Blood and Vanishing Topsoil

The devaluing of human life—particularly of populations seen as inferior—in order to protect the environment viewed as essential to White identity is at the core of Far Right environmentalism and ecofascist thought. The ecofascist dream is a not just a White ethnostate but a “green” one too.

It was an odd coincidence that on April 5, as worldwide infections crossed^[3] 1.2 million and deaths neared 70,000, the Finnish writer Pentti Linkola, long associated with ecofascism, died at age 87.^[4] For decades, Linkola called for the “controlled pruning” of the human population,^[5] described humanity as nature’s “very own tumour,”^[6] and argued that the reduction of infant mortality should be “distressing to a biologist.”^[7]

In recent years, Linkola’s ideas and image have been adopted by an emerging ecofascist strain within the Far Right, which admires him equally for his commitment to live simply, his thunderous denunciations of environmental and cultural destruction, and his proposed solution: genocide.

While this subculture congregates largely online, two massacres last year, executed by killers whose manifestos combined environmental and White supremacist grievances, underscore that it can be exceptionally deadly. The fact that those attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand and El Paso, Texas—the deadliest from the Far Right since 2011^[8]—both occurred in the last calendar year also suggests that we’re witnessing something new.

Over the last several months, a steady drip of stories have added to this uncomfortable trend. In December 2019, a member of the U.S.-based neonazi terror group Atomwaffen Division was outed as a former member of the radical environmentalist group Earth First!^[9] In January, a VICE report uncovered evidence that an arson in Sweden that destroyed a mink farm—a traditional target for left-leaning eco-saboteurs—may have been carried out by a member of another neonazi organization known as The Base.^[10] In March, a UK White supremacist group seemingly impersonated the environmental group Extinction Rebellion while promoting messages cheering on COVID-19.^[11] And in May, antifascists revealed the identity of an Oregon-based leader of a now-disbanded ecofascist group named The Green Brigade.^[12]

These developments, and ecofascism more generally, demonstrate that environmental activism doesn’t always align with liberatory politics, as conventional wisdom would have it. In fact, environmental advocacy has deep roots on the Right as well, which many contemporary White nationalist thinkers have sought to reclaim. Importantly, mainstream environmentalism has shown itself to be vulnerable to “fascist creep,” where far-right concepts and approaches to ecological crisis have been adopted by otherwise left-leaning environmentalists.^[13] (A recent Michael Moore documentary, for example, argued that environmentalists should prioritize work to forestall population growth.^[14])

Today, the single most important concept to far-right organizing is the projection of majority-minority populations in the U.S. and Europe—something often framed by the movement as “the great replacement.”^[15] The U.S. Census estimates that the country will reach that status by 2045, the same decade the atmosphere is projected to reach the 1.5 degree Celsius warming mark that will exacerbate food shortages, flooding, droughts, and poverty.^[16] As these two trends continue to converge, more acts of violence—state-sanctioned and individual—are likely to be committed in the name of environmentalism by far-right actors.  

The coming climate crisis, which promises to scramble all politics, provides ecofascists an opening. So too does the generational drift of younger people of all political persuasions ditching the climate change denialism of older generations. Debates about who is responsible for, and who should bear the burden of the coming crisis, combined with an ascendant populist Right anchored in White identity, may well open the door to ever more authoritarian solutions.

A HISTORY RETURNED

The stereotype of tree-hugging hippies in the U.S. has long masked the fact that racist projects were embedded in the earliest days of the American conservation movement and modern ecological thought.

Historian Peter Staudenmaier’s essay “Fascist Ecology,” published in 1995, describes how 19^th Century German political romantics first forged a “peculiar synthesis of naturalism and nationalism.”^[17] Staudenmaier highlights the 19th Century German nationalist Ernst Moritz Arndt, who argued that the essence of the German people could be found in the landscape and specifically the forest.^[18] Arndt was a fanatical antisemite, and, as Staudenmaier writes, “His eloquent and prescient appeals for ecological sensitivity were couched always in terms of the well-being of the German soil and the German people.” The soil and volk were inextricable, and overexploitation of the land, Arndt argued, led directly to a weakened German race.^[19] 

In 1866, German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term “ecology,” before going on to found the German Monist League, which “combined scientifically based ecological holism with völkisch social views,” including Haeckel’s personal belief in “nordic racial superiority,” Social Darwinism, and racial eugenics. His followers developed his thinking further, “embedding concern for the natural world in a tightly woven web of regressive social themes,” as Staudenmaier writes, so that “From its very beginnings…ecology was bound up in an intensely reactionary political framework.”^[20]

