Consider This from NPR - The Growing Overlap Between The Far-Right And Environmentalism

Episode Date: March 31, 2022

Researchers say the intersection between far-right movements and environmentalism is bigger than many people realize — and it's growing. Blair Taylor, researcher at the Institute for Social Ecology, explains. Alex Amend, who researches eco-fascism, says climate change will only fuel the link between the far-right and environmentalism. Dorceta Taylor of Yale University traces the rise of the American conversation movement, which was partly motivated by a backlash against the racial mixing of American cities. Hop Hopkins of the Sierra Club opens up about racism in the organization's past. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all on the web at theschmidt.org. These days, Blair Taylor looks the part of an academic, v-neck sweater, collared shirt, but a couple decades ago, he came across very differently. I was a young, dreadlocked, earth-first activist in the Pacific Northwest that had been, you know, doing like road blockades to stop logging. He took part in chaotic protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999, known as the Battle of Seattle.

I was locked down to a tripod in the middle of downtown Seattle. Let them go! Let them go! Let them go! It's basically, it's just like three poles, kind of like imagine the frame of like a teepee or a tent or something. And you put a person up in the top, and the idea is that if they try to move it, the person's going to fall and get hurt or killed. So you're putting yourself in the way. It was a common Earth-first tactic to stop destruction of forests and other natural areas, so we adapted it to an

urban environment. The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! Martial law was declared, you know, we all got pepper sprayed many times, shot with rubber bullets. Downtown Seattle was just covered in thick plumes of tear gas and smoke. It was a pretty wild, wild time. Back then, Taylor started to read some of the early writings

by founders of the environmental movement for more than a century ago to figure out where this philosophy he was so committed to got its start. And what he found shook him. There is this earlier, very nativist, exclusionary, and racist history of environmental thought. It was very much based on this idea of nature as a violent, competitive, and ultimately very hierarchical domain where, you know, white Europeans were at the top. The movement he had risked his life for had an insidious racist history, one that equated preserving the natural world with protecting the

white race. And so Blair Taylor pivoted. Today, he's program director for the Institute for Social Ecology. We've also been kind of at the forefront of research into right-wing environmentalism and ecofascism. Ecofascism. Consider this. The environmental movement has not always been a progressive one. And today, the overlap between far-right extremism and environmental activism appears to be growing.

From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Thursday, March 31st. Support for NPR and the following message come from the new VentureX card from Capital One. Earn 10x miles on hotels and rental cars and 5x miles on flights when you book through Capital One Travel. Capital One. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com for details. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. Picture two circles. One is the modern environmental movement, and the other is the far-right movement, including anti-immigrant and white supremacist groups.

In the Venn diagram with these two circles, how much do you think they overlap? Part of making America great again is making it green again. We know there's information out there that says that every time someone crosses the border, they're leaving between six and eight pounds of trash in the desert. Illegal immigration comes at a huge cost to our environment. Researchers say this intersection between the far right and environmentalism is bigger than many people realize, and it's growing. As climate change kind of turns up the heat,

there's going to be all sorts of new kind of political contestations around these issues. Alex Amond used to track hate groups at the Southern Poverty Law Center, and these days he researches eco-fascism. He says once you start to look at this overlap, you find two big misconceptions. One, that the right is always a climate denialist movement, and two, that environmental politics are always going to be left-leaning. Let's take those one at a time, starting with the idea that the far right always rejects environmental arguments. Conservative leaders have certainly denied climate change in the past. Because this is a worldwide hoax. From Rush Limbaugh

to Donald Trump. It is. It's probably getting a little bit warmer. And then in a number of years or decades, it'll get a little bit cooler. But today, a different argument is becoming more common on the conservative political fringe. On the podcast The People's Square, a musician who goes by Storm King described his vision for a far-right reclamation of environmentalism. Right-wing environmentalism in this country is mostly, especially in more modern times, an untried attack vector. And it has legs, in my opinion. Attack vector is an apt choice of words because this ideology has been used in literal attacks. In El Paso, Texas in 2019, a mass shooter killed more than 20 people and wounded more than 20 others.

