Themes and Features of Right-Wing Ecology

This chapter develops a conceptual and theoretical framework for understanding the distinctive environmental worldview of the far right. Within right-wing ecology, the chapter argues, notions of pollution and purity in the natural and social worlds are intimately connected. Here the native and the foreign, that which belongs and that which does not belong, are said to be inscribed in the laws of ecology. This is as true for human communities (as a part of nature) as it is for animal and plant communities. Thus within a right-wing ecological framework, the key to solving environmental problems lies in a rejection of Enlightenment universalism (a worldview in which a system of places is a human, not a natural construction) and the recovery of the natural and rooted—the ethnically and/or culturally pure nation. A feeling of belonging to a specific place within right-wing ecology is thus naturalized, made into an ecological determinant. These views of natural belonging and unnatural pollution run throughout far right environmental discourse and are illustrated by the three core concepts of the far right’s ecological ideology—eco-naturalism, eco-organicism, and eco-authoritarianism—reconstructed here. These three core concepts, briefly introduced in the previous chapter, are more fully unpacked and developed in this chapter.