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Years back I picked up a rather comical yet tremendously useful 1995 book titled Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, by two “antifascist” socialists named Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier. It’s a book which tries to highlight the right’s growing vitalist and lebensphilosophie tendencies, which promote an adherence to the ways and values of the natural world, by comparing the origination of the green movement itself in the Bad Guys™. They are rather open about their sensibilities in the introduction:

On the contrary, we uphold the importance of reason, science, and technology in creating both a progressive ecological movement and an ecological society. It is a specific set of social relations—above all, the competitive market economy—that is presently destroying the biosphere. Mysticism and biologism, at the very least, deflect public attention away from such social causes. (ibid.)

The entire thing really is a gem. They start by laying out some obvious and sensical contribution of the “green right”, such as organic farming, and hand-wring for the next 5 pages about how bad that is, actually. They’re doing it for the wrong reasons! Not wholesome!

A perfect example of this: the authors decry an environmental worldview contingent on the idea that native peoples of their land have a responsibility to said land. They of course jump right to the Bad Guys™ of Europe, but how would they respond if such a proposition were placed upon the Lakota in their fight against oil pipelines? Framed as an oppressed minority fighting against Big Oil, they would give their lives for such a cause. Just don’t ever expect anything of the sort when natives of White countries demand the same.

The book is the way it is because the authors elucidate an unintended point that was unavoidable with such a historical undertaking: their entire worldview, why they care about any of this stuff in the first place, is because of Nazis and proto-Nazis. Were it not for the nature worship of the German romanticists and on, they would be run-of-the-mill labor unionists in some Amazon warehouse just like the Anglo tradition necessitates they would. But instead, they find themselves in an academic profession where they can operate on the idea that nature has a value of its own, and that man must find his place within that framework. And that fact of reality boils them from the inside out.

Despite the hilarity, the authors actually do a very good job in drawing this point out. They compile about a hundred pages worth of historical anecdotes that show the right’s contributions to the green movement. I’ll share some of these here, as well as my own knowledge, to show one thing: it is we who have the correct orientation to nature! It is not merely a social experiment to get more compost bins and tax the rich, it is a fundamental relationship between man and the Earth—blood and soil.

Romanticism and German Nationalism

From the beginning, green attitudes were irrevocably attached to a sentiment of German Nationalism. The desire for Germans to have a Germany came with the obvious secondary that Germans & Germany are bound to German soil. The German Nationalists saw the German people as as much of a natural extension of the German ecosystem as the beech trees of the Black Forest, a unique relationship that demanded an anti-foreign and ethnocentric sentiment.

Fanatical nationalist Ernst Moritz Arndt wrote possibly the first modern conservationist piece in 1815, lengthily titled A Word about the Care and Preservation of the Forests and the Peasants in the Consciousness of a Higher, i.e., More Humane Law. In it he proposed a number of environmental restrictions against timber harvest and industrialization, stating that the German governments “should manage nature and implement laws so that a healthy, strong and happy race can develop and sustain itself.” He also lamented urbanization, in which the German folk abandoned their traditions and lands for economic benefit, stating: “the residents of the towns and cities, however, must take heed of their artificial existence and alter their way of life to emulate that of their rural cousins.” Turns out he was also a raging antisemite and Francophobe, and launches a polemic against the French or Jews at every turn. He even had a favorite slur for the French, "verfeinerte schlechte Juden", the bad refined Jews, just to make the association clear.

Wilhelm Rhiel, a novelist and student of Arndt, helped popularize these sentiments. Known today as “the father of agrarian romanticism”, he writes in 1853, “We must save the forest, not only so that our ovens do not become cold in winter, but also so that the pulse of life of the people continues to beat warm and joyfully, so that Germany remains German.” Composer Ernst Rudorff, after the unification of Germany, spoke against the rapid industrialization and urbanization that came with Bismark: “True civilization in our society is dying, for in most parts of the nation there is complete indifference to the legacy of our forefathers, and people’s connection with their heritage has faded away altogether.”

These sentiments were, of course, fueled by the preceding era of German Romanticism. This movement completely enveloped the German people and its culture: it urged them to look to the medieval and folkish traditions for meaning and happiness, artists painted the countryside as an icon of the divine, philosophers sought to understand reality by man’s experience in nature. The German fascination with nature and the past is everywhere in Goethe, Wagner, Caspar Friedrich, and Beethoven. This nature-oriented culture would last until its extirpation in 1945.

