THE 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.
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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 commentator Ann 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 long hoped 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 glorification of the past inherent in right-wing politics lends itself to nostalgic visions of bucolic days gone by”
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 concerns about 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 can’t win a culture war with facts.
- This column appears monthly. Up next week: Annalee Newitz
