Today, environmental politics are typically associated with left-wing political movements. However, for nearly two centuries, the right wing has had its own discourses concerning the environment and related issues. With discourses about climate change becoming more visible in everyday politics, an ideological ecosystem has emerged on the right to address these issues, which has been accompanied by an inflation of concepts: denialism, delayism, ecopopulism, ecofascism, green capitalism, green nationalism, and many more.
In a sentence, conservative environmentalism approaches environmental issues via a, well, conservative framework. That is, to the extent that it is open to addressing environmental challenges at all, it is only willing to do so in a way that leaves the present social order largely intact. It is not “revolutionary, idealistic, and ultranationalist” like some of the environmentalism on the fringe right, but rather offers “pragmatic solutions to environmental and economic problems.” That said, as Daniel Rueda notes, conservative environmentalism “can easily be assimilated and appropriated by more radical groups and could become a gateway to these.”
In general, however, the “mainstream” or conservative right’s view on the environment takes the form of both denialism (denying the existence of anthropogenic climate change) and delayism (accepting anthropogenic climate change but suggesting that the problem will be solved without serious changes to the status quo). The latter resists calls to change existing energy markets and the social systems they both rely on and fuel, while advocating for a techno-solutionist approach to environmental issues. For conservative environmentalists of this type, the idea is that, while climate change is real and even potentially anthropogenic, the market will be able to take care of it. Despite their critical differences, both denialism and delayism ultimately hinder the capacity or willingness of governments to intervene in climate change mitigation.
This paper, however, is not so concerned with these more overtly political interventions, nor with the tactics of the so-called “mainstream” right. Rather, it provides an overview of the landscape where genuine ideological innovation is occurring on the right, even as this innovation is as much a “return” as an invention of new ideologies and discourses. In its attempt to decipher the key conceptual, discursive spaces operative today, this paper hopes to provide an introductory but holistic account of how the increasingly radical right-wing is engaging with environmental topics in the 21st century.
Are “the People” Green? Populism and Environmentalism
The question of populism is an interesting one, ideologically speaking: while certainly antagonistic toward the mainstream right, populists are likewise distinguishable from the movements on the fringes of the right wing. Regarding our focus, right-wing populism and environmentalism have a complex relationship. The combination of salient climate politics and the populist logic often produces heterogeneous formations, as climate can be instrumentalized by both the left and right to shape the definition of populism’s constitutive discursive category, “the people.” Today, right-wing populists often frame measures to tackle climate change as globalist overreach but, as the impacts of climate change continue, the intersection between populism and environmental politics will likewise continue to expand and evolve.
Right-wing populists’ opposition to climate change mitigation policies are often considered part and parcel of their anti-expert, anti-globalist, and anti-redistribution identity. However, the anti-environmentalism common among right-wing populists today is only a contingent articulation, rather than an essential or transhistorical fact. In different conjunctures, right-wing populists are more favorable to environmentalist philosophies and have, in fact, advanced their right-wing agenda (on immigration, for instance) on the back of environmentalist-sounding discourses.
The anti-environmentalism common among right-wing populists today is only a contingent articulation, rather than an essential or transhistorical fact.
The Rassemblement National in France today, for instance, acts as “an incubator for a green nationalist narrative,” as can be seen in their calls to establish a “European ecological civilization” and their proclamation that “the best ally of ecology is the border.” Here, we see the motifs of right-wing populism—anti-globalism, anti-immigration—articulated not through climate change denialism, but rather within an environmentalist frame. In Switzerland too, as Ander Audikana and Vincent Kaufmann have demonstrated, “right-wing populist identitarian and environmental narratives tend to overlap,” as concerns over immigration, metropolization, resource scarcity, and created conditions of existence for a new “green populism” (with a right-wing bent) in the country.
Right-wing populists sometimes exhibit a “conditional, ‘yes-but’ environ-mentalism.”
Beyond ideology, we now have numerous examples of right-wing populist figures and parties in government, from the governments led by right-wing populists in Hungary and Poland and Italy, to those supported by right-wing populist junior coalition partners in Austria, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, to the presidential administration of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and the premiership of Narendra Modi in India. Paula Ganga has shown that, in government, right-wing populists often frame the fight against climate change as a Western imposition on their sovereignty, while doubling down on economic nationalism and national development at the expense of environmental sustainability.
