“Is Ecohumanism Possible?”: Roundtable on *The Ecocentrists* Pt 1

In 2019, two young men, one in Christchurch, New Zealand, and one in El Paso, Texas, murdered dozens of people in two astonishing acts of political violence. The first mass shooting, in Christchurch, helped inspire the second, which happened five months later; both men shared strong commitments to the same set of ideas and presented their suicidal atrocities as political theater, highly visible acts of terrorism intended to advance their ideology. That ideology can be found in the manifestos they published before undertaking their attacks, which circulated widely and are still available on the internet, but the ideology did not originate with these men. Rather, the constellation of ideas avowed by both Brenton Tarrant, the twenty-eight-year-old Australian who killed fifty-one people in two mosques in Christchurch on March 15, 2019, and Patrick Crusius, the twenty-one-year-old Texan who killed twenty-two people in a Walmart in El Paso on August 3, 2019, has deep roots in extremist strains of nationalism and environmentalism going back to the late nineteenth century.

That ideology is known as ecofascism. Broadly construed, ecofascism combines an ecocentric commitment to environmental sustainability with an ethno-nationalist commitment to political separatism based on race, ethnicity, and nationality, along with a willingness to use violence to make good on those commitments. In this respect, ecofascism might be something of a misnomer, since fascism isn’t merely an extreme form of nationalism, but rather a historically specific ideology combining nationalism, militarism, and corporatism. The strains of extremist environmental nationalism that have emerged in recent years—and the ideas that Crusius and Tarrant adhered to and expounded—tend to be neither militarist nor corporatist. As is the case with many recent developments in politics, the swift application of reductive and anachronistic labels risks misapprehending the phenomena in question (even with the case of someone like Tarrant, who explicitly identified as an ecofascist).

In the wake of the shootings in Christchurch and El Paso, numerous articles from a range of commentators on the left revised the famous quote often attributed to Rosa Luxemburg, which she, in fact, attributed to Fredrich Engels—“Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism”—to speak to our current moment.[1] In the words of journalist and critic Jeet Heer, writing in The Nation: “In our own century, the choice might come down to Green socialism or eco-fascism.”[2] Such articles tend to lump robust European political movements that combine environmentalism and anti-immigration, such as France’s Front National, Hungary’s Fidesz, and Italy’s 5 Star Movement, together with more disparate American phenomena, such as the “pine tree community,” neo-pagans, the Green Tea Coalition, the Unabomber, and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), while making a monitory claim that “Malthusian politics” will only increase the appeal of ecofascism among American conservatives.[3] Such articles also often point to environmentalist aspects of Nazism (including the postwar influence of Savitri Devi), racist strains in the history of American environmentalism (especially early conservationist Madison Grant), and the role of deep ecology. In a response to the El Paso shooting published in The Intercept, for instance, Natasha Lennard writes: “The so-called deep ecology movement, claiming to argue for the intrinsic value of all living things, insists that the flourishing of nonhuman life is impossible without decreasing the human population. Deep ecologists like David Foreman in the 1980s welcomed famine as a means of depopulation; his fellow eco-fascist contemporaries saw a similar boon in the AIDS crisis.”[4] This is a partial reading of deep ecology, to say the least, but brings out real problems—and old arguments.

One of the most valuable insights explored by Keith Makoto Woodhouse’s superb history of radical environmentalism, The Ecocentrists, is just how long these arguments have been going on and how deeply they are woven into American environmentalism. “Radical environmentalists were not beatific egalitarians,” Woodhouse writes.

They were angry. They believed, fundamentally, that as modern human society gradually destroyed wild nature it veered toward catastrophe, and that its self-destruction would take much of the planet with it. That belief assumed an oppositional relationship between the human and the natural. To reject ecocentrism, radical environmentalists argued, was to embrace anthropocentrism—human-centeredness. Beyond the two positions lay only equivocation.

It is easy to dismiss such extreme ideas. They lead in many troubling directions…. But as easy as it is to dismiss radicals’ ideas, it is less easy to define an environmentalism without them, or at least without some semblance of them.[5]

Woodhouse carefully and thoughtfully parses out conflicts between social justice movements and environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s, arguments between social ecology and deep ecology in the 1970s and 1980s, contentious debates within the Sierra Club and Earth First! about immigration, and divisive disagreements between successive generations of Earth First! activists about the value of ecological anti-humanism and militant tactics such as “ecotage,” all while keeping in focus key intellectual disputes around ideas of wilderness, nature, and the human. The Ecocentrists offers an exemplary combination of environmental history, intellectual history, and political history, tracing the development of a handful of central ideas through a rich texture of internecine squabbles, political confrontations, and individual biographies, all grounded in deep archival work. If not quite as expansive as its subtitle claims—Woodhouse focuses primarily on Earth First! and connected groups, mostly leaving aside early connections between nationalism, racism, and conservation; splinter groups like the ELF and individuals such as Theodore Kaczynski; broader cultural trends like those discussed in Daniel Belgrad’s recent book The Culture of Feedback: Ecological Thinking in ‘70s America; the deeper philosophical history of radical ecology admirably elaborated in Michael Zimmerman’s Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity; ecofeminism and the environmental justice movement; and the history of radical environmentalism since the 1990s (the lack of any discussion of the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle seemed especially glaring)—The Ecocentrists nonetheless fills out in compelling historical narrative detail a deep contemporary problematic, which has only achieved greater salience and urgency in the age of the Anthropocene, as the terrifying prospect of catastrophic global ecological transformation warned against by the very activists Woodhouse discusses emerges with breathtaking velocity. As Woodhouse puts it, we still face “the questions that environmentalists of all stripes have confronted, however incompletely: the limits of human freedoms and ambitions, the relationship between the human and the natural, and the intersection of social justice and environmental resilience.”[6]

