Neo-Nazis Go Green (Again)

Why is the far right suddenly paying attention to climate change?

Illustration by Adam Maida; Photograph by Corbis Historical, via Getty Images

As an environmental journalist, I’ve been covering the frightening acceleration of climate change for more than a decade. As a person who believes in the tenets of liberal democracy, I’ve watched the rise of white-supremacist, anti-immigrant and nationalistic ideologies with similar dread over the past few years.

But I always thought of those two trends — looming ecological dangers and the gathering strength of the far right — as unrelated, parallel crises in a turbulent time. Only recently have I begun to understand that they are deeply interconnected, an ugly pairing of forces drawing power from each other.

From France to Washington to New Zealand, angry voices on the hard right — nationalists, populists and others beyond conventional conservatism — are picking up old environmental tropes and adapting them to a moment charged with fears for the future. In doing so, they are giving potent new framing to a set of issues more typically associated with the left. Often, they emphasize what they see as the deep ties between a nation’s land and its people to exclude those they believe do not belong. Some twist scientific terms such as “invasive species” — foreign plants or animals that spread unchecked in a new ecosystem — to target immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities. And here’s what really frightens me: This dynamic is likely to intensify as climate change creates new stresses that could pit nations and groups against one another.

Although the pressures of a warming planet are new, the deployment of environmental language for racist, nativist and nationalistic ends has a long, dark history. Before environmentalism became a mainstream and progressive cause in the 1970s, many American conservationists were also white supremacists, who argued that those they saw as outsiders threatened the nation’s landscape or lacked the values to care for it properly. Such thinking was common in Europe, too. The Nazis embraced notions of a symbiotic connection between the German homeland and its people.

And while mainstream environmentalists have long since renounced such beliefs, “the far right is still aware of this tradition,” according to Bernhard Forchtner, an associate professor at the University of Leicester in England.

The neo-Nazi group Northwest Front, which advocates expelling people of color from the Pacific Northwest, appropriated a flag designed by a left-wing activist, reframing it with the slogan “The sky is the blue, and the land is the green. The white is for the people in between.” In Slovakia, far-right activists invoking the centrality of forests to national identity accuse members of the Roma ethnic minority of damaging them with excessive firewood gathering, Balsa Lubarda, a Central European University doctoral candidate studying the radical right, told me.

Of course, many on the nationalist right deny the scientific consensus on climate change, so the ecological concerns they cite are more local. Others, though, accept the reality of global warming and view it “through the prism of white nationalism. And the solution then becomes the exclusion of immigrants, people of color, the so-called ‘Third World,’ ” said John Hultgren, a faculty member at Bennington College and author of “Border Walls Gone Green: Nature and Anti-immigrant Politics in America.”