The rise of German nationalism was thus deeply connected to mythical conceptions of race and nature both of which were viewed as under threat by industrial advances. By the early 20th Century, figures like the psychologist Ludwig Klages, whom Stuadenmaier notes “anticipated just about all of the themes of the contemporary ecology movement,”^[21] were calling for a return to simpler modes of living more natural to the German volk. This reaction brought with it the concomitant worship of German rural and peasant life and rabid antisemitism—with Jews scapegoated as the bearers of a hated and false ideology of progress—that would feed directly into Nazi Germany’s philosophy of Blut und Boden (blood and soil).

Haeckel’s eugenicist beliefs also inspired one of the United States’ most effective early environmentalists, Madison Grant, a close friend to President Theodore Roosevelt who helped found numerous conservation groups and the Bronx Zoo.^[22]  But in the context of rising immigration in early 20^th Century industrial America, Grant saw little difference between saving bison from extinction on the Great Plains and protecting White “Nordic” stock from being subsumed by new arrivals from southern and eastern Europe.^[23] A key figure in the era’s elite-driven eugenics movement, Grant’s 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, laid out a pseudo-scientific classification of races that proved enormously consequential. Grant would go on to advise in the creation of anti-immigration and anti-miscegenation laws that served as a template for similar policies under the Third Reich,^[24] and Adolf Hitler himself would later write Grant, declaring his book “my Bible.”^[25] Roosevelt, who provided a blurb for the book’s later editions, is rightfully celebrated for his expansion of national parks and monuments, but as president also lectured White women on their duty to prevent “race suicide” by having more children.^[26]

The value of this history isn’t lost on contemporary White nationalists. When Grant’s book was rereleased by a far-right publisher in 2012, it included a foreward by Jared Taylor, editor of the influential White supremacist online monthly American Renaissance. After praising Grant for understanding “that heedless breeding is destructive,” Taylor added, “The Passing of the Great Race unquestionably helped make it respectable to think in terms of the demographic future of the United States.”^[27]

POPULATION & IMMIGRATION

In the 1960s and ‘70s, neo-Malthusian fears of overpopulation came to dominate the environmental movement. Two mid-century books—William Vogt’s The Road to Survival and Henry Fairfield Osborn, Jr.’s Our Plundered Planet—helped lay the groundwork for this perspective.^[28] And Paul Erhlich’s 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, brought those fears to the mainstream. Erhlich was joined by reactionary ecologist Garrett Hardin, who argued that the planet’s “carrying capacity” was fast approaching its limit due to population growth in poor countries in essays like “Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor.” While some environmentalists (notably biologist Barry Commoner) pushed back against Erhlich’s and Hardin’s arguments, their work nevertheless gained popular attention and was adopted by prominent environmental advocacy organizations like the Sierra Club (which published Erhlich’s book).^[29] 

Hardin’s work was particularly influential, helping to revive a national debate around Taylor’s concern for the country’s “demographic future” by marshaling ecological arguments in service of anti-immigration policy. Hardin’s impact over time can be measured in his popularization of the  “competitive exclusion principle,” which holds that in a fight between two populations over finite resources, one will inevitably lose out, and was cited in a 1961 segregationist tract^[30] and in a 2018 White nationalist defense of the South African apartheid regime.^[31] Hardin’s arguments about the environmental toll of immigration and foreign aid to the Global South remain influential among White nationalists, as do his prescriptions for worldwide population control[5]  including rejecting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in order to globally regulate procreation.

Hardin found a perfect collaborator in the late White nationalist conservationist John Tanton.^[32] Tanton, who died in 2019, was an immensely influential figure in the U.S. anti-immigrant movement, helping to found several anti-immigrant organizations including the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and the now-retired journal The Social Contract (which ran Hardin’s famous “The Tragedy of the Commons” in its inaugural issue). Tanton started his public activism in local environmental fights in his home state of Michigan and served on the Sierra Club’s National Population Committee in the 1970s.^[33] Like Hardin, he viewed immigration-driven population growth as a central threat not just to the environment, but to U.S. culture as well. The late wealthy heiress Cordelia Scaife May shared Tanton’s fears, and used her fortune to bankroll FAIR, CIS, and like-minded organizations.^[34] In the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, Tanton and his allies attempted to gain control of the Sierra Club’s board and transform the organization into another vehicle for anti-immigration policy and advocacy.^[35] He failed, but the sharp White nationalist turn he labored to create in the country would eventually find its advocate in President Donald Trump.

Tanton’s groups, which have provided the Trump administration with personnel and policy, produced numerous reports and commentary framing immigration as an important environmental concern.^[36] A 2016 FAIR report describes immigration as the “jet engine” of U.S. population growth and argued that reducing it “offers the best chance for achieving environmental sustainability long term,” while a 2008 CIS report argues that immigration—by moving people from low-carbon-using countries to the carbon intensive U.S.—undermines climate goals.

In February 2020, a CIS attorney testified at a White House Council on Environmental Quality event, alongside the director for a Tanton-allied group misleadingly named Progressives for Immigration Reform (PFIR).^[37] The two groups have long sought to expand the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)—the landmark 1969 law that requires federal agencies to prepare environmental impact assessments before “any major federal action” that significantly impacts the environment^[38]—to encompass immigration policy. Thanks, no doubt, to Erlich and Hardin’s influence in the 1960s, NEPA’s original language prescribes accounting for “the profound influences of population growth” on the environment.^[39] In their February testimony, CIS and PFIR demanded that “population,” under NEPA, be interpreted as including immigration.                         

Under Trump, the U.S. anti-immigrant movement has been elevated from the disreputable outskirts of Republican Party to effectively running immigration policy through allies like White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller. While the administration has yet to fully embrace an environmentalist rationale for immigration restriction, PFIR laid out how Trump might do so in a second term. In a well-produced video that spliced footage of Central American migrant “caravans” with garbage dumps and traffic jams, the group called on Trump to create an entirely new bureau within the Environmental Protection Agency dedicated to studying the impact of population growth on the environment with “jurisdiction over immigration and naturalization programs.”^[40] PFIR went on to suggest a total cessation of immigration until such studies could be carried out, and concluded with a direct appeal:

THE INTELLECTUALS

In a February article, journalist Shane Burley described how the two most influential White nationalist publishing houses working today—U.S.-based Counter-Currents Publishing and European-based Arktos Media—have developed the “intellectual foundation for a new fascism.”^[41] They’re also two of the most prominent sources of ecofascist thinking and ideas, promoting work on “deep ecology”—a biocentric environmental philosophy founded by the late Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss^[42] that holds, “It would be better for humans if there were fewer of them, and much better for other creatures.”^[43]

That credo, unsurprisingly, resonates with ecofascist thinking and has led to some ugly reasoning by deep ecology advocates.^[44] Finnish ecofascist Pentti Linkola arrived at this deep ecology principle with much more murderous vehemence, and Arktos Media published an English-translation collection of his essays in 2009 under the title Can Life Prevail? The book’s introduction was written by U.S. ecofascist Brett Stevens, who runs Amerika.org and the fansite PenttiLinkola.com.^[45] Several personalities on the influential White nationalist podcast network The Right Stuff have recently translated Finnish documentaries featuring Linkola^[46] while memes featuring his writings and image circulate across far-right communities online. 

Arktos also published two collections of essays by Ludwig Klages, who denounced the “ever-increasing mechanization” of mankind that was engendering the “desecration of the natural world.”^[47] Klages’ work has been celebrated on the U.S. Far Right by neonazi publisher National Vanguard^[48] and writers for the now archived altright.com, for developing a “useful deep ecological perspective.”^[49]

Counter-Currents has also written about Klages,^[50] and regularly commemorates figures from their own established canon of ecofascists—including some rescued from obscurity—like the Hitler-worshipping Savitri Devi; the English fascist and organic farming pioneer Jorian Jenks; English author Henry Williamson; as well as Linkola and early eugenics-driven conservationists like Madison Grant.

In a 2012 interview, Counter-Currents editor Greg Johnson spoke to the key tenets of ecofascist belief, arguing that “the centrality of nature”—terminology borrowed from deep ecology and biocentrism—connects fascism and ecology, in contrast to what he described as the “very much man-centered and anti-natural” outlook of modern liberal society.^[51] From the biocentric perspective, Johnson said, “follows an organic, hierarchical view of society, the rejection of egalitarianism, the rejection of modern technology and capitalism.”^[52] Both deep ecologists like Næss and ecofascists like Johnson associate the anthropocentric view with the Judeo-Christian tradition.^[53] Ecofascists, including original Nazi theorists like Alfred Rosenberg, often emphasize this fact by embracing paganism and extending antisemitic conspiracy theories to blame Jews for capitalism and industrial society’s destruction of the environment.

