The Politics of Nature from Left to Right: Radicals, Reactionaries, and Ecological Responses to Modernity

With his long white hair and flowing robes, Baldur Springmann cut a memorable figure. One of the more colorful spokespeople for the German Greens in their formative years, he was a frequent presence in the West German media during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Viewers who saw him on television then can still recall him decades later. Promoting the Green cause in his idiosyncratic way, Springmann stood out from other leaders of the nascent party. Most of them came from the generation of 1968, the ecological offspring of the radical Sixties. Springmann was much older than his youthful compatriots, and his political roots were decidedly different. Born in 1912, he was a longtime organic farmer whose biodynamic homestead in northern Germany served as a gathering point for environmentalists from the 1950s onward. He worked with pacifist and anti-nuclear groups and was considered one of the pioneers of Germany’s ecological movement. Celebratory portraits of him appeared across the spectrum of the German press in 1979 and 1980. From natural farming to alternative spirituality, from organic food to the founding of the Greens, Springmann seemed the very embodiment of modern environmental consciousness.¹

Baldur Springmann’s political involvement did not begin in the democratic context of post-war West Germany, however. His first allegiance was to the Nazi movement, which he joined as a young man shortly after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. During the so-called Third Reich, Springmann was a passionate proponent of Nazism’s “blood and soil” ideology, combining a mystical reverence for the German peasantry with care for the land they tilled. He worked with other young farmers as part of the Nazi agricultural apparatus. In 1944, a year before the final defeat of the Nazi regime, Springmann wrote a forty-five page manifesto spelling out his “organic-natural” worldview. Its title was taken from a Hitler quotation. The text was based on lectures Springmann presented to German military units as part of the blood and soil propaganda campaign. It remained unpublished and largely escaped the attention of scholars; a typescript copy is stored in an archive in Munich.²

Here Springmann railed against “mechanization,” “urbanization,” and “technological progress,” blaming them for “destroying natural communities” and disrupting “the organic harmony of body, soul, and spirit.” While the rest of the world wallowed in industrial defilement, Nazi Germany alone offered the last chance for salvaging “the eternal rhythms of nature.” Centuries of rural peasant life on German soil, close to the earth, had produced a “natural elite” marked by “Nordic blood.” This “organic living order,” however, was gravely threatened by Germany’s enemies: the Americans, the Bolsheviks, the “Polacks,” and other racial inferiors. But the most pernicious enemy of all was “the Jews,” who were nothing more than “flies on the body of humankind.” With their “degenerate intellect,” the Jews had subjugated most of the planet and were now in danger of “enslaving” the German people as well. The only hope was for all Germans to support the Führer and his “war for freedom.” Once free of the Jewish yoke, Germany would be able to return to its rightful inheritance of peaceful communities growing healthy food on their own soil.

What would Springmann’s comrades in the Greens have thought if they had known about this part of his past? He didn’t stay long enough to find out. In 1981 Springmann quit the Green Party because it had moved too far to the left, in his view, embracing social causes that did not fit his image of a natural order. He later accused the Greens of “anti-Germanism.”³ With a group of like-minded former Greens, Springmann went on to found a series of small right-wing environmental organizations.⁴ He increasingly associated himself with esoteric and neo-pagan spiritual currents. By his death in 2003 he had drifted to the extreme right margins of German society. Far-right environmental advocates continue to invoke his legacy today.⁵ Spanning the troubled twentieth century, Springmann’s strange career exemplified the historical contradictions built into the politics of nature in the modern world. 

Eccentric as he was, it would be easy to dismiss Baldur Springmann as an aberration, a random erstwhile Nazi who happened to wander into the Greens’ orbit. But he was hardly alone. Other far-right figures, some with equally extensive Nazi backgrounds, were involved in the early years of the German Greens.⁶ As the movement matured, left activists within the Greens successfully sidelined their would-be counterparts on the right by linking ecological themes to an emancipatory social vision while rejecting notions of purity and natural order. Nazism’s blood and soil heritage forced the young party to face the profound political ambivalence of ecology. For the most part, though, the convoluted history of the politics of nature remained a minor theme, unacknowledged and unresolved, a dynamic that is all too common when the past meets the present.⁷

The problem is by no means unique to the German Greens. It arises any time ecological concerns take political form. All varieties of environmentalism eventually sort out, implicitly or explicitly, what they draw from the left and from the right as well as the emergent space between those poles. Green parties may be famous for claiming a lineage that is “neither left nor right,” but that formulation – assuming it is more than mere public relations rhetoric – typically reveals political confusion and historical naïveté rather than substantive innovation. Since the nineteenth century, environmental issues have functioned as an intermediary for social discontent, a register of the uncertainties and misgivings that modern societies continually generate. Whether refracted through categories of class, race, gender, nation, religion, science, and so forth, or in the more diffuse mode that characterizes many reform currents in the Global North, the politics of nature offers a way for individuals and communities alike to navigate the precarious terrain of modern life and search for alternatives.