The Birth of Ecology: Haeckel and Lorenz

Among the list of contributions by the Bad Guys™ is the science of ecology itself. The term ecology was coined by “The German Darwin” Ernst Haeckel, who is additionally responsible for the development of phylogenies and the first attempts at describing the evolutionary history and interconnectedness of life. He was also an outspoken monist, a member of the Thule Society and founder of the Monist League, which was necessitated by his environmentalism:

The monistic idea of God, which alone is compatible with our present knowledge of nature, recognizes the divine spirit in all things. It can never recognise in God a "personal being," or, in other words, an individual of limited extension in space, or even of human form. God is everywhere. Haeckel, Monism as Connecting Religion and Science (1892)

Of course, he was also the progenitor of “scientific racism”, and saw the social sciences as a form of “applied biology”. His views on the distinct classification of human races and the polygenic origin of human races (that is, as opposed to the monogenic Out of Africa Theory), later had a profound impact on leaders in Nazi Germany such as Alfred Rosenberg. To this day, his views are condemned as the very origination of Nazism, and the institutes he founded frequently make a bonfire of his views. For the authors of Ecofascism, their biggest gripe is his fascination with Lebengesetze, “laws of life”, which state that civilizations and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as organic life.

In the boat of profoundly talented ecologists blamed of the Holocaust for their work… we also have Konrad Lorenz, the Austrian founder of the science of ethology, the study of animal behavior. He is largely responsible for our transition away from a vague concept of “instinct” to concretely modeled behaviors such as imprinting, aggression, sexual competition, and signaling. Just a slight problem: he was a registered member of the Nazi party, studied Poles for subhuman qualities in Poznan, and served as a medic on the Eastern Front in 1944.

After the war, he continued his work in Germany, even being co-awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his work. This was and remains to be incredibly controversial. In fact, the first time I heard of Lorenz was in a class dedicated entirely to ethology I took in college. The first day was dedicated to yet another bonfire, with my professor making sure we knew just how much of a hyper-fascist Lucifer this guy was. The media of the time weren’t kind to him either:

Because of what Dr. Konrad Lorenz wrote on racial purity, as a professor in wartime Germany, the propriety of awarding him a Nobel Prize has been questioned in the December issue of The Sciences, organ of the New York Academy of Sciences. An article in that journal cites writings published by Dr. Lorenz in 1940 and 1943, supporting “race‐preserving” measures to avoid the “degeneracy” in man that is typical of domesticated animals. Because the latter, unlike their relatives in the wild, were not bred along strictly racial grounds, they have become ugly and degenerate, Dr. Lorenz said. He therefore expressed support for the racial policy of the Nazi Government.

According to reports from Europe, Simon Wiesenthal, head of the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna, who has made a career of hunting down Nazi war criminals, wrote Dr. Lorenz, asking him to decline the prize as a gesture of contrition. However, these reports say, he declined to do so. (NYT, 1973)

(lol)

Lebensphilosophie Preached to the Wandervogel

The reaction to German industrialization prompted the organization of youth movements, such as the Wandervogel. This was an organic movement of mostly young boys who skipped school to commune with nature; they hiked trails with instruments, writing new folk songs and poetry, and communicating Romanticist ideas. Non-Christian religious tendencies developed, including a partial return to Nordic paganism. Crucially, this all occurred right before the Great War, and so the boys that once hiked and strummed as part of this clique of “right-wing hippies” eventually grew up to be the men of the NSDAP & SS. Indeed, this maturation eventually led to the formal integration of the Wandervogel into the Hitler Youth.

One such “right-wing hippie” was philosopher Ludwig Klages, who wrote a 1913 essay to the Wandervogel titled Man and Earth. I’ll let the authors of Ecofascism describe its importance:

Man and Earth anticipated just about all of the themes of the contemporary ecological movement. It decried the accelerating extinction of species, disturbance of global ecological balance, deforestation, destruction of aboriginal peoples and of wild habitats, urban sprawl, and increasing alienation of people from nature. In emphatic terms it disparaged Christianity, capitalism, economic utilitarianism, hyperconsumption and the ideology of ‘progress’. It even condemned the destructiveness of rampant tourism and the slaughter of whales, and displayed a clear recognition of the planet as an ecological totality. All of this in 1913! (ibid.)

And then the very next sentence:

It may come as a surprise, then, to learn Klages was throughout his life politically archconservative and a venomous antisemite.

Shit!

Klages was emblematic of the thought process of orienting man as being within nature, and not merely a beneficiary of it as modern greens suggest. Thus he was a pioneer of so-called “biocentric metaphysics”, in which doctrines such as blood and soil can find a comfortable home. Additionally, the anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, and anti-progressive worldview of Klages certainly struck a chord within the Wandervogel he addressed. It was just a few years later when, during the interwar period, those same boys lamented the encroaching totality of democratic, international capitalism overcoming their country.