Her quantitative analysis has demonstrated that “higher scores in populism are associated with lower levels of environmentally related expenses on research and development, fewer environmental taxes, less spending on environmental projects, and less aid on environmental projects.” Ideology, then, takes a back seat. Similar studies of right-wing populism in power have illustrated that the ideological positioning of these parties vis-à-vis environmentalism is not fixed, but fluctuates as a result of new opportunities and institutionalization. Right-wing populists thus sometimes exhibit a “conditional, ‘yes-but’ environmentalism.”
This is all to say that, for the populist right, ideology sometimes reaches its limit when it enters the halls of power. But what of those formations that are nowhere near the seat of power, nor in fact the “mainstream” at all? How have more fringe ideologies on the right developed and responded to the pressing questions put forth by our environmental moment? It is to these fringes that we now turn.
The Harmony of Nature and Race: Ecofascism and the Fringe Right
Janet Biehl and Peter Staudemnaier have defined ecofascism simply as “the preoccupation of authentically fascist movements with environmentalist concerns.” Ecofascism is thus a form of nationalism that recognizes the unsustainability of humanity’s current relationship with the natural world, but rather than addressing the complex systems contributing to this unsustainability, it promotes a form of nativism rooted in the conservation movements of the early 20th century and in Nazi ideology. We might, then, think of ecofascism as simply the intersection or synthesis of racism and environmentalism.
We might think of ecofascism as simply the intersection or synthesis of racism and environ-mentalism.
Racist environmentalism emerged in nineteenth-century Germany, shaped by Romanticism, anti-Enlightenment nationalism, and the Völkisch movement. These traditions, as is known, were also the forebears of National Socialism. Even the term “ecology” itself was crafted in 1867 by German eugenicist Ernst Haeckel. As a zoologist, Haechel argued for the connection between the purity of nature and race, shaping later tendencies within National Socialism. Racist environmentalism has several characteristics: it emphasizes a people’s ethnic and cultural connections to land, promotes social Darwinism (understood as the “survival of the fittest”), engages in nostalgia for a mythical past, and rejects modernity and humanism, as well as industrialization. The marriage of racialism and environmentalism can now be understood: because ethnic groups are characterized by their connection to specific lands and the histories that have unfolded on them, the destruction of one’s environment is akin to the degradation of one’s very ethnic purity and history.
For ecofascists, because ethnic groups are characterized by their connection to specific lands and the histories that have unfolded on them, the destruction of one’s environment is akin to the degradation of one’s very ethnic purity and history.
Before the rise of German fascism as we know it, groups like the Wandervogel were already making such connections. The Wandervogel (literally “bird of passage” or “wandering bird”) emerged in the late nineteenth century as just one of the groups comprising the important German Youth Movement, but one whose ranks would balloon into the tens of thousands in the first decades of the 20th century. These ranks were full of young Germans ready to commune with nature. But as Daniel Rueda has noted, the group did far more than organize hikes for young people; rather, it became a key site for Germany’s youth to express their disenchantment with modernity. Eventually, the group became a mouthpiece for antisemitic and ethnonationalist ideas. During the interwar years, former members of Wandervogel flocked en masse to “far-right and proto-Nazi parties.” Its ideas, which were specific but broadly in line with völkisch ideology more generally, “ended up permeating some sectors” of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, i.e., the Nazi party. Thus, the racist, ecologically-rooted ideals of this earlier era influenced Nazi ideology, from the notion of “Blood and Soil,” to the idea of a land shared by ascendancy.
Following the Second World War and the collapse of Nazism in Europe, ecofascist ideas were able to live on through theorists such as Savitri Devi (1905-1982), an “esoteric Nazi” whose The Impeachment of Man (1959) lamented the ways in which humans had become separated from animals and plants, all while pushing a eugenicist line about overpopulation and racial inferiority. This formulation distinguished her from other postwar fascist thinkers like Julius Evola (1898-1974), who, despite his own esoteric fascism and preoccupations with overpopulation and racial purity, “cannot be associated with ecofascism” because his solution for such problems never took the form of a “return to nature” discourse.
Contemporary ecofascist groups emphasize neo-Malthusian ideas about overpopulation and anti-immigration rhetoric in the purported name of environmental protection and national purity.