The fundamental issue at stake is the relation between the human and the non-human, and one way to frame it might be to ask whether ecological humanism is even possible. Framing the ecocentric-anthropocentric divide as a dichotomous binary suggests that it is not: either we see all beings on Earth as having equal inherent value, or we see humans as having special value above and beyond non-human nature. Yet as Woodhouse points out, building on Cronon’s seminal essay on wilderness and other criticisms of deep ecology (like Richard Watson’s “A Critique of Anti-Anthropocentric Biocentrism” and George Bradford’s “How Deep is Deep Ecology?”), ecocentrism is ultimately incoherent, since the claim that homo sapiens is just another species undermines any moral claims that human beings should behave with special consideration toward the rest of the world. You cannot argue that humans are morally equivalent to spotted owls, whales, or sequoias, while also arguing at the same time that humans have a moral obligation to modify their behaviors toward spotted owls, whales, and sequoias. As Watson bluntly put it, “if we think there is nothing morally wrong with one species taking over the habitat of another and eventually causing the extinction of the dispossessed species—as has happened millions of times in the history of the Earth—then we should not think that there is anything morally or ecosophically wrong with the human species dispossessing and causing the extinction of other species.”[7]

On the other hand, taking a strong anthropocentric stance toward the nonhuman world offers, at best, a stewardship of utilitarian calculation, still prone to the same short-sighted arrogance which put us on the trajectory of self-destruction we find ourselves on today. When the hard limits of human understanding meet up against the ecological insight that every species is interdependently bound up with other species and its environment in endlessly complex ways, one cannot avoid the implication that human science will never fully understand nature and our relation to it, which means we will never fully understand ourselves, and thus will always fail in any attempt to wholly know, much less master, both the non-human and the human. This humbling conclusion makes any strong claim to anthropocentrism seem farcical, a benighted primate’s narcissism.

Here we find ourselves, as the planet we live on rapidly transforms into something else, caught between blind nature and blinkered humanism. Is there a place for an enlightened ecological humanism? Can any such “ecohumanism” ground itself on persuasive ontological or logical foundation, or is it doomed to be a theory founded in self-contradiction? If high-level symbolic reasoning is a uniquely human trait, and rigorous ecological thinking necessarily decenters human beings from any comprehensive model of the web of life on Earth, is ecological reason even possible?

Woodhouse is correct when he writes: “Radical environmentalists believed very strongly that a planet dominated by humans should be a source of anxiety rather than complacency, and that environmentalism without anxiety or even anger is less meaningful. Their ideas deserve more of a hearing today.”[8] But we need to do more than simply pick sides between utopian ecosocialists and dystopian ecofascists, or rehash old debates about the contradictions between social justice and environmental values. If we want to ground our hope for a human future in something other than fantasies of popular revolt, naïve trust in global elites, or faith in technological miracles, we need to at once break down, integrate, and transcend the contradictions inherent in ecological thinking, and establish a new, robust, systemic ecological humanism, which makes a special place for human reason in subordination to a totality essentially and irreducibly beyond human reasoning.

Is the creation of such a grand philosophical “master narrative” even feasible in our fractured and skeptical age? It is impossible to know unless we try. What we can be sure of is that human life on Earth is changing and will change in response to the unfolding ecological catastrophe humanity has monstrously given birth to. We will adapt to life in the Anthropocene, or go extinct, and the form our adaptation eventually takes may turn out to be not only alien but repugnant to humanistic values we hold dear today—imagine, for example, a future in which Tarrant and Crusius are remembered as martyrs. If we believe in the value of human life, human reason, human diversity, and human creativity, and we want to see those values thrive in the alien future to come, then our obligation is clear: we must find a way to ground humanistic values in reverence toward—and submission to—that unknowable totality which, lacking a better term, we call nature.

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[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/ch01.htm

[2] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/el-paso-mass-shooting-fascism/

[3] Such warnings are indeed concerning, but fail to account for the peculiarities of American politics, namely the union of Protestant Christianity, petrocapitalism, and militarism which lies at the core of American empire, and as well the simple fact of the United States’ size and regional variety. While the idea of a “land” under threat from both ecological devastation and immigrants might mean, in Hungary, Italy, Germany, France, or England, something quite concrete, in the United States such ideas necessarily remain rather abstract. Since World War II at least, American cultural unity has centered not on identity with the land nor even with a civilizational history and its monuments, but rather on a “way of life” comprising consumer gratification, personal autonomy, economic abundance, and technological mastery (though special note might be made of the role “the West” played in American political imaginary in the Cold War era). Modern American environmentalism has always been most successful when it has been able to tap into these fundamental postwar beliefs, and so has modern American nativism. It’s difficult but not impossible to imagine an American eco-nationalism that would manage to combine nativism, environmentalism, and consumerism: such an ideological constellation, however, would be unlikely to resemble “eco-fascism” as people currently understand it. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/unabomber-netflix-tv-series-ted-kaczynski, https://harpers.org/2017/05/green-tea-party/, https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2018/09/eco-fascism-ideology-marrying-environmentalism-and-white-supremacy

[4] https://theintercept.com/2019/08/05/el-paso-shooting-eco-fascism-migration/

[5] Woodhouse, x–xi.

[6] Woodhouse, 289.

[7] Watson, “A Critique of Anti-Anthropocentic Biocentrism,” 253.

[8] Woodhouse, xii