The the Disenchanted Earth by Richard Seymour

Author:Richard Seymour
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Richard Seymour, Nature writing, The Disenchanted Earth, Climate change, The Twittering Machine, Global warming, Corbyn, Marxism, Environmental politics, Climate writing
Publisher: The Indigo Press
Published: 2022-03-30T17:35:56+00:00

‌What Is an Ideology Without a Space?

9 July 2020

How long can fascism remain in denial? There have been a number of stories lately about rising ecofascism. Indeed, the far right’s adhesion to the climate-denial industry was by no means inevitable, and it won’t necessarily continue that way.1

For the last few decades, the line has been: it’s not real, it’s a globalist conspiracy, they want to crush national sovereignty and give our wealth away to Third World moochers. Even if it is real, bring it on. More sunshine, warmer weather, what’s not to like? And, sotto voce, if it kills off the weak, so much the better. Yet this is just not tenable.

There are growing signs of a far-right effort to articulate some version of environmentalism. The struggle for them has not been the absence of an ecofascist tradition, to which I’ll return in a moment. Rather, since the far right thrives on resentment and collective hate, it needs to find the right friend/enemy distinction. That is beginning to happen. Look at German ecofascists saying: ‘Let’s chase the globalists off our acres.’2 Look at the Fox News host Tucker Carlson saying: ‘Isn’t crowding your country the fastest way to despoil it, to pollute it?’3

Look at the altright.com website portraying nature as savaged by Jewish ‘Unnatur’: ‘a modernist, capitalist, classically Liberal, materialist Jewish conception […] wiping out nature all over the Earth for the sake of higher profit margins’.4 Look at French neo-fascist Marine Le Pen claiming that ‘nomadic’ immigrants ‘do not care about the environment’ because they ‘have no homeland’.5

According to this fantasy, nature is white property. It is beauty, open space, the white wilderness of settler-colonial imagination, or the völkisch forests of European Romantic nationalism. It is the Heimat, the homeland. And it is threatened, in this scenario, by a coalition between feckless, rootless moochers and a dark conspiracy of global, rootless string-pullers.

The fact that fascism is most strongly associated with denihilism today, rather than environmentalism, is a result of certain contingencies. After the massacres in Christchurch and El Paso, however, the history of völkisch nationalism, counter-Enlightenment thought, misanthropic racism, fascism and settler colonialism in environmentalism has become more widely known.6 And, for British readers, this is not just a story about elsewhere: say, about Ernst Haeckel, Savitri Devi, Alain de Benoist, Renaud Camus, Garrett Hardin, Hervé Juvin, Björn Höcke and Dave Foreman. It includes Jorian Jenks, fascist, Oswald Mosley ally, pioneer of environmentalism and the organic movement, and co-founder of Lady Balfour’s Soil Association. It is a tradition that the British far-right, from John Bean to John Tyndall, has frequently sought to cultivate.7 And some version of this well-developed ecofascist structure of feeling arguably inflects the green nationalism of English writers like Paul Kingsnorth, whose disdain for ‘globalism’, the ‘global distancing of humanity from the rest of nature’ and search for ‘ecological Englishness’ is congruent with his unease about immigration. ‘English people had become an ethnic minority’ in cities like London, Kingsnorth complains, leaving ‘growing numbers’ of English people ‘beginning to feel unmoored and unspoken-for’.

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