This is what gives ecological challenges their powerful potential to spark fundamental social change. But it can also expose an unmistakable sense of political disorientation. The depth and severity of the environmental crises we face seem to disrupt conventional political concepts, revealing them as utterly inadequate to the task of comprehending our current predicament. Perhaps the two most confounding structures that underlie this constant sense of disorientation are the twin institutional pillars of modernity: capitalism and the state.⁸ For those of us on the radical left, the struggle against these structures has seemingly always been a part of our history, whether in socialist, anarchist, feminist, or communalist form. What we too often forget, however, is that the same is true for the history of the right, including the far right. This is particularly the case with capitalism, often considered primarily responsible for contemporary ecological destruction. In our attempts to make sense of the modern crisis, we would do well to take a closer look at the strikingly broad range of responses that the rise of capitalism has produced, responses that extend across the entire political spectrum.⁹

Even Baldur Springmann, in his 1944 manifesto, denounced the depredations of capitalism with its drive for profit and continual commodification of the natural world, an artificial system that reduced farmers to “grain manufacturers” and “milk suppliers” instead of caretakers for the soil. Springmann blamed all this on Jewish “financial magnates” who had usurped the proper place of hard-working Germans and their sacred bond with the land.¹⁰ Other Nazi supporters of organic farming shared Springmann’s views on this well-worn theme, condemning “speculative capitalism” and its Jewish overlords for ruining German agriculture.¹¹ They claimed that the chemical fertilizer industry was controlled by “Jewish finance capital” and that the degradation of German soil was the fault of “the Jewish masters of the banks and stock markets.”¹² Indeed “capitalism itself,” they insisted, was the nefarious invention of “international Jewry.”¹³

The conflation of capitalism with Jews is one of the enduring hallmarks of right-wing critiques of capitalism, though it has repeatedly appeared in left contexts as well. It is a way of personalizing capitalism, making an opaque and abstract economic system seem more concrete and understandable by associating it with an identifiable group. Nazi antisemitism drew extensively on this illusion of concreteness and immediacy.¹⁴ It is always tempting to believe that a highly complex social system can be simplified into a straightforward story of good guys and bad guys. It is even more tempting when these stories are cast in terms of an idyllic vision of restored nature.

Such simplifications were not, of course, peculiar to Nazi Germany. The phenomenon that Dan Stone has aptly labeled “rural revivalism” could be found in a number of interwar European societies, frequently linking racial and agrarian concerns.¹⁵ Organic farming was a conspicuously common feature of these right-wing utopias not just in Germany but in Britain, North America, and elsewhere. This unsettling fact serves as a reminder of the extent to which the “environmentalist tradition” has historically been “bound up with the radical right.”¹⁶ Even in Fascist Italy, scarcely a model of ecological practice, environmental policies consistently linked landscape, race, and ruralism.¹⁷ Fascist ideologues, like their Nazi counterparts, celebrated “the power of race, the cult of the soil, the agrarian tradition.”¹⁸ Italian ecologists credited Mussolini with the “rebirth of the nation’s forests.”¹⁹ Ideas like these were widespread on the European right at the time. During the 1930s, Hitler’s admirers abroad praised Nazi Germany for its “back-to-the-land” efforts and its “assault on urbanisation and industrialism.”²⁰

It can be hard to reconcile such factors with the conventional image of fascism and the far right. Yet these findings are not new. Forty years ago, George Mosse observed that fascism in its disparate varieties presents itself as “a door into a utopia of tolerance, of happiness, of productivity, and all the things that people long for.” Nazism, Mosse wrote, “promised a future outside the problems of industrialization, outside the problems of urbanization.”²¹ This promise ultimately proved hollow, but that did not render it less appealing to millions of people in the wake of the First World War and the Great Depression. What makes these insights challenging and provocative is their disconcerting proximity to longstanding arguments on the radical left and among progressive ecological activists. That is why it is important to understand the politically fraught history of ecological responses to the failures of modern society in its capitalist and statist form.

One way to begin that process of understanding is to attempt the difficult task of distinguishing left versions of ecological politics from right versions. Any effort along those lines faces several vexing problems. The same features that make definition and categorization useful conceptual tools – simplicity, clarity, precision – are unfortunately ill-suited to the messiness of social life. Historical reality in all its complexity does not fit easily into convenient ideal types. Nevertheless, it may be worth venturing an initial broad distinction between two tentatively outlined kinds, what we might call radical and reactionary responses to modernity. Consider the example of capitalism, viewed through the lens of a provisional differentiation: Reactionary critiques of capitalism reflect a nostalgic vision of returning to a simpler and wholesome communal life undisturbed by the demands of the modern world. Radical critiques of capitalism, in contrast, embody an emancipatory outlook that strives to create new social forms, indeed an entirely new society, in order to transcend the shortcomings of capitalist modernity without rejecting the modern project as such. This preliminary attempt at classification is undoubtedly much too simplistic, but it can serve as a fruitful starting point, to be refined and revised as necessary.

