Revisiting Nature and Nationalism: Right-Wing Ecology and the Politics of Identity in Germany

This introductory chapter surveys the main themes and ideas contained in the 1999 version of Nature and Nationalism. Taking account of both the limitations of the original edition and its enduring contributions, the chapter situates the book within a first generation of works focusing on the far right and the environment which described and analyzed the key actors and concepts articulating a distinctive environmental ideology or ecologism of the far right. In trying to understand this phenomenon, Nature and Nationalism develops three core concepts—eco-naturalism (the “laws of nature” as a model for the social and political order), eco-organicism (the nation and its people as a constituent part of any ecosystem), and eco-authoritarianism (authoritarian solutions to the perception of environmental crises)—structuring right-wing ecology. At bottom, the book argues that right-wing ecology rests on a particularism and ultra-nationalism, a framing that is intimately bound up with far right notions of purity and pollution as well as the expression of a “rooted” ethno-cultural identity. Although today much of the contemporary far right articulates a simple and reflexive obstructionism to combatting climate change, the chapter argues that such now familiar obstructionism does not solely define the relationship between the far right and the environment.