Eco-Fascism



“Lebensraum includes the bees too, guys! :’(“ ​

What it is

Spoiler: Good summary from an article ”CORY DOCTOROW” said:



Several of the recent white nationalist mass killers have described themselves as “ecofascists” and/or have deployed ecofascist rhetoric in their manifestos. The short version of ecofascism is that it’s the belief that our planet has a “carrying capacity” that has been exceeded by the humans alive today and that we must embrace “de-growth” in the form of mass extermination of billions of humans, in order to reduce our population to a “sustainable” level.



In some ways, ecofascism is just a manifestation of “peak indifference”: the idea that denial eventually self-corrects, as the debt built up by a refusal to pay attention to a real problem mounts and mounts, until it can no longer be denied. Eventually, the wildfires, floods, diseases (and ensuing refugee crises) overcome all but the most dedicated forms of bad-faith motivated reasoning and self-deception, and people start to switch sides from denying science to embracing it.



But there’s an ugly side to peak indifference: that denialism can give way to nihilism. As activists seek to engage people with the urgent crisis, they describe it (correctly) as an existential threat whose time is drawing nigh. Once people acknowledge the threat, it’s easy for them to conclude that it’s too late to do anything about it (“Well, you were right, those cigarettes did give me lung-cancer, but now that I’ve got it, I might as well enjoy my last few years on earth with a cigarette between my lips”).



Ecofascism is a form of nihilism, one that holds that it’s easier to murder half the people on Earth than it is to reform our industrial practices to make our population sustainable. Leaving aside the obvious moral objections to this posture, there’s also an important technical sense in which it is very wrong: we will need every mind and every body our species have to toil for generations to come, building seawalls, accommodating refugees, treating pandemic sufferers, working in more labor-intensive (and less resource-intensive) forms of agriculture, etc. etc. The exterminst doctrine assumes that we can know before the fact which humans are “surplus” and which ones might have the insight that lets us sequester carbon, cure a disease, or store renewable energy at higher densities.



But ecofascism isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Pastoralist and environmental thinking has always harbored a strain of white supremacy (the Nazi doctrine of Lebensraum was inextricably bound up with an environmental ideology of preserving habits from “excess” people – as well as the wrong kind of people, whose inferior blood made them poor stewards of the land.



The connection between eugenics and environmentalism runs deep. One of the fathers of ecofascist thought is Madison Grant, who worked with Teddy Roosevelt to establish the US system of national parks, and also to establish a whiteness requirement for prospective US immigrants. This thread of thinking – that there are too many people, and the wrong people are breeding – carries forward with the environmental movement, with figures like John Tanton, who started his career as a local Sierra Club official, but went on to found the Federation for American Immigration Reform and co-found the Center for Immigration Studies, warning Americans to defend against a coming “Latin onslaught,” revealing himself to be a full-blown white nationalist who is revered today as the ideological father of the ecofascist movement.



Meanwhile, the eco-left kept having its own brushes with xenophobia. In the early 2000s, the Sierra Club underwent an internecine struggle to reform its official anti-immigration stance and purge the white nationalists and xenophobes from its ranks. In the early 2010, Earth First had to oust co-founder Dave Foreman as his pro-environmental activism was overtaken by his anti-immigrant activism, with splinter groups like “Apply the Brakes” taking hard lines on borders and immigration.



Today, the ecofascist movement is closely aligned with the Trump administration, through links to Steven Miller and Jeff Sessions. The former executive director of FAIR is now serving as Trump’s citizenship and immigration services ombudsman. Ann Coulter demands that Americans choose between either “greening or browning” their future. Richard Spencer wraps white nationalism in green rhetoric, and Gavin McInnes has directly linked environmentalism to anti-immigration ideology.



Pushing back against this are two complementary strains of environmental thought: the bright greens who see democratically managed, urbanized, high technology as the way through the climate crisis (dense cities enable a circular economy, heal the metabolic rift, and leave more land free for habitat and carbon-sequestering trees); and the climate justice movement, which recognizes that poor, racialized people are the least responsible parties for carbonization, and the most vulnerable to the climate emergency, and emphasizes climate remediation steps that are led by, and responsive to, the priorities of indigenous people and the Global South.