Unsurprisingly, many real-world responses to the ravages of capitalism do not fall neatly into either the radical or the reactionary camp. This is especially true for environmentalist responses. Some of the most popular models in European and North American environmental circles represent a hybrid of left and right strands. Several of them center on panaceas and simple solutions, such as Henry George’s single tax proposals or the Social Credit movement founded by C. H. Douglas. Others offer full-fledged alternative economic visions like Rudolf Steiner’s “threefold commonwealth” or Silvio Gesell’s “natural economic order.” Though their roots lie in the nineteenth century, these models still find admirers in twenty-first century radical quarters.²² In many ways, however, their assumptions and implications are firmly reactionary, as left critics have pointed out.²³ The case of the Social Credit movement is perhaps the most striking; Douglas explicitly based his economic theories on the infamous antisemitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”²⁴

It is crucial to keep this historical background in mind when we look at figures like Baldur Springmann, either in the 1940s or the 1980s, or when we encounter comparable environmental advocates today. Modern capitalism is an extremely complicated system that obscures its own operations and resists easy explanation. It isn’t shocking that many ostensibly alternative proposals fall short in attempting to make sense of an apparently senseless economic arrangement. But it is important to pay attention to the patterns that arise in such foreshortened critiques of capitalism, which frequently mistake symptoms for structural causes. They typically end up focused on the superficial, decrying the most visible and most distressing aspects of life under capitalism rather than examining its underlying systemic forces. Moreover, foreshortened critiques of capitalism tend to reproduce a series of seductively simple dichotomies, such as productive versus parasitic, local versus global, and concrete versus abstract, that sometimes seem radical but have historically had reactionary consequences.

For those on the left who seek to build a life after capitalism and are working toward an ecological society, the vital lesson is this: We are not the only anti-capitalists out there – not historically, and not today. The discontent and dislocation that capitalism systematically produces can spin off in myriad directions, and many of them are emphatically not emancipatory; they do not lead toward freedom, equality, or environmental flourishing. They can just as readily undermine the very values and practices we are fighting for. In societies distorted by capitalism and the state, anxieties and unrest aimed at the status quo are always double-edged. If we hope they will lead toward more democracy, participation, cooperation, and egalitarianism, toward a world that is ecologically vibrant and socially dynamic, we will need to think carefully about how we respond to the ambiguities of environmental politics.

As much as we might wish otherwise, Baldur Springmann’s incongruous sojourn with the German Greens was not, at bottom, an anomaly. At times this has proven confusing for those expecting a clear-cut tale of environmental heroes and villains. It is not unusual for left critics of right-wing ecological politics to be mistaken for enemies of environmentalism as such.²⁵ The fact that such mistakes continue to recur after several decades of efforts by left ecologists to clarify the arguments at stake – arguments that matter deeply to the future of environmentalism in whatever form – indicates just how perplexing the subject remains, historically as well as politically. It is an invitation to take a closer look at a topic that many would prefer to avoid.  

Springmann and his ilk were not merely rustic oddballs. They stood for a brand of environmental politics that has persisted for over a hundred years. Far from disappearing in 1945, it has continued to arouse interest and attract adherents across the globe. Significant portions of the post-war organic farming movement, from Australia to Britain to France, were affiliated with far right politics.²⁶ Italian neo-fascists in the 1970s were eagerly interested in “ecology, macrobiotics, and alternative medicine,” sponsoring green workshops and publishing a magazine titled Environmental Dimension.²⁷ Their confederates in the Spanish and French radical right shared “a keen interest in environmentalism,” while “ecologism” was a core principle for parts of the extreme right in the Netherlands in the 1980s.²⁸ In contemporary Germany the so-called “New Right” has appropriated ecology as one of its favored causes.²⁹ In 2017 Marine Le Pen, leader of the far right National Front, presented an environmental agenda promoting organic agriculture and demanding a zero-carbon economy in France. She called for a “revolution in eating locally” and excoriated multinational corporations for pushing genetically modified crops and “poisoning the land” with pesticides.³⁰ It would be easier to dismiss such episodes as hollow campaign rhetoric if the overall trend were not so pronounced.