Johnson additionally describes how valuing biodiversity must extend to human biodiversity, arguing that if the former is viewed as worthy of preservation so too must the latter. With this perspective, Johnson explained, “you get the outlook of somebody like Savitri Devi…who said that her dream is of a world where you have many races and each race has its own place in the world where it can live according to its own lights.”^[54]

This vision of creating preserves for “human biodiversity,” otherwise known as ethnostates, echoes the work of the European New Right (ENR), which Counter-Currents and Arktos Media have strived to emulate and promote, and which Alt Right figures like Richard Spencer have heavily drawn upon.^[55] The leading philosopher of the ENR, Alain de Benoist, articulated the almost identical concept of ethnopluralism, or the idea of a racial “right to difference.”^[56] French political scientist Stéphane Françoise has highlighted Benoist’s interest in the environmental sustainability concept of bioregionalism—which envisions a more harmonious human adaptation to the unique natural characteristics that define a given “bioregion” and to live within its natural limits.^[57] Françoise described^[58] Benoist’s interest in bioregionalism as “a concept that joined the rooted regionalism” of his ethnopluralism.^[59]

This April, Counter-Currents published an obituary of Linkola^[60] and celebrated Earth Day by linking to old articles they’d published on ecology.^[61] It also ran a new piece, proposing that right-wing environmentalism should be understood as the effort to “keep human population at manageable levels, but value preservation of distinct racial types rather than suicidal extinction.”^[62] Accompanying the article was an image that has been circulated widely on 8chan by White supremacists, illustrating concepts considered essential to a new society, including “environmentalism” and “ethnic autonomy.” A year earlier, the Christchurch mass killer had used the same image on the cover of his manifesto.^[63]

THE KILLERS^[64]

On March 15, 2019, a 28-year-old Australian White man named Brenton Tarrant walked into the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, during Friday Prayer. With an arsenal and a camera attached to his helmet, he broadcast his own murderous rampage that would continue at another nearby mosque and ultimately leave 51 innocent people dead.

Before beginning his massacre, Tarrant posted his manifesto, “The Great Replacement,” on 8chan, an image board that, until last year, provided a playground for an assortment of White supremacist trolls and vicious online harassers. Tarrant’s title was a reference to the French author Renaud Camus, who developed the conspiracist grand remplacement theory that a global elite is orchestrating the replacement of White Europeans with non-European immigrants. The same concept inspired White supremacists in the 2017 torch-lit march in Charlottesville, Virginia, to chant, “Jews will not replace us.”

The Christchurch massacre was the latest in a rising number of White supremacist attacks worldwide.^[65] But it stood out for its lethality and how Tarrant tailored the siege to become a meme for the far-right community he’d emerged from: by streaming his attack, packing his manifesto with references and ideas that have long circulated among far-right corners of the internet, and even etching phrases and names into his rifle and body armor.

It also stood out for Tarrant’s identification as an ecofascist and how closely he echoed the movement’s ideas in describing “immigration and birth rates” as a threat to both “White” nations and the environment. “The environment is being destroyed by over population,” the killer wrote. “We Europeans are one of the groups that are not over populating the world. The invaders are the ones over populating the world. Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.”

Tarrant’s manifesto updated the neo-Malthusian fear of overpopulation by synthesizing “great replacement” theory with the climate crisis, and arguing, “Green nationalism is the only true nationalism.” And, like Devi’s vision of racial biodiversity and Benoist’s ethnopluralism, he also advocated for a “green” version of “ethnic autonomy”:

The attack in Christchurch was the deadliest White supremacist attack since 2011, when Anders Breivik, targeting Leftist youth, killed 77 in Norway. That attack, Tarrant wrote, was the “true inspiration” for his own.^[66] Breivik also wrote a manifesto—an encyclopedic-scale collection of far-right conspiracism, but his comments on the environment were somewhat overlooked.

