Godwin's Law and The Environment
Godwin's law: as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches 1.
Sometimes when I tell people that I’m researching environmental ideas on the far right they squint their face like they’ve never read any bit of the Unabomber’s manifesto:
Any illusions about achieving anything permanent through social arrangements should be dispelled by what is currently happening with environmental legislation. A few years ago its seemed that there were secure legal barriers preventing at least SOME of the worst forms of environmental degradation. A change in the political wind, and those barriers begin to crumble.
Their faces crumple like something sour’s been put in their mouth, or like a dry grape, when I tell them that the El Paso shooter wrote things like:
The American lifestyle affords our citizens an incredible quality of life. However, our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country. The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly over-harvesting resources. This has been a problem for decades. For example, this phenomenon is brilliantly portrayed in the decades old classic The Lorax. Watersheds around the country, especially in agricultural areas, are being depleted. Fresh water is being polluted from farming and oil drilling operations. Consumer culture is creating thousands of tons of unnecessary plastic waste and electronic waste, and recycling to help slow this down is almost non-existent. Urban sprawl creates inefficient cities which unnecessarily destroys millions of acres of land.
…before going into a Walmart and carrying out the largest targeted attack on Latino people in the history of our country. And then I tell them that he was inspired by the Christchurch shooter just a few months before, who wrote stuff like:
An environmentally conscious and moral society will never be able to economically compete with a society based on ever increasing industrialization, urbanization, industrial output and population increase. The cheaper labour and ignorance of environmental health will always result in cheaper goods produced with less effort and inevitably result in control of the market.
And famously:
there is no nationalism without environmentalism.
And its tough to talk about how the Christchurch shooter talked a lot about Anders Breivik who most people in the United States forget about, but who killed 77 young politically active leftists in Norway and in his 1400+ page manifesto are things like:
Getting around is necessary, oil is not. Considerable efforts should be made to further develop high-power Lithium-Ion batteries. The goal should be to aim for oil independence.
And both Breivik and Tarrant of Christchurch reference in their writing threads from the Deep Ecology movement which I read a bunch of when I was younger and coming to the basic understanding that my lifetime has been constituted by the denial of the central political problem, that we’re destroying this planet. But at that time I was young and the lifeboat ethics of the movement skimmed off me like water on GORE-TEX, even when they wrote things like:
What to do when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.
Famously the Deep Ecology movement de-centered humans and made up words like “biocentrism” which meant decision-making on behalf of the animals and at the expense of the poor. And I don’t mean metaphorically. A 1974 essay by Garrett Hardin in Psychology Today is called “Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor”.
And then eventually, like all history, we get back to Hitler, who hated people who were not white but loved animals:
But there's one thing I can predict to eaters of meat: the world of the future will be vegetarian.
And he said things too that de-centered people and ecologized politics in ways that literally everyone at the school I’m at would wish politicians in this country could say without losing donor money, like:
Man must not fall into the error of thinking that he was ever meant to become lord and master of Nature.
And people think Nazi’s were like, super Christian, but that’d be to miss the ball entirely, because people like Hitler were more Hindu than Christian:
Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature.
Which is basically the thesis of famous environmental pieces that we still read all the time in academia, like Lynn White’s The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis. Hindu because Aryanism is thought of as the European vein of the Vedic tradition where of course the swastika originates.
And it’s just important to note that Hitler was a huge fan and pen pal of Madison Grant who like me was once a white male at Yale University but unlike me started the Bronx Zoo and the Save the Redwoods League and who’s super racist book Daisy is reading at one point in The Great Gatsby:
“This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and…"
After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again.
"…and we've produced all the things that go to make civilization — oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”
Today rich people like Gatsby and Daisy go to great vineyards in California that do things like organic or biodynamic farming which is great for the environment and was vaulted into federal policy by The Third Reich. And we can continue here in America believing that the dimensions have fundamentally shifted, that the environment is a left issue now, one lumped in with broad social liberalism and decreased racial consciousness and the goal of racial equality under the law, but what do we do when Steve Bannon says things like:
I’m a huge believer that we are…a country that has a culture and a civilization and citizens and Americanness to it all, right? And that’s a country. If that’s called blood and soil, then so be it. But we’re a country, we are a thing, with a people and a set of customs and traditions. We’re not some idea.
And we get away with it today at places like Yale or even in mainstream publications, get away with thinking that the history of environmentalism started in 1990 when the first IPCC report came out and Exxon realized the jig is up and had to start lying to everyone and gathering people around delusion. But there is a deeper history, one where ecos and ethnos are entangled in ways that would surprise people like me who was born in 1991 into the current political arrangement around the environment. We should not take lightly Bannon’s using of the language of:
blood and soil (German: Blut und Boden) is a nationalist slogan expressing Nazi Germany's ideal of a racially defined national body ("blood") united with a settlement area ("soil").
As we cast off into the precarious ecological future we need to handle environmental ideas delicately. To take this history seriously is to understand that “nature” has been as historically important a radicalizing force as has been “god”. It makes me wonder if one can act urgently and with care.