Abstract
For decades, mainstream global discourse has coded the environment as a left-wing issue. And yet, in recent years, scholars have begun to notice the still marginal and yet rapidly expanding social phenomenon of far-right environmentalism and ecology (Lubarda, 2020; Taylor, 2019). Forchtner’s (2019) edited volume, The Far Right and the Environment, featured essays from scholars throughout Europe and the United States focused on describing this emerging socio-political fusion within wide-ranging national and cultural contexts.
This line of scholarship raged on with last year’s special edition of the journal Environmental History (Brain, 2022) which expanded the analysis of far-right ecology into South Asia (D’Souza, 2022), South America (Sedrez, 2022), and the Middle East (İnal, 2022), while another special edition of the journal Terrorism and Political Violence (Silke and Morrison, 2022) featured wide-ranging analyses connecting climate change, social movements, and political violence. It is against this backdrop of scholarly anxiety about far-right ecology that we must situate historian Peter Staudenmaier’s (2022) Ecology Contested, which, despite its brevity, functions as an enormous historical bibliography to remind us of his central point and thesis: ‘the profound political ambivalence of ecology’.
Staudenmaier has been focused on the centrality of the environment to the far-right for decades (Biehl and Staudenmaier, 1995; Staudenmaier, 2013). And yet, in contrast to much of his previous work, Ecology Contested functions as a much more effective reminder to sociologists of the ‘political ambivalence of ecology’, and to approach nature, ecology, and the environment as both central and yet flexible elements in the makeup of any community ideology.
The collection is broken into four lengthy essays: ‘The Politics of Nature from Left to Right’ (pp. 19–45), ‘A Revolution Against Technology’ (pp. 46–116), ‘Ambiguities of Animal Rights’ (pp. 121–148), and ‘Blood and Soil Revived?’ (pp. 149–194). There is also a very brief essay in the middle of the collection called ‘Disney Ecology’ (pp. 117–120) which analyzes the movie Bambi from an ecocritical perspective and does not really seem to fit with the rest of the collection.
The first essay, ‘The Politics of Nature from Left to Right: Radicals, Reactionaries, and Ecological Responses to Modernity’ begins with a reflection on the political trajectory of famous German biodynamic farmer Baldur Springmann from Nazism (1920s–40s) to Green Party anti-nuclear activist (1950s–70s) and back to far-right neo-Nazism (1980s). Staudenmaier then uses the case of Springmann to illustrate how, when ‘refracted through categories of class, race, gender, nation, and religion. . . the politics of nature offers a way for individuals and communities alike to navigate the precarious terrain of modern life and search for alternatives’ (p. 23).
For Springmann and others in the far-right, this moral refraction often includes a particular form of antisemitism that sees cities, capitalism, the state, finance, debt as unnatural and rurality, localism, and family as natural. As the essay continues, Staudenmaier illustrates these same natural–unnatural binary patterns playing out in contemporary Italy, Australia, and the United States.
As is true with the final essay, one of the most important contributions to international scholarship is Staudenmaier’s ability to bring together the German and English-speaking academies in conversation. The bibliography of this first chapter cites scholarship in both languages, and in this way, it begins the important task of bringing together two enormous strands of socio-ecological literature under one roof. This first essay functions as an introductory illustration of the ways how, even within a single lifetime, the ‘political ambivalence of ecology’, if underpinned by moral commitments to purity and nature, can organize politics that emerge like a whack-a-mole anywhere from left to right.
In the second essay, ‘A Revolution Against Technology: The Unabomber Manifesto in Historical Context’, Staudenmaier refocuses on what many scholars have understood as a case of far-left ecoterrorism. The essay embeds the Unabomber manifesto (‘Industrial Society and Its Future’) into a lineage of politically ambivalent ‘philosophical precursors’ that he argues ‘belongs firmly to the right’ (p. 52). Staudenmaier roots ‘Industrial Society’ into the reactionary Kulturkritik of Germany through its focus on anti-tech, anti-bourgeois, and anti-feminism. In the manifesto, leftism is equated with civilization and technology, and thus, as is true for much of far-right ecologism, ‘nature becomes the opposite of technology’ (Kaczynski, 1995).