Ecofascism isn't new: white supremacy and exterminism have always lurked in the environmental movement It’s easy to think of climate denial as a right-wing phenomenon, but a growing and ultra-violent strain of white-nationalism also embraces climate science, in the worst way possible. It’s easy to think of climate denial as a right-wing phenomenon, but a growing and ultra-violent strain of white-nationalism also embraces climate science, in the worst way possible.Several of the recent white nationalist mass killers have described themselves as “ecofascists” and/or have deployed ecofascist rhetoric in their manifestos. The short version of ecofascism is that it’s the belief that our planet has a “carrying capacity” that has been exceeded by the humans alive today and that we must embrace “de-growth” in the form of mass extermination of billions of humans, in order to reduce our population to a “sustainable” level.In some ways, ecofascism is just a manifestation of “peak indifference”: the idea that denial eventually self-corrects, as the debt built up by a refusal to pay attention to a real problem mounts and mounts, until it can no longer be denied. Eventually, the wildfires, floods, diseases (and ensuing refugee crises) overcome all but the most dedicated forms of bad-faith motivated reasoning and self-deception, and people start to switch sides from denying science to embracing it.But there’s an ugly side to peak indifference: that denialism can give way to nihilism. As activists seek to engage people with the urgent crisis, they describe it (correctly) as an existential threat whose time is drawing nigh. Once people acknowledge the threat, it’s easy for them to conclude that it’s too late to do anything about it (“Well, you were right, those cigarettes did give me lung-cancer, but now that I’ve got it, I might as well enjoy my last few years on earth with a cigarette between my lips”).Ecofascism is a form of nihilism, one that holds that it’s easier to murder half the people on Earth than it is to reform our industrial practices to make our population sustainable. Leaving aside the obvious moral objections to this posture, there’s also an important technical sense in which it is very wrong: we will need every mind and every body our species have to toil for generations to come, building seawalls, accommodating refugees, treating pandemic sufferers, working in more labor-intensive (and less resource-intensive) forms of agriculture, etc. etc. The exterminst doctrine assumes that we can know before the fact which humans are “surplus” and which ones might have the insight that lets us sequester carbon, cure a disease, or store renewable energy at higher densities.But ecofascism isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Pastoralist and environmental thinking has always harbored a strain of white supremacy (the Nazi doctrine of Lebensraum was inextricably bound up with an environmental ideology of preserving habits from “excess” people – as well as the wrong kind of people, whose inferior blood made them poor stewards of the land.The connection between eugenics and environmentalism runs deep. One of the fathers of ecofascist thought is Madison Grant, who worked with Teddy Roosevelt to establish the US system of national parks, and also to establish a whiteness requirement for prospective US immigrants. This thread of thinking – that there are too many people, and the wrong people are breeding – carries forward with the environmental movement, with figures like John Tanton, who started his career as a local Sierra Club official, but went on to found the Federation for American Immigration Reform and co-found the Center for Immigration Studies, warning Americans to defend against a coming “Latin onslaught,” revealing himself to be a full-blown white nationalist who is revered today as the ideological father of the ecofascist movement.Meanwhile, the eco-left kept having its own brushes with xenophobia. In the early 2000s, the Sierra Club underwent an internecine struggle to reform its official anti-immigration stance and purge the white nationalists and xenophobes from its ranks. In the early 2010, Earth First had to oust co-founder Dave Foreman as his pro-environmental activism was overtaken by his anti-immigrant activism, with splinter groups like “Apply the Brakes” taking hard lines on borders and immigration.Today, the ecofascist movement is closely aligned with the Trump administration, through links to Steven Miller and Jeff Sessions. The former executive director of FAIR is now serving as Trump’s citizenship and immigration services ombudsman. Ann Coulter demands that Americans choose between either “greening or browning” their future. Richard Spencer wraps white nationalism in green rhetoric, and Gavin McInnes has directly linked environmentalism to anti-immigration ideology.Pushing back against this are two complementary strains of environmental thought: the bright greens who see democratically managed, urbanized, high technology as the way through the climate crisis (dense cities enable a circular economy, heal the metabolic rift, and leave more land free for habitat and carbon-sequestering trees); and the climate justice movement, which recognizes that poor, racialized people are the least responsible parties for carbonization, and the most vulnerable to the climate emergency, and emphasizes climate remediation steps that are led by, and responsive to, the priorities of indigenous people and the Global South. Click to expand...

As “good guys”

As ‘neutrals’