The concerns of this tradition live on in the discourses of contemporary ecofascist groups, who emphasize neo-Malthusian ideas about overpopulation and anti-immigration rhetoric in the purported name of environmental protection and national purity. Advocating for racial exclusion, they are, in fact, not so much concerned with the planet’s overpopulation per se but rather with the population growth of non-white ethnic groups. In the words of Marguerite Culot and Diego Marin, “Eco-fascism recognizes the environmental crisis but prefers to focus on demographic arguments propagating coercive and discriminatory population control targeted at communities which contribute little to the environmental crises…” Sometimes, these ecofascist themes of population control, racial purity, and an affinity for nature and the environment boil over into gruesome violence, as evidenced by the presence—to varying degrees and in differing combinations—of these themes in the manifestos of several mass shooters in Europe and the Anglosphere.
Online forums and social media have provided a platform for and perpetuated the rise of “ecoterrorist” and ecofascist ideas more generally through the growth of “online micro-cultures of extremist ecologism, such as ‘Pine Tree Twitter,’” among others. These online spaces, for instance, celebrate Ted Kaczynski (better known as “the Unabomber”), who terrorized US society for nearly twenty years by mailing or otherwise delivering homemade bombs to university campuses, aerospace companies, and localities across the country. Kaczynski’s “primitivist” ideology and his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, have emerged as a key touchstone for the eco-extremism movement, and even gained some deference within mainstream culture. Both the Christchurch and El Paso mass shooters were members of eco-extremist online circles and identified themselves as ecofascists, tying together racist, anti-immigrant, and environmental extremist ideologies.
Sometimes, these ecofascist themes of population control, racial purity, and an affinity for nature and the environment boil over into gruesome violence.
While ecofascism can thrive in online communities, it also manifests itself in the real world, and not only when its adherents resort to acts of mass violence. The propagation of ecofascist lifestyles and the formation of intentional, offline communities are increasingly desired by those with ecofascist beliefs. In Germany, for instance, this has started to become a material reality. There, in more than a hundred and fifty locations, it is estimated that over one thousand völkisch settlers have formed closed communities in the countryside where they “participate in neo-pagan customs, wear traditional clothing, practice ancient crafts, organize cultural events such as theater and concerts as well as youth camps,” in addition to engaging in “organic farming and animal husbandry of endangered, local breeds of livestock.” While at first glance these practices could be considered broadly traditionalist, communalist and even apolitical, it is known that these settlers “strive to realize almost every element of völkisch ideology in the everyday,” through calls to preserve “racial purity,” subordinate the individual to the community, and train children in combat, while maintaining strict hierarchical family structures and patriarchal gender roles. Hauke Dannemann calls the organization of these eco-fascist communities an act of “ecopolitical experimentation,” one that demonstrates the viability of far-right, “sustainable” communities and alternative lifestyles.
Conclusion
While environmentalism is typically associated with left-wing politics, environmental politics has intersections across the spectrum of right-wing politics. In mainstream conservatism, conservative environmentalism maintains existing social and market systems when addressing environmental issues. At times, conservative environmentalism has taken the form of advocacy for technocratic solutions, while at other times taking the form of delayism or denialism regarding climate change in order to protect existing systems.
While elements of right-wing populism, such as anti-expert and anti-globalist identities, have intersected with anti-environmentalism, others allow right-wing populists to opportunistically utilize environmentalist discourses to advance their agendas. On the fringe, ecofascism has married racism with environmental ideologies. For the foreseeable future, as states continue to confront environmental disasters and the impacts of climate change, environmental ideologies will continue to shape and be reshaped by right-wing political movements.
For the foreseeable future, environmental ideologies will continue to shape and be reshaped by right-wing political movements.
Grace Truslow is a recent graduate of George Washington University, where she majored in political science and minored in sustainability. Grace currently works as a Policy Analyst at the Eno Center for Transportation, a nonpartisan transportation policy think tank, in Washington, DC. She previously worked at the U.S. Department of Transportation as a Policy Analyst Trainee with the Volpe Center and as an intern with the Deputy Secretary’s Office. She has also previously interned with Deloitte, Holland & Knight LLP, Cornerstone Government Affairs, Y Analytics, in the U.S. Senate, and in the U.S. House of Representatives. Her research interests include effective infrastructure policy implementation, environmental politics, and the intersection of transportation safety and technology. She is a 2024 Truman Scholar and is currently a Truman-Albright Fellow.
Image created using “Global warming ubx,” by Jackl licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. All other images used are in the public domain.
