6 SEPTEMBER 2019
Green and White Nationalism
Elizabeth Chatterjee
A few minutes before 22 people were murdered in a Walmart in El Paso on 3 August, in a now-familiar ritual of American gun violence, a manifesto was uploaded to the fringe online forum 8chan (tagline: ‘Embrace infamy’)... Its opening lines praised the lengthy statement published on the same forum five months earlier by the New Zealand mosque attacker – a self-proclaimed ‘eco-fascist’ – and it name-checked an unexpected source: Dr Seuss’s 1971 environmentalist children’s fable The Lorax.
The link between environmentalism and racism isn’t new. Romantic advocates of pristine ‘wilderness’ often sought to exclude poor and native populations. Madison Grant, who helped to found the Bronx Zoo, Glacier National Park and the Save the Redwoods League, was also the author of the eugenicist tract The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Hitler called the book his ‘bible’. A green wing of the Nazi movement saw vegetarianism, organic farming and nature worship as the natural corollary of the party’s racial obsessions. Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists advocated a return to the land. After the war, the BUF’s agrarian adviser, Dorian Jenks, was one of the founders of the Soil Association.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, overpopulation became an obsession. The Death of Tomorrow (1972) by John Alexander Loraine boasted ‘a foreword by His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh’. (Contemplating the human ‘population explosion’ 15 years later, Prince Philip wrote that he was ‘tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus’.) The notorious opening passages of Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling The Population Bomb (1968) depicted Delhi as a hellscape, and predicted that hundreds of millions would starve to death.
Garrett Hardin’s essay ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ appeared in Science in December 1968. Declaring that ‘freedom to breed is intolerable’, Hardin argued that only coercion could prevent ecological collapse. In a later paper, he coined the term ‘lifeboat ethics’ for the response he urged on the United States: let the poor of the world drown. He went on to lobby for nativist immigration policies and cuts to food aid... ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ has been cited more than 40,000 times...
Right-wing extremists have seized on the opportunity to claim to speak, like Dr Seuss’s Lorax, for the trees. In some of the dimmer corners of the internet, the Pine Tree Gang – ... demands a white separatist homeland in the northwestern United States. Their founding philosopher is ‘Uncle Ted’, the Unabomber; they circulate such slogans as ‘Save trees, not refugees.’ ...
WHOLE THING ATThe link between environmentalism and racism isn’t new. Romantic advocates of pristine ‘wilderness’ often sought to exclude poor and native populations. Madison Grant, who helped to found the Bronx Zoo, Glacier National Park and the Save the Redwoods League, was also the author of the eugenicist tract The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Hitler called the book his ‘bible’. A green wing of the Nazi movement saw vegetarianism, organic farming and nature worship as the natural corollary of the party’s racial obsessions. Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists advocated a return to the land. After the war, the BUF’s agrarian adviser, Dorian Jenks, was one of the founders of the Soil Association.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, overpopulation became an obsession. The Death of Tomorrow (1972) by John Alexander Loraine boasted ‘a foreword by His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh’. (Contemplating the human ‘population explosion’ 15 years later, Prince Philip wrote that he was ‘tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus’.) The notorious opening passages of Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling The Population Bomb (1968) depicted Delhi as a hellscape, and predicted that hundreds of millions would starve to death.
Garrett Hardin’s essay ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ appeared in Science in December 1968. Declaring that ‘freedom to breed is intolerable’, Hardin argued that only coercion could prevent ecological collapse. In a later paper, he coined the term ‘lifeboat ethics’ for the response he urged on the United States: let the poor of the world drown. He went on to lobby for nativist immigration policies and cuts to food aid... ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ has been cited more than 40,000 times...
Right-wing extremists have seized on the opportunity to claim to speak, like Dr Seuss’s Lorax, for the trees. In some of the dimmer corners of the internet, the Pine Tree Gang – ... demands a white separatist homeland in the northwestern United States. Their founding philosopher is ‘Uncle Ted’, the Unabomber; they circulate such slogans as ‘Save trees, not refugees.’ ...