White supremacist organizations in the United States today still espouse a vision of blood and soil. “Vanguard America,” one of the more active groups in the current resurgence of the extreme right, ran the website “bloodandsoil.org” until it was taken down after the August 2017 events in Charlottesville, Virginia.³¹ Their manifesto, adorned with fascist imagery, declared the Unites States “a nation exclusively for the White American peoples” and called for “an America based on the immutable truths of Blood and Soil.” It warned that “the large multinational corporations that have bled this nation dry will not be allowed to continue their detrimental efforts unabated.” The manifesto avowed:

America must be once again built from the ground up to recapture the glory an Aryan nation deserves. Vanguard America stands indomitably opposed to the tyranny of globalism and capitalism, a system under which nations are stripped of their heritage and their people are turned into nothing more than units of cheap, expendable labor. […] A nation based upon the values of self-reliance and fellowship must be created which stands entirely apart from the dictatorship of international finance. Like all independent nations, America should strive for a truly national economy. An economy that is self-contained, and free from the influence of international corporations, led by a rootless group of international Jews, which place profit beyond the interests of our people, or any people.

Proclamations like these reveal the worldview that animates reactionary responses to a distorted modernity. Their historical origins are not confined to the extreme right, but extend to mainstream environmentalism as well. The roots of the American conservation movement have long been entangled with various outgrowths of racism, eugenics, and xenophobia.³²

But we are not bound to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn from those mistakes as we reach toward a better world. This will mean taking seriously the lengthy tradition of right-wing environmental politics, and facing it squarely, rather than pretending that this tradition is a minor deviation from an otherwise proud history. “Ecological discourse,” as one scholar has noted, “forms a major constituent of right-wing thought.”³³ The specter of Baldur Springmann is not easily dispelled. Today as before, the emancipatory potential of the ecology movement is threatened with eclipse by an all too familiar assortment of reactionary and authoritarian forms of ecological thinking.

The 2019 attacks in Christchurch and El Paso were a stark warning that the links between environmental sentiment and anti-immigrant ideology are becoming more virulent on the right: mass murder rationalized through ecological claims. Explaining their heinous acts, the El Paso shooter condemned “decimation of the environment” while the Christchurch shooter proclaimed himself an “eco-fascist.”³⁴ In the aftermath of these atrocities, there is a strong tendency to dismiss the perpetrators as aberrant and their beliefs as marginal. When the same beliefs are repeatedly invoked to justify homicidal violence, however, it is all the more imperative to confront their history.

That will not be an easy undertaking. Reckoning conscientiously with the mercurial politics of environmentalism raises far-reaching questions. Capitalism and the state, after all, are not the only social structures that shape modern life. Radical ecologists also contend with the legacy of patriarchy and white supremacy, which are just as important – for opposite reasons – to the far right. Racial and sexual hierarchies have long claimed natural status as their justification, another variation on the politics of nature. They have also left their mark on the evolution of environmentalism.³⁵ Along with the colonial origins of conservation and similarly neglected elements, these controversies await broader informed and incisive engagement.

All of this means we have more work to do. A critical re-assessment of environmental responses to the predicaments of modern society will require difficult choices about political practice. We do not have to settle for approaches that preach personal change in place of social change or that promise an untarnished refuge from the burdens of history. We do not have to accept an environmentalism that ignores its ancestry. We can ask for much more radical possibilities. If environmental politics have historically been susceptible to the authoritarian right, perhaps ecological activists today would do well to align themselves with the anti-authoritarian left.

A hard look at the politics of nature leaves us with as many questions as answers. It is not just a matter of examining our ideas or altering our thinking; as Carolyn Merchant reminds us: “A new story can be written only through human action.”³⁶ Ecological activists face a daunting array of challenges, and many other issues demand our attention. This can make attending to our own history seem self-indulgent. But it is part of our responsibility to the future. Any candid process of political discernment can be trying, and some will find the very idea divisive and distasteful. That is why it deserves honest reflection and forthright debate. As we steer our way through the general crisis of the twenty-first century, we will be wise to keep in mind the wrong turns taken in the past.

