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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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