“We’re the virus.” So read a popular tweet from mid-March praising reports of diminished air and water pollution in countries under lockdown due to the novel coronavirus COVID-19. By mid-April, the tweet, which also suggested that “Coronavirus is Earth’s vaccine,” was liked nearly 300,000 times.[1]
Viewed one way, the sentiment that the earth is “healing” itself in the absence of human activity, now endlessly lampooned,[2] points to hopes that the world will change for the better in the wake of the worst worldwide pandemic since the HIV/AIDS crisis. Viewed another, celebrating improvements to the natural environment at the expense of mass human death takes us down a much darker path.
The devaluing of human life—particularly of populations seen as inferior—in order to protect the environment viewed as essential to White identity is at the core of Far Right environmentalism and ecofascist thought. The ecofascist dream is a not just a White ethnostate but a “green” one too.
It was an odd coincidence that on April 5, as worldwide infections crossed[3] 1.2 million and deaths neared 70,000, the Finnish writer Pentti Linkola, long associated with ecofascism, died at age 87.[4] For decades, Linkola called for the “controlled pruning” of the human population,[5] described humanity as nature’s “very own tumour,”[6] and argued that the reduction of infant mortality should be “distressing to a biologist.”[7]
In recent years, Linkola’s ideas and image have been adopted by an emerging ecofascist strain within the Far Right, which admires him equally for his commitment to live simply, his thunderous denunciations of environmental and cultural destruction, and his proposed solution: genocide.
While this subculture congregates largely online, two massacres last year, executed by killers whose manifestos combined environmental and White supremacist grievances, underscore that it can be exceptionally deadly. The fact that those attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand and El Paso, Texas—the deadliest from the Far Right since 2011[8]—both occurred in the last calendar year also suggests that we’re witnessing something new.
Over the last several months, a steady drip of stories have added to this uncomfortable trend. In December 2019, a member of the U.S.-based neonazi terror group Atomwaffen Division was outed as a former member of the radical environmentalist group Earth First![9] In January, a VICE report uncovered evidence that an arson in Sweden that destroyed a mink farm—a traditional target for left-leaning eco-saboteurs—may have been carried out by a member of another neonazi organization known as The Base.[10] In March, a UK White supremacist group seemingly impersonated the environmental group Extinction Rebellion while promoting messages cheering on COVID-19.[11] And in May, antifascists revealed the identity of an Oregon-based leader of a now-disbanded ecofascist group named The Green Brigade.[12]