He told authorities he was targeting Mexicans. And he also left behind a manifesto. Quote, the decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. The shooter wrote, if we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more sustainable. He titled that manifesto, An Inconvenient Truth, which was also the name of Al Gore's Oscar-winning 2006 documentary about climate change. KTAR News Newsmaker. Anti-immigrant environmental arguments pop up in more official places, too, like court filings.

We are talking with Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich about his new lawsuit against the federal government claiming that stopping wall building is a violation of the Environmental Protection Act. Local news station KTAR interviewed Arizona Attorney General Brnovich last year about this case. Brnovich argued that because migrants leave trash in the desert, a border wall is needed to protect the environment. That trash is a threat to wildlife. It's a threat to natural habitat. To be clear, mainstream environmental organizations take the opposite view, that a wall will harm ecosystems on the border. This strain of anti-immigrant environmentalism may be growing today, but it isn't new. And that brings us to misconception number two, that environmental politics are always left-leaning.

The truth is, ecofascism has a long history in the U.S. and in Europe. Here's Blair Taylor, researcher at the Institute for Social Ecology again. The idea that natural purity translates into racial or national purity, that was one that was very central to the Nazis' environmental discourse. Quote-unquote unspoiled forest goes hand- hand in hand with racial purity or something like that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the Nazis saw themselves as environmentalists. In the 90s, when Taylor started reading books about the movement, he stumbled upon some ideas that seemed very wrong. And he was kind of horrified to learn that in some ways, the environmental movement was founded on

ideas of white supremacy. So that's been rediscovered, I think, by the alt-right. The word ecology was even coined by a German scientist, Ernst Haeckel, who also contributed to the Nazis' ideas about a hierarchy of races. And this history applies to the United States, too. I am the author of The Rise of the American Conservation Movement, Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection. That's Yale University professor Dorceta Taylor. Her research helped reveal this American environmental history that had not been widely known.

We see a taking of Native American lands to turn into park spaces that are described as empty, untouched by human hands, pristine, to be protected. So this is where the language of preservation really crosses over into this narrative of exclusion. Taylor read the notes and diaries of early American environmentalists and learned that the movement to preserve natural spaces in the U.S. was partly motivated by a backlash against the racial mixing of American cities. White elites, especially white male elites, wanted to leave the spaces where there was racial mixing. And this discomfort around racially mixed neighborhood infuses the discourse of those early conservation leaders. So the connections between environmentalism and xenophobia in the U.S. are long and deep. In recent years, some prominent groups have begun to publicly confront their own exclusionary history,

like the Sierra Club. We're not going to just pretend that the problem's not happening. We're actually going to begin to do the responsible thing and then begin to address it. Hop Hopkins is the Sierra Club's director of organizational transformation. And the organization went through its own transformation. In the 20th century, the group embraced racist ideas that overpopulation was the root of environmental harm.

In fact, in 1998 and again in 2004, anti-immigrant factions tried to stage a hostile takeover of the Sierra Club's national board. They failed, but the group learned a lesson from those experiences. You can't just ignore these ideas or wish them away. We need to be educating our base about these dystopian ideas and the scapegoating that's being put upon Black, Indigenous, and people of color working class communities such that they're able to identify these messages that may sound like they're environmental,

but we need to be able to discern that they're actually very racist. Do you ever encounter people who say, I believe in the environmental movement, I believe in the racial justice movement, these two things have nothing to do with each other? I encounter it on a daily basis, and that's part of the reason why I do the work that I do. That work goes beyond identifying the racism and bigotry in the environmental movement.

It also means articulating a vision that can compete with ecofascism. Because as climate change increases, more people will go looking for some narrative to address their fears of collapse, says Professor Emerita Betsy Hartman of Hampshire College. If you have this apocalyptic doomsday view of climate change, the far right can use that doomsday view

to its own strategic advantage. So we're letting an opening happen that doesn't need to be there. In a way, the threat of eco-fascism has something in common with climate change itself. The problem is visible now, and there's time to address it. But the longer people wait, the harder it's going to be. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro. aggie.org support for npr and the following message come from the kaufman foundation providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability