"Identitarian Ecology" The Far Right's Reinterpretation of Environmental Concerns (original) (raw)

For decades, mainstream global discourse has coded the environment as a left-wing issue. And yet, in recent years, scholars have begun to notice the still marginal and yet rapidly expanding social phenomenon of far-right environmentalism and ecology (Lubarda, 2020; Taylor, 2019). Forchtner's (2019) edited volume, The Far Right and the Environment, featured essays from scholars throughout Europe and the United States focused on describing this emerging socio-political fusion within wide-ranging national and cultural contexts. This line of scholarship raged on with last year's special edition of the journal Environmental History (Brain, 2022) which expanded the analysis of far-right ecology into South Asia (D'Souza, 2022), South America (Sedrez, 2022), and the Middle East (İnal, 2022), while another special edition of the journal Terrorism and Political Violence (Silke and Morrison, 2022) featured wide-ranging analyses connecting climate change, social movements, and political violence. It is against this backdrop of scholarly anxiety about far-right ecology that we must situate historian Peter Staudenmaier's (2022) Ecology Contested, which, despite its brevity, functions as an enormous historical bibliography to remind us of his central point and thesis: 'the profound political ambivalence of ecology'. Staudenmaier has been focused on the centrality of the environment to the far-right for decades (Biehl and Staudenmaier, 1995; Staudenmaier, 2013). And yet, in contrast to much of his previous work, Ecology Contested functions as a much more effective reminder to sociologists of the 'political ambivalence of ecology', and to approach nature, ecology, and the environment as both central and yet flexible elements in the makeup of any community ideology. The collection is broken into four lengthy essays: 'The Politics of Nature from Left to Right' (pp. 19-45), 'A Revolution Against Technology' (pp. 46-116), 'Ambiguities of Animal Rights' (pp. 121-148), and 'Blood and Soil Revived?' (pp. 149-194). There is also a very brief essay in the middle of the collection called 'Disney Ecology' (pp. 117-120) which analyzes the movie Bambi from an ecocritical perspective and does not really seem to fit with the rest of the collection. The first essay, 'The Politics of Nature from Left to Right: Radicals, Reactionaries, and Ecological Responses to Modernity' begins with a reflection on the political trajectory of famous German biodynamic farmer Baldur Springmann from Nazism (1920s-40s) to Green Party anti-nuclear activist (1950s-70s) and back to far-right neo-Nazism (1980s). Staudenmaier then uses the case of Springmann to illustrate how, when 'refracted through categories of class, race, gender, nation, and religion.. . the politics of nature offers a way for individuals and communities alike to navigate the precarious terrain of modern life and search for alternatives' (p. 23).