This
blog has previously condemned those in the environmentalist movement
who have promoted the proposition that climate change is somehow
driven by too many people and we have criticised them for
inadvertently endorsing a racist eugenic programme. This was not the
blog engaging in hyperbole.
This article in the Guardian offers some substance to the blog's attitude
which is worth quoting extracts from.
“...We’re
seeing the far right really take up ecological arguments again,”
said John Hultgren, a Bennington College environmental politics
professor and author of Border
Walls Gone Green: Nature and Anti-immigrant Politics in America.
“The rise of eco-fascism, I think, is very real...”
“...Anti-immigrant
ideology has been part and parcel of the whole of American
conservationism since the first national park was founded, in part to
protect wild yet white-owned nature from Mexicans and Native
Americans. National purity and natural purity were inextricably
linked. The current rise of eco-minded
white supremacy
follows
a direct line from the powerful
attorney, conservationist
and
eugenicist Madison Grant
– a
friend of trees, Teddy Roosevelt, and the colonial superiority of
white land stewardship...”
“...Environmentalists
were hardcore eugenicists. They were as committed to racial thinking
as they were to protecting the great redwoods in California,” said
Heidi Beirich, intelligence project director at the Southern Poverty
Law Center.
That
eco-xenophobia resurfaced in the 1970s as overpopulation and resource
depletion was deemed the pre-eminent challenge facing the planet at
the dawn of the anthropocene.
Published
in 1968, The Population Bomb, by the Stanford University biology
professor Paul Ehrlich, predicted that overpopulation would fuel
worldwide famine and global upheaval. Much of what Ehrlich predicted
did not come to pass, but the book proved hugely
influential
in the nascent environmental movement.
Global
population growth was soon conflated with US immigration growth, and
both were blamed for the coming collapse of Spaceship Earth. This
argument inspired generations of eco-nativists, and the most
influential anti-immigration advocacy network currently operating in
the US...”
“...In
1979, Tanton, a local Sierra Club official, founded the
“centrist/liberal” Federation for American Immigration Reform
(Fair) to further advance the
overpopulation-as-environmental-degradation
cause.
He went on to co-found the Center for Immigration Studies. Tanton,
who warned of a “Latin onslaught” that would degrade America’s
culture and lands, is widely regarded as the founder of the modern
immigration reform movement.
While
Tanton was establishing his right-leaning network of anti-immigration
organizations, new ecologists on the left were coming to the same
conclusions he did about the answer to growing environmental crisis.
“Deep
ecologists” in the 1980s and 1990s argued that humans were just one
of many species, and often an invasive and destructive one. Activist
David Orton argued that limiting immigration “from a maintenance of
biodiversity perspective … has nothing to do with fascists”. The
deep ecologist Dave Foreman was a co-founder of the radical
wilderness collective Earth First! before the group forced him and
his increasingly anti-immigration ideology out...”
“...By
the late 90s, the anti-immigration issue reached a fever pitch within
the US environmental movement. The Sierra Club had grown
exponentially in the preceding decades, and “population control”
had been part of its core platform...anti-immigration groups
associated
with Tanton
didn’t
give up on attempting to influence eco-minded progressives. They ran
ads linking overpopulation and climate crisis in mainstream
newspapers and progressive magazines, from the New York Times to the
Nation...”
“...immigration
control as climate control is a similar pseudoscience. By stopping
immigration from countries with low per capita emissions to wealthier
nations with high per capita emissions, this thinking goes, total
environmental impact will be limited, as will further damage to US
wildlands and biodiversity: fewer people means less sprawl and less
resource use. There
is little actual science to bolster immigration control for
ecological purposes. While there is evidence that population
and economic growth
in total increases global emissions, recent studies show no
correlation between
US immigrant communities and pollution.
Whether
eco-nativists are using these arguments to greenwash racism, or they
truly believe limiting immigration is the best way to pull the planet
back from the brink, the results are the same. “You can be a
genuine environmentalist and a genuine xenophobe – the two often do
converge,” said Hultgren...”
“...Limiting
immigration has certainly proven more politically palatable than
regulating fossil fuel companies and corporate polluters under the
current administration...The eco-xenophobic rhetoric that Tanton and
his supporters have traded in has proliferated across the right,
straddling both arguments about population growth and outright racist
beliefs that Latino immigrants, in particular, destroy nature. Long
before he became the father of the Proud Boys, the Vice magazine
co-founder Gavin McInnes espoused the ecological virtues of
population and immigration control. In a 2003
Vice
Guide to Happiness,
McInnes offered some cause for optimism under President George W
Bush: “Immigration is getting handled, which is helping the
environmental problems overpopulation has caused.”...”
Richard
Spencer’s “meta-political manifesto
for the Alt-Right” advocated for a kind of conservationism in
the white nationalist tradition. Right wing pundit Ann Coulter
claimed Americans will have to choose between a “greening
or browning” of America. Fox News host Tucker Carlson opined on
air about the ecological impact of immigrants: “I actually hate
litter, which is one of the reasons I’m so against illegal
immigration.”
“What’s
on the rise is white supremacy in general, but this is a pretty
staple part of that ideology,” said Beirich. “When people hear
[the Nazi nationalist slogan] ‘blood and soil’, they think of the
blood, but the soil part mattered.”
But
SOYMB notes the good news.
“...In
2013, the Sierra Club and the environmental activist group 350.org
threw
their support behind immigration.
Earth
First! has gone a step further, calling national borders “scar[s]
on the earth”.
“The
entire earth is a closed system, and the idea that people crossing
borders is going to have a major impact on any individual environment
is absurd,” said Veery Marten, an Earth
First! Journal
collective member. “The culprits of this white supremacist violence
citing alleged environmental interests are almost always middle class
white men who are not lowering their own carbon footprint. It’s not
really about consumption, it’s about who’s allowed to consume and
gate-keeping these resources...Mainstream
environmentalists and the broader left may no longer espouse the
benefits of limiting immigration, but many do warn of an impending
global
refugee crisis worsened by climate change that will in turn pressure
societies unable or unwilling to grapple with an influx of new
residents...”
“...”I
think that portrayal of migrants as climate change refugees,
especially these mass movements of people, feeds into the
anti-immigrant environmental worldview,” said Hartmann. “Alarmist
hyperbole and stereotypes around climate conflict and even climate
mass refugee dislocation is based on kind of old, racially and
colonially charged stereotypes of poor people of color being more
prone to violence in times of scarcity.”
A
worsening climate crisis could easily become a cudgel for
anti-immigration activists looking to use ecological preservation as
an excuse to close borders, a
means
of gesturing toward doing something about climate crisis that aligns
with the right’s other political goals..."
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