The Cunning of Nature: The Emergence of Right-Wing Ecology in the 1970s

This chapter examines the development of right-wing ecological ideas and their reception in the modern German environmental movement of the 1970s and early 1980s. The chapter shows how the New Left in the 1970s and early 1980s at times uncritically absorbed a romantic critique of the Enlightenment found within the older nature and nationalism tradition. The result was a politically ambiguous discourse in which undifferentiated attacks on progress, anti-rational and anti-technology rhetoric, all-too-common arguments that the environmental crisis necessitates new and more extensive—and quasi—authoritarian—state powers, and a critique of the homogenization or Americanization of the world, made possible bridges to the ecological critique of an emerging New Right. Springing up in the early 1970s after the virtual collapse of an older, fascist-dominated far right, this (far right) New Right took up environmental questions at the very same time the New Left was doing so, with some of its activists originally joining branches of the German Greens before leaving or being expelled from the party. Distancing itself from the explicit biological racism of an older far right, the New Right nevertheless proclaimed the necessity of ethno-cultural homogeneity for a true ecological politics, one that was authentically and ecologically “rooted” in the nation.