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1. Makoto Nishida, Strömungen in den Grünen (1980-2003): Eine Analyse über informell-organisierte Gruppen innerhalb der Grünen (Münster: Lit, 2005), 38-43; Frank Schnieder, Von der sozialen Bewegung zur Institution? Die Entstehung der Partei Die Grünen in den Jahren 1978 bis 1980 (Münster: Lit, 1998), 42-45, 113-15; Silke Mende, “Nicht rechts, nicht links, sondern vorn”: Eine Geschichte der Gründungsgrünen (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011), 244-49. Mende cites 1979-80 articles about Springmann from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeit, Stern, Bild, and a variety of other organs; he was also featured in the Spiegel and elsewhere as well. See additionally the obituary for Springmann in the tageszeitung 25 October 2003.
2. Baldur Springmann, “Das Deutsche Reich wird ein Bauernreich sein” Institut für Zeitgeschichte ED 643/1.
3. 1995 interview with Springmann in Junge Freiheit quoted in Jonathan Olsen, Nature and Nationalism: Right-Wing Ecology and the Politics of Identity in Contemporary Germany (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 50. Olsen fittingly characterizes Junge Freiheit as a “radical right wing” journal.
4. Compare Volkmar Wölk, Natur und Mythos: Ökologiekonzeptionen der ‘Neuen’ Rechten im Spannungsfeld zwischen Blut und Boden und New Age (Duisburg: Institut für Sprachund Sozialforschung, 1992); Jürgen Wüst, Konservatismus und Ökologiebewegung (Frankfurt: Verlag für interkulturelle Kommunikation, 1993); Oliver Geden, Rechte Ökologie: Umweltschutz zwischen Emanzipation und Faschismus (Berlin: Elefanten, 1996); Jutta Ditfurth, Das waren die Grünen: Abschied von einer Hoffnung (Munich: Econ, 2000); Peter Bierl, Grüne Braune: Umwelt-, Tier- und Heimatschutz von rechts (Münster: Unrast, 2014).
5. Anke Oxenfarth, ed., Ökologie von rechts: Braune Umweltschützer auf Stimmenfang (Munich: Oekom, 2012), 21; Gudrun Heinrich, ed., Naturschutz und Rechtsradikalismus: Gegenwärtige Entwicklungen, Probleme, Abgrenzungen (Bonn: Bundesamt für Naturschutz, 2015), 121, 128.
6. The better known examples include Werner Vogel (1907-1992) and Werner Haverbeck (1909-1999). For further context see the discussion “Zur realen Gefahr des Öko-Faschismus” in Jan Peters, ed., Alternativen zum Atomstaat: Das bunte Bild der Grünen (Berlin: Rotation, 1979), 87-130; Richard Stöss, Vom Nationalismus zum Umweltschutz (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1980); Margret Feit, Die “Neue Rechte” in der Bundesrepublik: Organisation, Ideologie, Strategie (Frankfurt: Campus, 1987), 151-56; Justus Ulbricht, “Grün als Brücke zu Braun: Über die Schwierigkeiten der Ökologiebewegung mit dem rechten Rand” Politische Ökologie 11 (1993), 7-12; Alison Statham, “Ecology and the German Right” in Colin Riordan, ed., Green Thought in German Culture: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), 125-38; as well as the valuable selection of material from the 1970s collected in Jan Peters, ed., Nationaler “Sozialismus” von rechts (Berlin: Guhl, 1980) and Jan Peters, Rechtsextremisten als Umweltschützer (Berlin: Freunde der Erde, 1980).
7. In a thoughtful and self-critical retrospective interview, a leader of one of the left currents within the early Greens, eco-socialist Thomas Ebermann, acknowledged that he and his comrades underestimated the potential for far-right appropriation of ecology: Ebermann in Michael Schroeren, ed., Die Grünen (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 1990), 219-20.
8. For an argument that capitalism and the nation state form the central institutions of modernity see Robert Marks, The Origins of the Modern World (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). Though the examples I draw on in this essay come from Western contexts, it is essential to recognize that comparable dynamics mark the history of the Global South as well; see the analysis of anti-colonial intellectuals as early “critics of modernity” in Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (London: Picador, 2012), 302.
9. On the contours of “the modern crisis,” along with its alternative potentials and its “hidden message of freedom,” see Murray Bookchin, The Modern Crisis (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986). The notoriously vague word “modernity” is often little more than a pretentiously inflated term with scant real meaning. Yet it can still help us discern essential aspects of the plight we face. It has also become central to discussions of the history of environmentalism: “the rise of ecological holism in Europe and North America throughout the twentieth century helped mitigate the spiritual and existential disorientation of modernity.” Frank Zelko, “‘A Flower Is Your Brother!’ Holism, Nature, and the (Non-ironic) Enchantment of Modernity” Intellectual History Review 23 (2013), 517-36, quote on 518. For broader perspective see Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York: Longman, 2000).
10. These ideas have a lengthy history. As George Kren noted decades ago: “This rootlessness came more and more to dominate the evolving stereotype of the Jew. Thus, by the nineteenth century they were associated with the city, were accused of lacking roots in soil and country, of being rationally calculating and without feeling, – and above all of lacking the German’s reverence for the higher things in life. This is the central theme of what is probably the most famous German anti-Semitic novel of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm von Polenz’s Der Büttnerbauer, first published in 1895. This work contrasts the honest, simple German peasant, tied to the soil, with the rootless urban Jew. Stating a theme which National Socialism was to reemphasize, Polenz described the Jew as a person lacking any appreciation of the mystical qualities of inherited land, and contrasts him to the honest, simple German peasant with firm and deep roots in the sacred inherited land. In the novel the Jew lends the peasant money at usury and the latter, unable to repay it, loses the land to the Jew who, without regard for the true purpose of the soil, builds a factory on it. The peasant, unable to bear this sacrilege, hangs himself on an old tree on the land.” Kren, “Race and Ideology” Phylon 23 (1962), 167-77.
