Figures and previews from the forthcoming IPCC AR6 (due out in July) are starting to come out. They're not looking great. Limiting warming to 2 degrees C or less is now virtually impossible, as even the most optimistic net carbon zero projections put us at 2.1 degrees of warming by 2100. More realistic target is now in the 2.5-3.5 degrees of warming range, which is likely to be extremely bad for a lot of people.
The authors of the IPCC report suggest that only an "immediate and radical transformation" of the global economy and governance would allow us to avoid the worst of the oncoming climate catastrophe. This kind of language is a marked difference from earlier IPCC reports, and reflects a growing sense of urgency and impending doom within the climatology community broadly.
Yes, absolutely. I'm teaching an introductory course on climate change to mostly Zoomers this year, and I've spent a lot of time talking to and warning them about this. We very much need to be on guard for responses of this type (and language that starts to normalize thinking about climate change this way), because it's definitely coming, and when it starts it's going to ramp up very, very quickly. Making sure people are widely aware of what eco-fascism looks like, and making sure they're aware that it's going to come wrapped in what looks like environmentalist and "green" language is a super important part of climate change praxis.
I would love to read some of your teaching points o eco-fascism, or if you have any specific authors/texts on this I can try to compile some theory for others to read here, and afar. Thank you for bringing awareness to this.
:rosa-salute:
There's a ton to say here, but I think the right thread to emphasize is that the environmental movement in general has some seriously racist and classist historical roots. In particular, a lot of the early environmental movements were deeply wrapped up with the popularity of eugenics in the 19th and early 20th centuries, both of which were tremendously influenced by Thomas Malthus' 1798 work "An Essay on the Principle of Population," which argued that the main cause of human suffering and poverty (both historically and at the time he was writing) was an increase in population--especially non-productive members of the population--beyond the carrying capacity of the environment. This, Malthus argued, would inevitably result in famine, mass deaths, and tons of human misery in general.
This "Malthusian trap" idea was very popular with 19th and early 20th century progressives, and was often interpreted to mean that the poor, people in underdeveloped areas, and really anyone that was seen as "non-productive" in the standard capitalist sense ought to be (at the very least) sterilized for their own good. Margaret Sanger, a very prominent early women's rights advocate and birth control pioneer in the 1920s, was very much motivated by this kind of concern:
Contemporary ecofascism is usually traced to Mussolini and Hitler's shared idea of "living space" and "returning to the land" in their various regimes, especially Mussolini's 1921 article "Fascism and The Land." Quoting from this piece from Columbia University:
After World War II, open endorsement of eugenics got a lot less popular in liberal democratic circles (I wonder why!), but the "Malthusian trap" myth persisted for much longer, and continued to motivate a lot of foreign policy in the NATO world. In 1958, Eisenhower told his national security council that the best way the United States could help underdeveloped countries was to check their population growth, and promoted the idea that the distribution of contraceptives was the most effective way to fight poverty (and thus communism). This resulted in all sorts of terrible shit happening, including the marketing and shipment of birth control devices that were extraordinarily dangerous to women and banned in the United States being shipped off to developing nations to help fight the Malthusian scourge. Garret Hardin , the economist responsible for the "tragedy of the commons" idea, openly advocated against sending food aid to developing nations for what look like pretty explicitly fashy reasons. Quoting from the previously linked piece:
The emergence of COVID in 2020 revitalized a lot of these tendencies in public discourse, which is why I think it's especially important to talk about this right now. Early on in the pandemic, what we might call "clean nature porn" emerged as a genre on social media, with pictures of clear skies, clean canals, and other environments returned to their "natural" state--ostensibly as a result of COVID-cased decrease in greenhouse gas emissions. While it's true that COVID did cause a modest decline (I think it's about 5%) of GHG emissions over 2020, this framing of the issue was the thin end of a wedge for ecofascists. The idea that "humanity is the virus" and that nature could recover if only enough people (and, presumably, the right people) died of COVID started to get repeated and amplified by various crypto-fascist personalities on the internet. This is really just a repackaging of the same old Malthusian idea that our most significant problem--the driver of poverty, starvation, misery, and environmental destruction--is a dearth of resources and a human population beyond the carrying capacity of the Earth. This is, to put it bluntly, totally fucking wrong. We have more than enough food to sustain the global population, and we have the technology that would be necessary to convert our global economic system into a carbon negative one. Our problem is not a lack of resources, but rather a lack of a system that equitably and fairly distributes those resources but instead prioritizes short-term economic gains over long-term sustainability and environmental responsibility.
It's this "humanity is the virus" narrative that I think is most concerning and most worth combatting (at least right now). Even well-meaning liberals can be taken in by this sort of argument, and it's no more sensible now than it was when Malthus was writing in 1798.
There's a ton more that could be said about any aspect of this, and I'm happy to go into more detail about particular points if people are interested, but that's the (not so) short version of the points that I think are important to make.
EFFORTPOST EFFORTPOST 🤩
Thank you so much, just really grateful for this information. Very well composed, if you don't mind I am going to copy this into it's own post in !antifascism@hexbear.net
You're welcome! By all means, repost wherever you like.
I think blue Maga is only a short hop to Eco fascism. It's got all the appropriate money, fake goodwill, and chauvinism built right in.
:gold-communist:
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Yep, I can do that. I've got a class to teach in..
fourthree minutes, but I'll say a little bit later today.Edit: here you go https://hexbear.net/post/98963/comment/1086817
well, what does it look like?
it looks like fascism, but this time the excuse is "we need to save the environment. this is for the greater good." instead of "we need to save the country and immigrants are destroying it."
See here: https://hexbear.net/post/98963/comment/1086817