Why We Don’t Support the “New Ecology” Movement

from Earth First! Newswire

What if the Republican Party in the US suddenly launched an environmental initiative? Would you vote for them? This is basically the question facing several countries of Europe as the far-right political parties are grouping together to form alliances, and even forwarding a new eco-nationalist movement. The latest in France is the “New Ecology” movement, and it is put forward by the National Front (FN).

With its roots in extreme anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and Imperialism, the FN’s social polity must be exposed as oppressive and against the interests of anyone fighting for a just ecological world. The FN garners their base of support not from wealthy finance and industry, but from reactionary small business owners and rural people whose social wages have been ruined by neoliberalism and the European Union. Fodder for the eco-nationalist thrust comes, then, from disenchantment with the international climate talks—a disenchantment shared by virtually everybody.

The international Conference of Parties talks, which just finished in Lima, Peru, and will resume in Paris next year, includes 189 countries and covers numerous details regarding the neoliberal global trade agenda and carbon emissions, but the NF considers them a “communist project.”

Based on the FN’s fear of everything beyond their borders, it should not be surprising that the main thrust taken by the “New Ecology” movement is not climate, but land rights—specifically, regulations on fracking, which creates problems for rural farmers by compromising water sources. The approach of “New Ecology” to climate change becomes more complex, as the leading patriarch of the FN, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has denied climate change and called environmentalists communists in disguise (watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside).

According to Mireille d’Ornano, a member of the FN environmental committee, “The New Ecology movement is based on national interest and patriotism. We have to be closer to our people and not against our country’s interests… We have to find a balanced position and we don’t have to be politically correct or ideologically biased about it. There are pros and cons to the scientific evidence. We have to find out what really comes from human activity, or doesn’t.”

That’s right, the FN isn’t sure if humans caused climate change, and, to them, the science is still debatable. France’s Green Party points out that the FN has no problem whatsoever voting for big agribusiness, tar sands, or deep sea fisheries. Revealing their hypocrisy, the FN’s support for nuclear energy is staunchly nationalist in flavor, but all the uranium comes from other countries.

The ideological bent of “New Ecology” is the triad: “family, nature, and race,” and while they co-opt and compromise a few attention-grabbing campaigns, their broader agenda is firmly in the realm of extraction overseas and anti-immigration at home. According to eco-nationalists from Switzerland to Hungary, immigrants are like invasive species; they compromise the integrity of the nation’s relationship to their environment. And while extracting natural gas in the homeland is problematic, there is nothing wrong with other peripheral countries doing it for export (vis-a-vis corporations based in the North Atlantic).

These tenets of eco-nationalism are exploitative and counterproductive to a world-wide movement against extractivism. Eco-nationalism is just an opportunistic tactic for the far-right wing looking for short-term gains, and using anybody and everybody who will help them achieve those goals. They will compromise any initiative they insinuate themselves in.

While the “New Ecology” movement, divorced from climate change, allows us to criticize the failings of nationalism to properly understand the science behind ecology, biodiversity, and the interconnectedness of all things, it also gives us a startling example of how incredibly broken the US political spectrum seems. The question that opens this essay about the Republicans remains incredibly rhetorical, as they maintain a shocking anti-ecology agenda (and Democrats do not part ways to any considerable degree).

The answers to these problems can not come out of the currently existing political or economic system. We must create them ourselves.