11. Georg Halbe, “Zur neuen Getreideordnung” Deutschlands Erneuerung: Monatsschrift für das deutsche Volk September 1934, 552-56. Halbe was an energetic proponent of biodynamic farming within the Nazi agricultural apparatus. He oversaw the “Blut und Boden Verlag,” the party’s “Blood and Soil” publishing house. Beginning in 1942 he worked for the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. He also published in the journal of the biodynamic movement; see Georg Halbe, “Goethes Naturanschauung und lebensgesetzlicher Landbau” Demeter December 1940, 116-18.
12. Hermann Schneider, Unser täglich Brot: Lebensfragen der deutschen Landwirtschaft (Munich: Nationalsozialistische Bibliothek, 1930), 41, 72. Alongside antisemitic tirades, the pamphlet – published under Nazi auspices – makes a strong case for organic farming methods. Like Halbe, Schneider (1872-1953) was an early Nazi supporter of biodynamic agriculture. He joined the party in 1929 and served as a Nazi member of the Reichstag from 1930 onward, soon becoming a prominent agricultural official for the party and the SS. Schneider remained an outspoken advocate of biodynamics throughout the Nazi era; see e.g. Hermann Schneider, Schicksalsgemeinschaft Europa: Leben und Nahrung aus der europäischen Scholle (Breslau: Gutsmann, 1941).
13. Günther Pacyna, Der deutsche Bauer im Osten (Berlin: Engelhard, 1943), 137. Pacyna was yet another supporter of biodynamic farming in the Nazi agricultural apparatus. The role of the biodynamic movement in the Nazi era has received increasing attention in historical scholarship. As a recent overview notes, “The natural farming system that undoubtedly generated the most excitement and support within Nazi circles was biodynamics.” Corinna Treitel, Eating Nature in Modern Germany: Food, Agriculture and Environment, c. 1870-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 213. Another study points out: “numerous documents provide evidence that the organization of farming processes and daily work schedules to agree with biodynamic principles supported by parts of the SS power apparatus was taken very seriously.” Willi Oberkrome, “National Socialist Blueprints for Rural Communities and their Resonance in Agrarian Society” in Martina Steber, ed., Visions of Community in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 270-80, quote on 273.
14. Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism” in Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes, eds., Germans and Jews since the Holocaust (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), 302-14. For background compare Christine Achinger and Marcel Stoetzler, “German Modernity, Barbarous Slavs and Profit-seeking Jews” Nations and Nationalism 19 (2013), 739-60; Bernd Sommer, “Anti-capitalism in the name of ethno-nationalism: ideological shifts on the German extreme right” Patterns of Prejudice 42 (2008), 305-16; Pierre Birnbaum, “Anti-Semitism and Anticapitalism in Modern France” in Frances Malino and Bernard Wasserstein, eds., The Jews in Modern France (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1985), 214-23; Heike Hoffmann, “Völkische Kapitalismus-Kritik” in Uwe Puschner, ed., Handbuch zur ‘Völkischen Bewegung’ 1871-1918 (Munich: Saur, 1996), 558-71; Matthew Lange, Antisemitic Elements in the Critique of Capitalism in German Culture, 1850-1933 (Oxford: Lang, 2007); Nicolas Berg, ed., Kapitalismusdebatten um 1900: Über antisemitisierende Semantiken des Jüdischen (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2011); Michael Barthel and Benjamin Jung, Völkischer Antikapitalismus? Eine Einführung in die Kapitalismuskritik von rechts (Münster: Unrast, 2013); Michele Battini, Socialism of Fools: Capitalism and Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
15. Dan Stone, “Rural Revivalism and the Radical Right in France and Britain between the Wars” in Stone, The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 110-22. See also the thorough recent study by Philip Coupland, Farming, Fascism and Ecology: A Life of Jorian Jenks (London: Routledge, 2016).
16. Stone, “Rural Revivalism and the Radical Right,” 115. In a searching reflection on “the Holocaust as an ecological project,” the late Boaz Neumann argued that “politically the modern ecological idea originates from the conservative Right.” Boaz Neumann, “National Socialism, Holocaust, and Ecology” in Dan Stone, ed., The Holocaust and Historical Methodology (Oxford: Berghahn, 2012), 101-23, quote on 104.
17. Marco Armiero and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, “Green Rhetoric in Blackshirts: Italian Fascism and the Environment” Environment and History 19 (2013), 283-311.
18. Massimo Scaligero, “La razza, la terra e il fuoco” La Vita Italiana December 1941, 626-30.
19. Aldo Pavari, “The Fascist Government and the Restoration of Italian Forests” Forestry 8 (1934), 67-75.
20. Anthony Ludovici, “Hitler and the Third Reich” English Review September 1936, 231-39.