While Breivik embraced some climate change denial arguments, and believed that environmentalism was a Communist plot, he also borrowed from reactionary ecology. Specifically, he blamed overpopulation as “the outcome of 2nd but especially 3rd world human behaviour” created by a “Marxist/multiculturalist/suicidal humanist/capitalist globalist elite.” Like Garrett Hardin’s broadsides against international aid, Breivik attacked the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights as enabling “third world” overpopulation that was threatening to overtake Europe. Sounding not unlike Linkola or Hardin (who helped popularize the concept of Earth’s “carrying capacity”), Breivik wrote:

Like a murderous daisy chain, Breivik inspired Tarrant, whose “Great Replacement” manifesto in turn inspired another killer who expressed environmental grievances as justification for shooting down 23 innocent people in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart in August 2019. In a manifesto also posted on 8chan, the El Paso shooter described how he targeted “invaders” as one way to “get rid of enough people…[so that] our way of life can become more sustainable.”

“The environment is getting worse by the year,” the killer wrote, arguing that immigration from Mexico posed a dual threat to White political power and the environment. “If you take nothing else from this document, remember this: INACTION IS A CHOICE. I can no longer bear the shame of inaction knowing that our founding fathers have endowed me with the rights needed to save our country from the brink [of] destruction.”

The significance of these manifestos, noted historian Graham Macklin, wasn’t just their value as “ideological justification” and propaganda, but the “call to arms” they issued for new killers to follow.^[67]

Tarrant made that invitation clear in a concluding section of his manifesto titled “Destabilization and Accelerationism,” in which he called on others to follow his lead, sowing violence and discord in order to bring about societal collapse from which new White ethnostates can be erected.

GREEN ACCELERATIONISM & UNCLE TED

In the immediate aftermath of the El Paso killings, Southern Poverty Law Center analyst Cassie Miller noted that far-right channels on the encrypted messaging service Telegram broke out in celebration of the terror attack and anointed the killer a “saint.”^[68] This same Telegram community, Miller wrote, represents the “largest online stronghold for accelerationist ideas.”

Within the White power movement, accelerationism is seen as “the belief that a social system’s internal contradictions should be pushed to their limits in order to encourage rather than overcome the system’s self-destructive tendencies. This is done to hasten the system’s collapse or demise as well as create space for radical social change to take root,” as the neonazi group The Base put it in a meme shared to Telegram.^[69] Before a federal crackdown unraveled the group this spring, The Base held survivalist trainings—another important aspect of ecofascist groups at work today.

It’s easy to see how the accelerationist theory of change could include radical, and even murderous, action to forestall environmental destruction. For ecofascists, “the system” is not just a decadent Western civilization enabling its own destruction through immigration and egalitarianism, but also, through its capitalist and industrial economy, the primary threat to the environment. Toppling a destructive techno-industrial society that celebrates multiculturalism could simultaneously advance the White nationalist cause and help the planet.

Throughout 2019, a diffuse group of ecofascist Telegram accounts called the “Ecogram” was active—including pagan and neo-volkisch accounts, an account for a North Carolina animal shelter run by a White supremacist,^[70] as well as accounts calling for revolutionary fascism. One account described itself by writing, “Yesterday we were Libertarians, today we’re any variety of EcoFash terrorwave collapse cult accelerationists. This is because the only outlet we have left to voice white self interest is a direct hands on approach.” Another account for a short-lived group called The Green Brigade described itself as “consisting of openly accelerationist, Eco-Extremist members focused on tearing down the system that exploits our land, animals, and people.” In December, this group posted photos of an alleged leafletting action in Arkansas featuring a flyer with an image of a human skull atop the crossed monkey wrench and stone hammer from the Earth First! logo.^[71]

The accelerationist call to overthrow the “system” also helps explain the growing far-right adulation of Ted Kaczynski, the U.S. terrorist who killed three and injured more than 20 using mail bombs intended to spark an anti-technology revolution. After his arrest, anarchists^[72] and radical environmentalists^[73] first embraced Kaczynski for his writings attacking technological developments that he saw as ruining the environment and enslaving mankind. There were also less pronounced explorations of Kaczynski’s value on the Far Right, including threads on Stormfront dating back to 2002. Notably, Anders Breivik plagiarized Kaczynski in his sprawling manifesto.^[74]

