Word for the day: ecofascism

I encountered the word in an extremely interesting Gizmodo article about the El Paso shooter:

This weekend’s mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, has re-opened the festering debates over gun control, immigration, and the president’s penchant for racist hate speech. But the manifesto believed to have been authored by the suspected shooter also reveals another horrific idea edging its way toward the mainstream from the primordial sludge of racist message boards...

Included among its racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric are ideas central to the mainstream environmental movement. “[O]ur lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country. The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources,” it reads.

Where Crusius’ views violently diverge is the solution to these real issues. The manifesto suggests Americans overconsumption will never stop, so the only option is “get rid of enough people” to make the American lifestyle “more sustainable.” Horrific, disgusting, and absurd, this so-called ecofascist ideology uses legitimate environmental concerns to justify racist policies and, sometimes, mass murder...

The El Paso shooter manifesto itself echoes that of the gunman who killed 51 in Christchurch, New Zealand, earlier this year. Brenton Tarrant, the accused shooter in that massacre, identified as an ecofascist and defined it as “ethnic autonomy for all peoples with a focus on preservation of nature and the natural order.” The El Paso manifesto is in the same vein, going further in some ways by noting that the goal of the murders was to preserve Americans’ unique position as one of the world’s biggest per-capita carbon polluters on Earth...

Deploying racialized fears of overpopulation destroying the environment, members of the Tanton network even tried to take over the Sierra Club in the late 1990s and turn it into an anti-immigrant organization. Fortunately, they were defeated. What we are facing now is the greening of hate, stage two. Old ideas, but with some new actors and manifestations. While ties exist between the Tanton network and the white nationalist movement, the lethal embrace of these ideas by violent, armed white nationalists is another order of magnitude...

But we can’t ignore how Malthusian ideas about overpopulation and the environment are taught in high schools all over the United States. They are an important part of many environmental studies curricula. There’s a deep racial undercurrent with poor people of color are presented as having too many children and destroying the environment. Unfortunately, Malthusianism has achieved the status of conventional wisdom in the U.S. It’s not surprising that white nationalists are influenced by it and deploy it for their own hateful aims.

Now, there’s also a powerful apocalyptic discourse that links climate change, environmental degradation, overpopulation, and scarcity. White nationalism is already steeped in violent apocalypticism—fears about the white race coming to an end feed the impetus to mount an Armageddon-style bloody-but-cleansing race war. The manifestos of the shooters in both New Zealand and El Paso in a sense represent a coming together of a green apocalypse and a brown fascist one. This toxic mix serves as a rationale for saving nature and the white race. ..

I don’t want to deny that there may be climate conflicts or climate-related migration. But there is a deeply problematic, apocalyptic discourse about climate and conflict and climate refugees that is quite common in liberal policy circles and even documentaries. It draws on highly racialized depictions of poor people—especially in Africa—as more prone to violence in times of resource scarcity as if they’re savages not capable of cooperation. And these narratives also simplify the migration process with the claim that climate change is going to cause scarcity, scarcity’s going to cause conflict, and that’s going to cause migration. Most climate migration researchers believe a lot of migration that is likely to occur will be within countries not across borders. But to the extent that it is across borders, why are negative images fomented of these poor people coming to get us? That’s not on the far right, that’s in some liberal foreign policy and military scenarios around climate change...

This past fall, Matthew Phelan wrote an article in the New York Review of Books on ecofascism. He talks about how sustainability discourse is becoming popular in Europe among right-wing populists, especially in Italy with the Five Star Movement. Sustainability could become a mantra of these people, but their kind of sustainability excludes. It’s sustainability for white people and for their particular nativist vision of the nation-state. So sustainability needs to be clearly delineated in terms of whose interests are being served. The same with climate policy. Green comes in many shades. We need to understand the differences between them.

And for the TL;DR reader, here's the briefer Wikipedia entry.

To me it is absolutely fascinating (and unexpected) to learn that environmentalists who trumpet scenarios of rising oceans and crippling droughts/floods are unintentionally (and unknowingly) fuelling the end-times fantasies of radical extremists.