21. George Mosse, Nazism: A Historical and Comparative Analysis of National Socialism (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1978), 34, 40.
22. A particularly conspicuous example is the article by conspiracy theorist Guido Preparata, “Perishable Money in a Threefold Commonwealth: Rudolf Steiner and the Social Economics of an Anarchist Utopia” Review of Radical Political Economics 38 (2006), 619-48. Preparata is a fan of Silvio Gesell and C. H. Douglas as well as Steiner. For earlier statements from Steiner’s and Gesell’s followers see Owen Barfield, “The Relation between the Economics of C.H. Douglas and those of Rudolf Steiner” Anthroposophy: A Quarterly Review of Spiritual Science September 1933, 272-85; Heinrich Nidecker, Gesundung dessozialenOrganismus nach den Vorschlägen von Rudolf Steiner und Silvio Gesell (Bern: Pestalozzi-Fellenberg-Haus, 1926); Werner Onken, “Silvio Gesell und Rudolf Steiner: Wegbereiter einer sozialen Zukunft” Fragen der Freiheit January 1990, 4-38.
23. See e.g. Derek Wall, “Social Credit: The Ecosocialism of Fools” Capitalism Nature Socialism 14 (2003), 99-122; Robert Kurz, “Politische Ökonomie des Antisemitismus” Krisis 17 (1995), 177-218; Peter Bierl, Schwundgeld, Freiwirtschaft und Rassenwahn. Kapitalismuskritk von rechts: Der Fall Silvio Gesell (Hamburg: Konkret, 2012); Mark Loeffler, “Populists and Parasites: On Producerist Reason” in John Abromeit, ed., Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 265-92. For historical context on Rudolf Steiner’s “threefold commonwealth” teachings see Helmut Zander, Anthroposophie in Deutschland: Theosophische Weltanschauung und gesellschaftliche Praxis 1884–1945 (Göttingen 2007), 1239-1356; Peter Staudenmaier, Between Occultism and Nazism: Anthroposophy and the Politics of Race in the Fascist Era (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 64-100.
24. C. H. Douglas, Social Credit (London: Palmer, 1924), 11, 56-59. See also C.B. Macpherson, Democracy in Alberta: Social Credit and the Party System (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Bob Hesketh, Major Douglas and Alberta Social Credit (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); Janine Stingel, Social Discredit: Anti-Semitism, Social Credit, and the Jewish Response (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000).
25. A personal example may help illustrate the problem. A few years ago, in an online review, a fellow professor of history denounced a book that I had co-authored, characterizing it as an “anti-ecology tome” founded on “right-wing political bias.” The book in question was Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism Revisited (New Compass Press, 2011), originally published in 1995. Readers who take a brief look at either edition of the book will quickly see that it is a left-wing critique of right-wing tendencies, not the other way around. The review was later retracted, but the incident is nonetheless quite illuminating. When even professional historians can’t tell left from right, we have a lot more work to do in order to make sense of the politics of nature.
26. Andrea Gaynor, “Antipodean Eco-nazis? The Organic Gardening and Farming Movement and Far-right Ecology in Postwar Australia” Australian Historical Studies 43 (2012), 253-69; Venus Bivar, Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 50-72. On “overt fascist sympathies” in the early British organic movement see Gregory Barton, The Global History of Organic Farming (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 134, 21, 30, 157-59.
27. Marco Tarchi, La rivoluzione impossibile: Dai Campi Hobbit alla Nuova destra (Florence: Vallecchi, 2010), 223-27; Mario Bozzi Sentieri, Dal neofascismo alla nuova destra (Rome: Nuove Idee, 2007), 201-05. For further neo-fascist discussions of “ecology,” “urbanization,” and “industrial congestion” in the 1970s see Mauro Lenci, A destra, oltre la destra: La cultura politica del neofascismo italiano, 1945-1995 (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2012), 39; Piero Ignazi, Il polo escluso: Profilo storico del Movimento Sociale Italiano (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998), 190-91. An incisive analysis of this milieu can be found in Furio Jesi, Cultura di destra (Milan: Garzanti, 1993). The trend was not peculiar to Italy: “Even as the German revolutionary nationalists joined the environmentalist movement in the late 1970s, the Spanish radical far right made a specialty of setting up environmental and anti-speciesist associations.” Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 86.
28. Camus and Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe, 45, 86, 131, 216; Cas Mudde, The Ideology of the Extreme Right (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 158-59.
29. For a representative example see Norbert Borrmann, “Ökologie ist rechts” Sezession October 2013, 4-7, part of a special issue of the journal devoted to ecology. This is not just a theoretical interest; the German far right has taken a markedly hands-on approach to environmental concerns. See Kate Connolly, “German far-right extremists tap into green movement for support” Guardian 28 April 2012; Sally McGrane, “The Right-Wing Organic Farmers of Germany” New Yorker 11 January 2013; Christian Thiele and Marlene Weiss, “Unterwanderung des Biolandbaus durch Rechtsextreme” Süddeutsche Zeitung 13 April 2012; Anna Schmidt, Völkische Siedler/innen im ländlichen Raum (Berlin: Amadeu-Antonio-Stiftung, 2014).
