24 | New Scientist | 17 August 2019
T
HE mass shooting at a
Walmart store in El Paso,
Texas, earlier this month
was widely reported as a racially
motivated attack by a white
supremacist. That is almost
certainly what it was: shortly
before it happened, a manifesto
railing against the “Hispanic
invasion” of the US appeared
online, and the police believe
it was posted by the shooter.
As has become depressingly
familiar, the document contained
numerous references to alt-right
conspiracy theories such as the
“great replacement”, which claims
that white Christian civilisation is
being swamped by black and Asian
people, and Muslims. But buried
in it was another, rarer trope that
appears to be rising up the white
nationalist agenda. The manifesto
also cited environmental
destruction of the US as a
motivation, and blamed this
on immigrants.
According to Peter Beinart, a
journalism professor at the City
University of New York (to whom
I am indebted for bringing this
issue to my attention in a piece
in The Atlantic), the unexpected
fusion of white nationalism and
environmentalism is a growing
phenomenon. White nationalists,
he says, are increasingly hijacking
environmental issues and
hitching them to their own wagon.
The right-wing extremist who
killed 51 people at two mosques
in Christchurch, New Zealand, in
March also cited environmental
damage among his justifications.
In his manifesto, he said that
non-Europeans are the main
cause of overpopulation.
The ravings of xenophobic
murderers are one thing, but,
according to Beinart, these views
are now finding their way into
mainstream political discourse.
The right-wing commentatorAnn Coulter, for example, has
argued that immigrants threaten
the US environment because
they don’t have the same love of
nature (never mind that Coulter’s
beloved Republican party is the
world’s most powerful promoter
of climate change denial). In
Europe, far-right leaders such
as Marine Le Pen in France have
started talking about love of
nature as a national virtue
and blaming environmental
destruction on immigrants.
The emergence of this bastard
ideology took me completely by
surprise. Like many progressive
environmentalists, I have longhoped that conservative politics
will eventually embrace
environmentalism – after all, what
could be more conservative than
conservation? But there is no
reason to celebrate this adoption.
The far right’s appropriation
of environmentalism serves two
purposes, neither involving the
protection of nature. The first is
to further demonise immigrants
for sullying the otherwise pure
environment. The second is to
absolve the “native population” –
for which read those of white
European ancestry – from blame.
It may be that the El Paso
and Christchurch killers were
genuinely motivated by concernsabout the environment. Filtered
through their ideology, though,
that just morphed into more
hatred and became another
justification to despise,
dehumanise and kill the “other”
in the name of national purity.
Furthermore, as with much
of the alt-right belief system, it is
based on fallacies. Poorer people
in the US – a group that includes
most migrants – have the smallest
carbon footprints. They consume
less, drive and fly less and eat less
meat. The people who need to
scale back their consumption are
the rich, who are overwhelmingly
white and of European descent.
With hindsight, this tie-up
was probably inevitable. The
glorification of the past inherent
in right-wing politics lends itself
to nostalgic visions of bucolic
days gone by, conjuring up
a green and pleasant land
uncontaminated by outsiders.
It also harks back to a simpler time
before the scale of the damage we
are doing to the planet became
clear, when rich Westerners
could consume with impunity.
For now, nationalist
environmentalism is solely an
alternative expression of white
supremacy, but it could take on
a life of its own. The far right has
successfully vilified immigrants as
scroungers, job stealers and queue-
jumpers, despite ample evidence
to the contrary. That could easily
escalate into a resource war: a fight
for dwindling reserves of oil, gas,
minerals and water, along national
or ethnic lines.
The political mainstream
needs to confront the ever-
growing threat of nationalist
environmentalism – or maybe
we should call it eco-fascism –
before it spirals out of control.
But countering it won’t be easy. As
we have seen time and again, you
BL can’t win a culture war with facts. ❚
AINE^ HAR
RINGT
ONIII/GE
TTYThis column appears
monthly. Up next week:
Annalee Newitz“ The glorification of
the past inherent in
right-wing politics
lends itself to
nostalgic visions of
bucolic days gone by”The rise of real eco-fascism White nationalists are embracing
environmentalism. We must tackle this threat before it spirals
out of control, writes Graham LawtonNo planet B
What I’m reading
The Missing Lynx by Ross
Barnett, an enjoyable
book about Britain’s
lost mammals and the
possibility of bringing
them back.What I’m watching
I’m halfway through
Netflix’s Cambridge
Analytica documentary
The Great Hack. Too
horrifying to watch
all at once.What I’m working on
A story about the world’s
most amazing dodo
specimen.Graham’s week
Graham Lawton is a staff
writer at New Scientist and
author of The Origin of (Almost)
Everything. You can follow him
@grahamlawtonViews Columnist