Last August, we pointed to warnings about the dangerous potential of the far-right taking climate change seriously, and using it as a pretense to impose racist immigration policies. Then, in November, we talked about how deniers were denying the link between immigration and climate-driven crop failures in Central America. We predicted that they would ignore a key root cause--fossil fuel emissions--and instead “send in the troops to use military force to enforce the (white) nationalist status quo.”
Sadly, we have now seen that play out.
As NBC reported last week, in response to widespread crop failure and starvation in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, the Trump administration froze or re-purposed $400 million in foreign aid. That aid would have funded programs, for example, to help coffee growers deal with a climate-charged fungus killing their crop.
But instead of using aid to feed the hungry, the Trump administration has chosen to send equipment and personnel to Guatemala with a mission of “enhancing border security...in order to reduce irregular migration flows”. (If a militaristic response to a humanitarian crisis isn’t fascism, what is?)
Not only are we cutting aid to vulnerable communities, we’re also making it harder for them to leave those communities. We are spending US tax dollars to keep people in communities where, as NBC reported, children are quite literally starving to death.
And the worst part is that this is just the beginning. This is the outcome of racism from political leadership in the federal government in conjunction with ignoring climate science. So what happens when that science is not just ignored by someone like Trump, but actually accepted by other white supremacists? And then acted upon?
Tragically, that is not a hypothetical question. We know exactly what happens when racists on the right accept climate change as a crisis--it’s already happened twice this year. The massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand and El Paso, Texas were both motivated in part by eco-fascist concerns about immigration.
Sadly, we can’t expect this emerging trend to dissipate any time soon. As Sarah Manavis wrote last week in the New Statesman, social media is bringing eco-fascists together to share their green-motivated white nationalism. And it has been most fervently supported by Europe’s far-right. For example, in Italy, a forest that was planted in the 1930’s to honor Benito Mussolini was recently “damaged in a fire allegedly caused by a pot of boiling tomato sauce,” per reporting by Erica Eisen in Jewish Currents. Mussolini’s present-day supporters, of course, rushed in to restore the forest monument.
Stereotypically Italian pasta accidents aside, this is no laughing matter. At the core of eco-fascism is the belief that a pristine planet is better off with a small white population than a large brown one, an idea that was concerningly present in mainstream green groups for far too long.
Thankfully, this is changing. As environmental justice continues gaining traction in the mainstream green movement, and the traditionally disadvantaged and disproportionately harmed communities move to the forefront, it’s clear that green groups both of the friendly Youth Climate Strike and more radical Extinction Rebellion variety need to work to overcome the blindness embedded in their historic whiteness. As Jane Zelikova and Giana Amador wrote in Scientific American yesterday, that’s going to require new leadership, and will bring new opportunities.
But it also might require rethinking some things. Those who try and reach center-right audiences by playing to their fears about climate catastrophes driving immigration should probably reconsider that approach, and ask themselves a hard question: is it worth using that messaging given the risks?
Moderately conservative audiences are increasingly proving receptive to climate messaging. But if the cost of their support is playing into a racist worldview that radicalizes a more extreme and extremely well-armed far right, is it worth it?
Either way, as NRDC’s Mary Annaïse Heglar tweeted last month, we can’t ignore eco-fascism and just hope it goes away.
Because from El Paso to the White House, it’s just getting started.
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