But in the last several years, a loose far-right community emerged on social media platforms with users who added pine tree emojis to their profile names and adopted Kaczynski as their own. Members of this pine tree community circulated memes featuring “Uncle Ted” and his Montana cabin, alongside more earnest discussions about Kaczynski’s anti-technology ideas and the desire for simpler, healthier lives more in tune with nature. While some far-right fans recognize that Kaczynski isn’t explicitly a “racialist,” they applaud his hatred of Leftism and social justice activism. (The first section of Kaczynski’s infamous manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” concerns “The Psychology of Modern Leftism.”) Some new adherents, including members of Atomwaffen, sought correspondence with Kaczynski by sending him letters in prison.^[75]

One micro-celebrity to emerge from this community is Mike Mahoney, aka Mike Ma, a former member of Milo Yiannopoulos’ entourage^[76] who created a brand, the “Pine Tree Party,” adopting the Revolutionary War-era “An Appeal to Heaven” flag. In 2019, Ma self-published a novel, Harassment Architecture, rife with scenes of brutal violence, racism, and misogyny—including fantasies of shooting up a gay nightclub and curb-stomping a Leftist woman—culminating in a fantasy of accelerationist terror the narrator describes as “cleansing fire.” In a speech near the end of the novel (sold on Amazon and as an Audible Audiobook), Ma’s hero exhorts his followers:

PDFs and an audiobook version of Harassment Architecture have been circulating across accelerationist Telegram since the book’s publication. The book has also been included in a “Audio Nazi Library” on Telegram, alongside William Pierce’s infamous race-war novel The Turner Diaries, and the manifestos of White supremacist mass killers like Dylann Roof and the Christchurch shooter.

Ma, still in his twenties, has developed a steady following on social media, posting daily Instagram stories featuring fans with his novel or wearing his merchandise, including shirts reading “Kaczynski Electric.” His followers—largely young, White men, many of whom are into weight-lifting, tactical weapons training, and outdoor survival—constitute a demographic other far-right environmentalist influencers see as ripe for recruitment.

COLLAPSE    

Another influential figure to emerge from the Pine Tree community is the obscure U.S. electronic musician Storm King,^[77] who in several interviews including on racist podcasts over the past several years has detailed his vision for the Far Right to reclaim environmentalism as an “untried attack vector” that could aid their organizing.^[78] In particular, Storm King advocates what he calls deceleration: an alternative apocalyptic approach to accelerationism^[79] that involves going off-grid and creating self-sufficient communities organized around shared political beliefs. “Move your family into a situation preferably in a very rural area where you are anti-fragile,” Storm King advised in a 2018 interview. “It’s essentially prepping. You’re decelerating in your own life.”^[80]     

Ma has embraced this concept too, if only for branding purposes, in one of his catchphrases: “ACCELERATE THE WORLD, DECELERATE YOUR TRIBE!” For these two influencers of American far-right environmentalism then, collapse in the form of environmental and economic crisis is welcomed as an opportunity.

Collapse is also the subject of a French survivalist book, CBRN: Surviving Chemical, Biological, Radiological & Nuclear Events, published this March by Arktos, which includes chapters discussing pandemics in general, as well as an “Unknown Virus” and “The Flu.” The book is an example of just how savvy (and lucky) neofascist organizations can be in capitalizing on political and environmental crises.

The ongoing coronavirus crisis has made “preppers” of everyone, at least in some ways. It has also provided something of a dry run for how society will respond to disaster on the scale of the coming climate crisis. So far, it has led to increased anti-Asian vitriol and violence, due in part to President Trump’s insistence on calling COVID-19 the “Wuhan virus” and other conspiracies about the origin of the virus.^[81] Meanwhile, Trump’s administration has supercharged deportations and suspended most types of immigration under the cover of a national emergency—orders influenced in part by the same anti-immigrant organizations arguing against immigration on environmental grounds.^[82] Calls from Trump to “LIBERATE” Democratic-led states were answered by armed protesters while the Far Right has cheered at the prospect of economic societal collapse.^[83] By early July, the death toll had surpassed 130,000.

Alongside the heroics of doctors, nurses, and everyday workers, there’s been a Far Right striving to exploit the crisis in myriad ways. The Left-leaning environmental movement must recognize that the ground will continue to shift beneath them and remain vigilant against what this threat portends for the larger crisis to come. They must recognize the insight of author and activist Daniel Denvir—that nationalism “poses a greater threat to addressing global warming than climate denialism.”^[84] The rise of ethnonationalist movements and groups—inflamed by xenophobia, expressed through violence, and increasingly claiming the mantle of environmentalism—cannot be separated from the challenge of the climate crisis itself. They are—all of them—the same fight.