The story so far: Ten people were killed and three were injured when an 18-year-old gunman opened fire on Saturday at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, in a racially motivated attack he broadcast live. The shooter was wearing a bulletproof vest and a helmet and was arrested by the police.

The shooting is being investigated as a hate crime, Stephen Belongia, special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) field office in Buffalo, told reporters.

According to local media, the suspect, identified as Payton Gendron of Conklin, New York, posted an online manifesto ahead of the attack. In the manifesto, he identifies with the ideologies of “eco-fascism” and nationalist socialism. The attacker was also influenced by the Christchurch shootings in 2019, another hate crime in New Zealand where 51 people were killed in attacks on two mosques.

What is ecofascism?

Although it may seem that the ideology of ecofascism has been gaining traction in recent times, historians are of the opinion that it has been around for centuries. In the Threat of Ecofascism (1995), environmental historian Michael E. Zimmerman defines ecofascism as a radical movement that calls for “protecting ecologically vital private property from those who despoil it” and portrays ecological despoliation as a threat to the racial integrity of people. people. The ideology demands that “society be reorganized in terms of an authoritarian and collectivist principle of leadership based on masculine and martial values,” he writes.

Zimmerman also adds that if ecofascism were to occur, it is likely to happen in countries that already have a long-term sense of national identity that could be construed as “racial.”

In other words, ecofascism attributes environmental degradation to immigration and overpopulation and wants to preserve the natural resources of developed countries for only the historically indigenous population. Ecofascists believe that humans have put a strain on the planet’s natural resources, but certain population groups, usually people of color, marginalized communities and minorities, are less deserving of using these resources. As such, ecofascism becomes a vehicle for carrying racism under the guise of environmental protection.

The origin of the ecofascism theory is unclear, but some experts believe the idea of ​​mixing eugenics and natural resources first arose in The population principle, an essay written by the English economist Thomas Robert Malthus in 1798. According to the Malthusian theory, population will continue to grow in geometric progression while the means of subsistence will increase in arithmetic progression, and only “vice, misery and coercion morale” can control excessive population growth. The crux of the Malthusian theory is that food and other natural resources will not be able to meet the demands of an ever-increasing human population.

Madison Grant: Father of Ecofascism

the American Institute for Economic Research identifies Madison Grant as the father of ecofascism. Mr. Grant was the founder of modern wildlife management and a close friend of US President Theodore Roosevelt. During his tenure as president of the New York Zoological Society, he founded the Bronx Zoo. In 1906, the zoo caged Ota Benga, a member of the Mbuti tribe of the Congo, to live with monkeys. Mr Benga was released in contempt, but was reportedly depressed and committed suicide ten years later. Mr. Grant had supported the caging of Mr. Benga. He also wrote The Passage of the Great Racea book that advocates racist ideologies and was a favorite of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

Dr. Peter Staudenmaier, associate professor of history at Marquette University in the United States, sees ecofascism as deeply connected to fascist politics with strong roots in the 1920s and 1930s in Germany, Italy and Great Britain. Brittany.

“As early as the 1870s, American environmental writers blamed immigrants for the decline of natural rural living, and by the 1910s mainstream American conservationists were promoting eugenics and racial ideology. Similar currents can be seen in Britain in the 1920s and especially in the 1930s,” Dr Staudenmaier said, speaking to The Hindu. Dr. Staudenmaier is the author of the 1995 book Ecofascism: lessons from the German experienceand more recently The contested ecology.

Nazi Principle of “Blood and Soil”

Walther Schoenichen, a German biologist under the Nazi Empire, linked ecosophy to the local principle of blut and boden—German for Blood and Soil—a racist ideology propagated during Hitler’s reign. Blood and Soil was primarily intended to ground the Germans in their rural surroundings, as Hitler was not a fan of industrialization. The phrase also conveyed rightful ownership of the land to the “master race”.

Lebensraumanother Nazi ideology, is closely linked to the principle of blut and boden. The word loosely translates to “living space” and refers to the land and how the Germans were deprived of their land by the “lower races”. The ideology extended to post-war plans to encourage the “superior races” of northern Europe to reestablish their roots in their native soil.

The “great replacement” theory is also linked to ecofascism and propagates that non-white populations are replacing white people from their rightful lands due to globalization and industrialization. French author Renaud Camus mentioned the theory in his 2011 book. It has been brought up by far-right perpetrators of shooting incidents in Christchurch, El Paso and, more recently, Buffalo.

Why the rise in incidents linked to eco-fascism?

Dr. Staudenmaier is of the opinion that despite its history, ecofascism was still a relatively marginal phenomenon until a decade ago. “My sense is that these historic currents of right-wing ecology began to emerge more openly and gain notoriety again around 2015, alongside the global rise of right-wing authoritarian and populist elements. The clearest example is the Christchurch attack in 2019, followed by the El Paso attack, but the environmental dimensions of the radical right have been there forever. It took atrocities like the Christchurch attack to get the public’s attention,” said he declared.

How to respond to ecofascism?

“In my opinion, much of the coverage of the Buffalo attack failed to consider the longer historical context, which I believe is essential to understanding shocking events like these,” said said Dr. Staudenmaier.

“The environmental passages of the Buffalo author’s manifesto were taken verbatim from the 2019 Christchurch Manifesto (titled ‘The Great Replacement’), itself an amalgamation of disparate beliefs swirling around the contemporary radical right. In my view, the best way to respond to these events is to show that any green program capable of meeting the challenge of the current global climate crisis must go hand in hand with a commitment to social equity if it is ever to succeed. ; Nationalist, racialist and anti-immigrant versions of environmental policy are not only inhumane but inconsistent at the basic ecological and planetary level.

“The long historical legacy of far-right ecology has nothing useful to offer the world today.”