Staudenmaier also spends time critiquing and locating the manifesto in the complicated politics of anarchism, which should demand more attention as global politics continue to evolve and could add to the often vague theoretical conversations around populism (Ofstehage et al., 2022). This chapter’s bibliography functions as a wonderful starting point for any sociologist starting a project on tech skepticism, whether historical or contemporary.
The third chapter, ‘The Ambiguities of Animal Rights’, looks at the complicated moral terrain of animal rights and pacifism. This chapter raises important and often overlooked issues for sociologists of morality, in particular how moral frameworks successfully and unsuccessfully transcend the nature–culture dualism. It also provides a tour de force of references on anthropocentrism that will be useful to all environmental sociologists, again, with reference to both the English- and German-speaking academies.
Staudenmaier’s ethical argument ultimately pivots around the fact that it is an ethical error to extend humanistic moral frameworks to the non-human world. He argues that dissolving the distinction between the humanistic and ecological as two ethical domains opens the door to the ambivalent politics of nature and the types of ethical theories that can simultaneously justify the progressive Animal Protection Law of 1933 and the genocide of the Jewish people. For sociologists working in environmental ethics, this essay provides an important lens for seeing how the blending of natural and social theory may present unexpected ethical outcomes.
The final essay in the collection, ‘Blood and Soil Revived: Ecological Politics of the Far Right’, is in some ways an updated reboot of his earlier work with Janet Biehl (Biehl and Staudenmaier, 1995), featuring updated discussions around ecofascism that additionally include the recent El Paso and Christchurch massacres. In some ways, this essay accomplishes more in less space than earlier work and, like other sections, successfully brings together a bibliography that cuts across the English and German-speaking academies.
The essay is a collage of geographic breadth that gives credibility to far-right ecology as a global phenomenon. Both historical and contemporary movements are addressed. The historical section includes attention to far-right environmental movements in early twentieth-century Britain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. The contemporary section includes attention to far-right ecology movements in those same countries and additionally in Greece, Austria, Russia, and the United States. There is particular attention paid to the functioning of environmental ideas within the American altright movement. The altright is contrasted with earlier American far-right articulations of ecology like White Aryan Resistance, which claimed ‘ecology is for Aryans’ (quoted on 162).
The chapter concludes with the caveat that we should not automatically associate far-right with whiteness, and that far-right movements such as the Chipko in India and the Ken Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria deserve more attention for the ways in which they integrate nature politics into far-right nationalist ideology.
Both of the two biggest weaknesses of Ecology Contested from the perspective of a sociologist come simply from Staudenmaier’s position as an American historian of Germany. First, the book contains very few references to empirical studies. Second, it is a project largely locating contemporary phenomena within the ideological history of German thought, in particular within the lineage of Naturphilosophie and German Romanticism.
That said, this work seems particularly important for those of us in the American and British social sciences, where German intellectual history beyond Kant, Marx, and Weber is quite marginal. Each essay, but in particular the first and last, features a huge volume of German social theory that is useful in understanding the social phenomena that are coming into focus through contemporary edited collections (Forchtner, 2019) and special editions of journals (Brain, 2022; Silke and Morrison, 2022). Thus, Ecology Contested works toward the goal of building a global academy, though the language barrier remains.
It is easy to make the mistake of interpreting ideas about the natural world as more settled than those in the social world. However, as Staudenmaier’s work reminds us, nature is just another contested aspect of any culture that communities iteratively reproduce in wildly different ways.
Today, as climate change bears down, the blending between natural and social politics will no doubt grow more enmeshed. As those politics blend, sociologists must be on the cutting edge of describing these new social phenomena. And yet, we must also remain open to the possibility that there is nothing new under the sun. Ecology Contested then provides a succinct historical and theoretical introduction for any social scientist who is surprised by the emerging phenomenon of far-right ecology and ecofascism and who might be curious about pursuing a sociological study of the politics of nature.