote blatantly about his perceptions of the
indigenous people of California’s Merced Valle as subhuman, lazy, dirty, and superstitious.
And, in the same breath, praised the wildlife of Yosemite as divine. Indeed, the very creation and
preservation of Muir’s Yosemite National Park meant the forced expulsion of Native
American communities from the area. But among his contemporaries in the environmental movement, John
Muir was, sadly, the tamest. The head of Theodore Roosevelt’s National Conservation Committee,
Gifford Pinchot, who many know as the father of conservation, was also a staunch eugenicist. Or
in other words, he believed that white people had superior genetic traits and that in order
to preserve this genetic superiority, the world needed to forcibly sterilize or kill people
of color. Pinchot wasn’t just a closet eugenicist either. This man was a delegate in the first
and second International Eugenics Congress, and also a member of the advisory council of the
American Eugenics Society for ten years. And then there’s Madison Grant. A personal friend of then
president Theodore Roosevelt, Grant actively worked to establish wilderness preservation
in the form of Denali National Park, lobbied the New York government to restrict hunting practices,
fought the construction of the Hetch Hetchy Dam in Yosemite and also established the Bronx Zoo.
While he was engaging in these environmental pursuits, Grant was espousing white supremacist
and eugenicist views in his notorious 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, which Theodore
Roosevelt called “a capital book.” The tome outlined the superiority of the “Nordic” race
and lamented its supposed decline. Grant was such a white supremacist that Adolf Hitler wrote him
a personal letter to tell him that Grant’s book was “his personal bible.” So, as environmentalism
took shape in the early 20th century, some of its most prominent and powerful advocates
were deeply rooted in white supremacist thought. A tradition that continued into the 1960s and 1970s.
Overpopulation
With the publishing of Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s Population Bomb in 1968,
the United States exploded into a frenzy with fears about overpopulation. The thesis of the book
was that societal and environmental collapse were at our doorstep and overpopulation was the driver.
“Sometime in the next 15 years the end will come.” The first page of the book describes a
“stinking hot night in Delhi,” wherein people were closely packed together “thrusting their hands
through the taxi window begging” and others were “defecating and urinating.” But what Ehrlich was
seeing was not overpopulation, what he was seeing was gross inequality in a capitalist system. To be
quite clear, overpopulation is not the problem. Various studies have shown that the conspicuous
consumption of just 10% of the world’s population is responsible for 49% of the world’s greenhouse
gas emissions. And a recent study published in The Lancet projected that global population will
peak in 2064 at 9.73 billion and then decline to 8.79 billion in 2100. Yet, overpopulation
quickly took hold as a serious issue, and often the solution mirrored the solutions of Grant,
Muir, and Pinchot: decrease the population of non-white, poor people to the save wealthy white
nations. Indeed Ehrlich often encouraged sterilization, and American ecologist
Garrett Hardin outlines this exact argument in his 1974 paper, Lifeboat Ethics. Hardin,
with prose baked in white supremacy, envisions nations as lifeboats on a planet of dwindling
resources. According to Hardin, in this scenario it’s morally excusable for rich lifeboats to
let those struggling in the water drown. And Hardin’s views weren’t just fringe theories,
the 1950s, 60s and 70s witnessed a slew of forced sterilizations in the majority world.
From the sterilization of ⅓ of women in Puerto Rico to India’s mass sterilization program in
1975 that withheld welfare and government benefits to lower-caste people who refused sterilization,
fear of overpopulation led to sterilization programs often propped up by the United States.
And within the United States, the fear of the “hyper-fertility” of women of color and
concerns about resource depletion meant that from 1970-1976, Indian Health Services sterilized 25 to
42% of indigenous women seeking healthcare. While in North Carolina in the 1960s, 65% of women who
were sterilized by the state were Black, despite making up only 25% of the population. The point
here is this: although environmentalists sounding the alarm about overpopulation
might seem harmless it is more often than not used as excuse for eugenics and racist policies.
Modern Eco-Fascism
These different strands of white supremacist enviornmentalism are one once again gettting
pulled from the past and coalescing before our very eyes. In fact, this ideology stormed
the halls of Congress during the January 6th insurrection in the form of the QAnon Shaman. Who,
according to a deep-dive of his social media page, manifests his ecofascist worldview through only
eating organic food while simultaneously lionizing Nordic culture and viking paraphernalia. If this
sounds familiar, it’s because eco-fascists and white supremacists love Madison Grant,
the guy who wrote about the decline of the Nordic race. And I’m not just saying this, Anders Brevik,
the Norwegian who killed 69 teenagers and 8 adults in a brutal 2011 mass shooting and bombing,
quoted Madison Grant’s Nordic theory multiple times in his lengthy manifesto. The person
responsible for the Christchurch massacre at two mosques, a self-described ecofascist,
wrote that immigration is "environmental warfare" and that "there is no nationalism without
environmentalism." While the El Paso shooter argued that “If we can get rid of enough people,
then our way of life can be more sustainable.” Decades before these shootings, the infamous
Unabomber espoused similar views in his 35,000 word manifesto that argued that industrialization
and population were ruining the world. But this extremist thought is also prevalent in the mass
media. Fox News Anchor, Tucker Carlsen, has spoken multiple times about how a rise in immigration
is causing local environmental degradation. Modern eco-fascism is not anything new, throughlines of
white supremacy and racial genocide run throughout the environmental movement’s history. Today,
as in the past, it is an extremely dangerous trend in the far right. Its ideological subscribers are
not using environmentalism to mask their white nationalist and eugenicist ideals,
the two inform each other simultaneously, often with the conclusion being that the only way
to stop climate change is through brutal violence and draconian eugenics regimes.
As climate change gets worse and worse and our global prospects more dire,
ecofascist extremist thought seems to be growing in prevalence among the right. This
means that there’s a growing battle over what the climate crisis will mean. As Naomi Klein says:
“are we in the wealthy world going to hoard what is left and lock out everybody else and see this
resurgence in these in these abhorrent ideologies that never went away, are we going to recognize
that our fates are interconnected are we going to completely reimagine borders and are we going to
share what's left.” Our only choice to fight these fascist ideologies is to address climate change
in a way that will not only repair the harm of past racist “environmental” measures but to also
re-envision a more equitable and just world. That means seeing the problems of overpopulation
for what they really are: failed capitalism and deep seated racism.
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