On Saturdays, Sarah Dye and her husband, Douglas Mackey, sell seasonal vegetables and eggs at a farmers’ market in Bloomington, Indiana. Sarah stands behind a stall piled high with heirloom tomatoes, basil, okra, and acorn squash. With a towheaded baby in her arms, she greets customers and makes small talk. She and Douglas own Schooner Creek Farm in nearby Nashville, Indiana. They’re crunchy—even for Bloomington, a college town with a distinctly earthy vibe. You’d never guess that in private far-right chat rooms, Sarah goes by “Volkmom.” She posts about home schooling, recommends books by neo-Nazis, and complains about the “strife” faced by “Whites” who live in “non-white” neighborhoods. She also occasionally writes about farming.

Fascists have long shared Volkmom’s preoccupation with green living. The past few years have seen a resurgence of eco-fascist and eco-nationalist themes in the rhetoric of Europe’s far-right parties and in the writings of online radicals. Some, inspired by Netflix’s recent thriller about Ted Kaczynski, have embraced the Unabomber’s nihilist primitivism. Others have adopted Norse aesthetics and a radically anti-humanist version of “deep ecology.” Both the Christchurch and El Paso mass shooters included environmentalist themes in their white-nationalist manifestos.

When writing about eco-fascists, the media often speaks of green politics “masking” a darker racial vision. But most eco-fascists are sincere in their environmentalism. “The common theme,” said Peter Staudenmaier, a professor of history at Marquette University, “is this link between a yearning for purity in the environmental sphere and a desire for racialized purity in the social sphere.” For people like Dye and Mackey, the nation is an ecosystem, and nonwhite immigrants are an invasive species.

The Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil” ­reentered public discourse two years ago, when torch-wielding neo-Nazis chanted it in Charlottesville. But the phrase actually predates the Third Reich. In the nineteenth century, German romantic writers like Ernst Moritz Arndt and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl synthesized naturalism and nationalism. “We must save the forest,” Riehl wrote in 1853, “not only so that our ovens do not become cold in winter, but also so that the pulse of life of the people continues to beat warm and joyfully, so that Germany remains German.”

This philosophy later inspired the Völkisch movement, a youthful revolt against capitalist modernity that preached a return to the land, and to the wholeness, purity, and plenitude of rural peasant life. In the 1920s and ’30s, veneration for the earthbound volk—and hatred for its opposite, the rootless, urban Jew—found their way into Nazi ideology, where they were infused with scientific racism and transformed into a rallying cry. “The concept of Blood and Soil gives us the moral right to take back as much land in the East as is necessary,” wrote Richard Walther Darré, the Third Reich’s minister of food and agriculture. He spoke of Jewish people as “weeds.”