30. Michael Stothard, “Marine Le Pen uses environmental issue to broaden appeal” Financial Times 26 January 2017. An updated and expanded assessment can be found in Norimitsu Onishi, “France’s Far Right Wants to Be an Environmental Party, Too” New York Times 18 October 2019. For earlier French examples see the September 1993 issue of the “New Right” journal Krisis dedicated to ecology; for current comparison see Giovanni Monastra and Philippe Baillet, Piété pour le cosmos: Les précurseurs antimodernes de l’écologie profonde (Saint-Genis-Laval : Éditions Akribeia, 2017).
31. I copied the text of the “Vanguard America” manifesto from their “bloodandsoil.org” website in April 2017. As of March 2018 that website hosted a group calling itself “Patriot Front,” which split off from “Vanguard America” in September 2017. The “Patriot Front” site inveighs against “the encroaching rot of modernism” and a society that has become “utterly detached from nature.” It calls for “a people free from the vices of the modern world” who are to be “removed from decadence and given community.” Many strands on the right avail themselves of this ideological ensemble; see the recent survey by Peter Kolozi, Conservatives Against Capitalism: From the Industrial Revolution to Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). For comparison with antisemitic themes in left contexts see the perceptive analyses by Robert Fine and Philip Spencer, Antisemitism and the left: On the return of the Jewish question (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); Sina Arnold, “From Occupation to Occupy: Antisemitism and the Contemporary Left in the United States” in Alvin Rosenfeld, ed., Deciphering the New Antisemitism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 375-404; Dominique Miething, “Antisemitism in the anarchist tradition” Anarchist Studies 26 (2018), 105-08.
32. Compare Carolyn Merchant, “Shades of Darkness: Race and Environmental History” Environmental History 8 (2003), 380-94; Jade Sasser, “From Darkness into Light: Race, Population, and Environmental Advocacy” Antipode 46 (2014), 1240-57; Garland Allen, “‘Culling the Herd’: Eugenics and the Conservation Movement in the United States, 1900–1940” Journal of the History of Biology 46 (2013), 31-72; Lisa Sun-Hee Park and David Naguib Pellow, “Nativism and the Environmental Movement” in The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 127-61; Mark Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); John Hultgren, Border Walls Gone Green: Nature and Anti-Immigrant Politics in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Carl Zimring, Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2016); Miles Powell, Vanishing America: Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and the Origins of Conservation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).
33. Statham, “Ecology and the German Right,” 129. She also points to “a strong element of convergence in rhetoric between right and left” on environmental issues (134). For further context compare Jonathan Olsen, “The Perils of Rootedness: On Bioregionalism and Right Wing Ecology in Germany” Landscape Journal 19 (2000), 73-83; Tamara Mix, “The Greening of White Separatism: Use of Environmental Themes to Elaborate and Legitimize Extremist Discourse” Nature & Culture 4 (2009), 138-66; Braune Ökologen (Berlin: Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2012); Mi Park, “The trouble with eco-politics of localism: Too close to the far right?” Interface 5 (2013), 318-43; Kristian Voss, “Nature and Nation in Harmony: The Ecological Component of Far Right Ideology” (Dissertation, European University Institute, 2014); Bernhard Forchtner and Christoffer Kølvraa, “The Nature of Nationalism: Populist Radical Right Parties on Countryside and Climate” Nature & Culture 10 (2015), 199-224; Stefanie von Schnurbein, Norse Revival: Transformations of Germanic Neopaganism (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 180-215; Madeleine Hurd and Steffen Werther, “The Militant Media of Neo-Nazi Environmentalism” in Heike Graf, ed., The Environment in the Age of the Internet (Cambridge: Open Book, 2016), 137-70. A recently published volume offers contemporary international perspectives: Bernhard Forchtner, ed., The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse and Communication (London: Routledge, 2019).
34. This essay was originally written in early 2018, before the attacks in Pittsburgh, Christchurch, El Paso, and elsewhere. Subsequent media coverage has highlighted many of the themes discussed here; prominent examples include Susie Cagle, “The environmentalist roots of anti-immigrant bigotry” The Guardian 16 August 2019, and Joel Achenbach, “Two mass murders a world apart share a common theme: ‘Ecofascism’” Washington Post 18 August 2019.
35. For insightful treatments of North American trends see Noel Sturgeon, Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009); Sarah Ray, The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013); Dorceta Taylor, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). In US contexts, political assessment of the history of environmental movements is complicated by the anti-statist currents in right-wing thought. This factor has made it more difficult to recognize “the conservative roots of modern environmentalism.” (William Cronon, “Conservative Conservationists,” Foreword to Brian Drake, Loving Nature, Fearing the State: Environmentalism and Antigovernment Politics before Reagan,Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013, xiii.) For critical discussion of such tendencies in the far right milieu see the chapter on “Decentralism” in Matthew Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire (Oakland: PM Press, 2018), 144-60.
36. Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2013), 206.