As villains







Like always, tell me if you spot any typos or errors. ​

Ecofascism is, to put it plainly, the belief that climate change is primarily caused by overpopulation and can thus be solved by reducing the planet’s total number of humans. The people that the Ecofascists believe to be the source of this overpopulation are poor, non-white people. These beliefs aren’t supported by any kind of scientific evidence not created (or at least funded) by the Ecofascists themselves of course, but since when have fascists cared about their beliefs not corresponding to reality?Outright Ecofascists aren’t actually particularly common, but they’re very good at getting themselves into positions of power/influence in environmentalist movements and, perhaps most dangerously, they’re also very good at spreading disguised versions of their own beliefs. They don’t have to outright call for the genocide of minorities, they only need to convince people that “humans are the real virus” and that mass death will heal the planet in some way – once they believe the fundamental tenants, self-radicalization is likely, especially if an environmental collapse actually does take place.Why Ecofascist rhetoric is so easy for people to adopt is somewhat debateable. Some might say that it’s a result of growing nihilistic in the face of an existential threat; it’s easy, and perhaps even comforting to a degree, to think of climate change as an essentially self-solving problem that kills off the people who caused it once it goes too far. A more Marxist answer might be to invoketheory; just as “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism”, it’s easier to imagine killing off some half of humanity than it is to imagine making the necessary socioeconomic reforms in time.Ecofascism isn’t really an entirely new phenomenon. Reactionaries calling for the culling of the lower classes and/or lesser races in response to a supposed Malthusian crisis is roughly at least as old as, and probably even older. The Nazis infamously passed environmental policies, and treated animals better than they did Jewish, Romani, socialist, queer, mentally ill or disabled people. Part of the concept of Lebensraum was saving the Russian land from its supposed despoilment by Russian peoples. Madison Grant, the guy who established the US national park system with Teddy Roosevelt, also established the whiteness requirement for prospective immigrants.Some Ecofascists are, in all likelihood, just regular neo-fascists who are simply using the environment as a justification for their calls for eugenics, but there undoubtedly some Ecofascists who genuinely believe in their ideology. Those ones are more likely to go even further into extreme environmental ideology, which is when Ecofascism starts to incorporate deep green ideas like degrowth.They’re fascists, they can literally only play the role of something even vaguely resembling ‘good guys’ when playing the role of lesser evil compared to something somehow even worse. That said...These Ecofascists only manage to influence the government rather than take control of it, or else come to power in a severely watered down form. Instead of launching a genocide against the ‘’, they engage in a “peaceful” form of ethnic cleansing where they ‘merely’ strip those deemed undesirable of their citizenship and forcefully deport them to whatever country is willing to make a deal to take them – they will then often repossess the deported people’s lands and transform them into new nature reserves. They implement some of the struct racial and ideological immigration tests in history, but they don’t actively invade other countries to try and ‘save the native ecosystem’.They make some minor efforts to implement some green reforms, but they are too little and too late. Most of their efforts at ‘making their nation sustainable’ come in the form of trying to eliminate ‘excess population’ and ‘overbreeders’. Strict forms of birth control that amount to little else than state control over women’s bodies and sexual conduct, as well as mandatory sterilization of segments of the population they don’t deport, are implemented.Again, they’re fascists. The only way they can’t be the villains is when they play the lesser evil compared to an even worst threat.The Ecofascists in this scenario decide to take the isolationist approach rather than the expansionist one; they’re sure that the overburdened Earth is too close to collapse to be saved completely, so they focus on making their own nation survivable. They close their borders and begin setting up their own Holocaust to rid themselves of ‘useless eaters’. Strict population control measures are implemented even for the master race, although it’s not uncommon for the rich and powerful to secretly weasel their way out of that.They continue the kind of industrial economy that caused climate change in the first place largely unabated, allowing those most responsible for ecological collapse to live safely within their borders while those least responsible for it are left to suffer and die on the outside. The borders are highly militarized so that any approaching refugees trying to ‘pollute’ their environment are detained or even killed before they get the chance.The most positive thing that can be said about them is that they might try to do some weird things like use cloning to resurrect extinct species.might have a few ideas for things Ecofascists may do, based on some historical plans of the Nazis.The Ecofascists manage to come to power completely, and they’re convinced that the Earth is well over its maximum “carrying capacity” and that ‘degrowth’ needs to be embraced by most – if not all – of the world right now to save it. This, effectively, means that they view the entire world as their Lebensraum. In any realistic scenario they’d lose here, even if they came to power in the most militarily powerful country on the planet during an ecological and economic collapse that destabilized everyone else, because world conquest just isn’t a feasible scenario.Everything from the ‘neutral’ entry above would be implemented in the Ecofascist’s home nation while they build up their military, with the possible exception of less strict population controls – they’ll need more soldiers, after all – and choosing to make the ‘useless eaters’ useful by working them to death rather than eliminating them outright. Any land they do manage to conquer will be, at best, subjected to something similar to Alfred Rosenberg’s version of Generalplan Ost where they assimilate fragments of the population as collaborators and puppet regimes whilst slowly exterminating the rest and turning entire countries into nature reserves.Imagine the Khmer Rouge or Cultural Revolution China with ultranationalist and extinctionist motivations instead of Maoist ones. Killing fields large enough to be marked on world maps. Concentration camps the size of cities. Actual citities transformed into sprawling arcologies, with architecture resembling a bizarre mix of brutalism, Graeco-Roman design and folk-art designed to remain standing and imposing even in the event of total civilizational destruction.Feel free to readabout Nazi Europe as a nightmare hellscape for inspiration, featuring such lovely concepts as an industrial-genocide complex equivalent to OTL’s military-industrial complex.