Eco-fascism is a pipeline from environmentalism to fascism. Like with other fascist pipelines, people that deliberately build it don’t go mask off unless they’re stationed far enough along the pipeline that their audience is fine with it. It is intentionally difficult to tell the difference between someone thoughtlessly repeating ecofascist talking points and someone intentionally spreading those talking points to pull people towards more fascist ideologies.
Relatively far down the pipeline are people like Peter Thiel, who openly talk about human population control, or the executives at Nestlé, whose solution to water shortages is to corner the market. And before you complain that you don’t support them or that they aren’t very ecological - most people defending PewDiePie jokes wouldn’t support Hitler either, and Hitler isn’t very funny either.
Though if I had to peg someone as deliberately building at it while operating not very far down the pipeline, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson. I haven’t read The Ministry for the Future, but in the Mars trilogy corporations terraform Mars at breakneck speed without any lasting negative consequences, the Martians overthrow the corporations that are selfishly bringing millions of people from the global south, and as ecological disaster makes Earth far less habitable, the heroes’ answer is to limit migration far below Mars’ carrying capacity because “they would drown our world without saving theirs” (paraphrasing from memory). In the end, Mars is described as a bougie paradise while people on Earth are described as living in squalor and sleeping under their desks.
All this is couched among positive depictions of eco-sabotage, anti-corporate guerilla warfare, a flourishing gift economy, post-work society, citizens’ assemblies, community self-determination, anarchism, etc.
Given the damage done to our environment, you’d actually expect there to be more eco-fascists at this point, but the people responsible for the most damage have so severely buried their heads in the sand, they focus just on fascism without the eco part.
I do worry that as climate change gets worse and worse, we will see much more of it. I think a big part of ecofascism is that the out-groups are going to be disadvantaged people living in the areas most affected, so those of us living in the relatively affluent parts of the globe won’t experience it for quite some time.
You can look to many historical “conservationists” like John Muir as prototypes taking areas people have lived in for thousands of years, declaring them “land untouched by human hands” and kicking the people living there out to “preserve” it.
I think just generally, there are way way more people doing ecofascist things than there are people who would best be described as “ecofascist”. Similar to how many fascists are zionist and antisemitic, many fascists are malthusians who proclaim that the problem is people in the global south with 1/50th of their carbon footprint.
Eco-fascism is a pipeline from environmentalism to fascism. Like with other fascist pipelines, people that deliberately build it don’t go mask off unless they’re stationed far enough along the pipeline that their audience is fine with it. It is intentionally difficult to tell the difference between someone thoughtlessly repeating ecofascist talking points and someone intentionally spreading those talking points to pull people towards more fascist ideologies.
Relatively far down the pipeline are people like Peter Thiel, who openly talk about human population control, or the executives at Nestlé, whose solution to water shortages is to corner the market. And before you complain that you don’t support them or that they aren’t very ecological - most people defending PewDiePie jokes wouldn’t support Hitler either, and Hitler isn’t very funny either.
Though if I had to peg someone as deliberately building at it while operating not very far down the pipeline, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson. I haven’t read The Ministry for the Future, but in the Mars trilogy corporations terraform Mars at breakneck speed without any lasting negative consequences, the Martians overthrow the corporations that are selfishly bringing millions of people from the global south, and as ecological disaster makes Earth far less habitable, the heroes’ answer is to limit migration far below Mars’ carrying capacity because “they would drown our world without saving theirs” (paraphrasing from memory). In the end, Mars is described as a bougie paradise while people on Earth are described as living in squalor and sleeping under their desks.
All this is couched among positive depictions of eco-sabotage, anti-corporate guerilla warfare, a flourishing gift economy, post-work society, citizens’ assemblies, community self-determination, anarchism, etc.
Given the damage done to our environment, you’d actually expect there to be more eco-fascists at this point, but the people responsible for the most damage have so severely buried their heads in the sand, they focus just on fascism without the eco part.
I do worry that as climate change gets worse and worse, we will see much more of it. I think a big part of ecofascism is that the out-groups are going to be disadvantaged people living in the areas most affected, so those of us living in the relatively affluent parts of the globe won’t experience it for quite some time.
You can look to many historical “conservationists” like John Muir as prototypes taking areas people have lived in for thousands of years, declaring them “land untouched by human hands” and kicking the people living there out to “preserve” it.
I think just generally, there are way way more people doing ecofascist things than there are people who would best be described as “ecofascist”. Similar to how many fascists are zionist and antisemitic, many fascists are malthusians who proclaim that the problem is people in the global south with 1/50th of their carbon footprint.
Fascism is hardly ever ideologically consistent.