Implementing the Biocentric Worldview

With the rise of the Nationalist Socialist Party and Adolf Hitler came the rise of the former Wandervogel, and a laundry list of environmental protections and fundamental changes to the German worldview as it relates to policy. As stated in Mein Kampf,

When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against nature must lead to their own downfall. AH

Throughout the Reich’s government were ardent environmentalists. Reichsminister Fritz Todt was known for “serious run-ins with Bormann, protesting against his despoiling of the landscape around Obersalzberg”. Charged with the construction of the Autobahn, he made strenuous and costly changes to the project that made it as least impactful to the environment as possible. His advisor, Alwin Seifert, was officially known as the Reich Advocate for the Landscape and unofficially as “Mr. Mother Earth”. He championed a number of environmental policies in the Reich, including bans on chemical pesticides, monoculture farming, and wetlands drainage. Rudolf Hess was a well-known right wing hippie, with a strict biodynamic diet and love of homeopathic medicine. More importantly he was directed with land planning for the Reich, and as a personal favorite of the Fuhrer, gave serious political power to the environmentalist wing of the NSDAP.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of the ecological protections established by the Reich, much of which survives today in some form:

• Restrictions on animal experimentation and slaughter. One of the very first laws passed by the NSDAP, Germany became the first to ban vivisection. Followed by the stricter Reich Animal Protection Act, effectively banning any intentional cause of animal suffering.

• Reichserbhofgesetz, the establishment of a set acreage of farmland for each man to pass to his bloodline.

• Reichsnaturschutzgesetz (Reich Conservation Act). A massive expansion of conservation areas and defined the role of the German state in conservation, covered the protection of species and provided for conservation areas dedicated to the protection of endangered species.

• Law on the Transition of Forestry and Hunting to the Reich. Established the Reich Forestry Office to protect forests, oversee reforestation efforts, and preserve forested areas due to their importance to the nation's culture and industry.

• A litany of environmental agencies including The Reich Agency for Nature Protection, today’s Federal Agency for Nature Conservation.

• Commissions for organic city planning, which concentrated urbanization and minimized environmental impacts. One such example was in Cologne, which shortened roads, limited gas stations, and banned billboards in the countryside.

Of course, the reality of the need for industrialization in the face of an overwhelming enemy eventually set in. Hess, Todt, and much of the greens were dead by 1942. And though rapid, panicked industrialization followed the failure of Barbarossa, many historians put some degree of blame on the failure of the Reich to keep up with its enemies on the environmental protections it had championed.

Still, this effort has left a legacy. After the war, many of these regulations were kept in place by the Allies (though, of course, stripped of their ideological context and language). Despite the contributions, it is uniquely the aspect of “blood and soil” which continues to receive attention. One wonders if any of these protections would have came at the time they did without such a worldview to spur it.

We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a reintegration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole … This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought.

Ernst Lehmann, 1934

Ecofascism in the Contemporary Right

The environmentalist worldview homogenizes a number of positions among the right. When one the idea that specific peoples ultimately belong to a specific soil, a place responsible for their genesis and of which they consider their Heimat, the successive idea that those people have a duty to its preservation is not far behind. For if the soil is responsible for the genesis and nourishment of cultures, then the deterioration of the environment comes with the deterioration of the culture.

Additionally among the right is a special love of natural law, or stated here as Lebengesetze. Nature provides the basis not just for blood and soil doctrine, but also for a number of popular topics and principles among the right: sexual ethics, family values and kin selection, IQ and human biodiversity, sexual dimorphism and gender roles, the nuclear annihilation of China, and so on.

There is however, a point of friction in the right regarding the elevation of nature as a source of values. The Christian right is tremendously prominent, and such ideals may taste bitter without proper reframing. They would certainly take issue with Klages’ polemics against Christianity, going as far as to describe it as the ultimate companion to democratic capitalism and all of its evils. Stewardship will have to compete with the idea of man as fundamentally within nature. Lynn White Jr., in a piece titled “The Root of our Ecologic Crisis”, puts the blame for ecological despoilment squarely on the Judaic and dualist rejection of nature that Christianity established within the West. I wonder if he, that simple Californian professor, recognizes just how similar his argument was to that of the ecofascists.

These things aside, I do see a clear tendency towards environmental positions among the right, especially its younger elements. Climate skepticism remains rampant precisely because they see it as leftist social ecology, which is no true ecology at all. When it comes to preserving the American quality of the American wilderness, encouraging an inexplicable link between man and his environment, and leaping for joy when their children skip public school for hikes in the wilderness, I see a truly ecological worldview beginning to germinate once more.

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Further Reading

Man and Earth, Ludwig Klages

The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis, Lynn White Jr

From Green Pastures to Scorched Earth: German Environmentalism and Ecology

Monism as Connecting Science and Religion, Haeckel

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