The Green Scare Part II: Fascism Goes Foraging
Eco-nationalism, aesthetic propaganda, and the weaponisation of climate concern.
Welcome back to this cursed series on the planet being on fire and the right being kind of into it.
In Part I of the Green Scare, we traced how the American conservative movement went from protecting the homeland (literally) to accusing wind turbines of killing bald eagles. Once a party of national parks and clean air acts, the right slowly morphed into a machine of denial — torching treaties, downplaying science, and treating Greta Thunberg like a one-woman Marxist uprising.
But as we discussed, this wasn’t just about oil money or the God-given right to grill. For decades, the conservative movement had coalesced around a single unifying threat: communism. When the Soviet Union collapsed, that ideological scaffolding crumbled. And climate change made for a perfect replacement — global in scale, critical of American consumption, scientific in tone, and worst of all: collective in its solutions.
What followed was a full-blown narrative transplant. Environmentalists were no longer just tree-huggers; they were “watermelons” — green on the outside, red on the inside. Over time, the metaphors got weirder (green Taliban, regulatory jihadis), but the logic stayed the same: climate policy poses a threat not just to economic prosperity but national identity.
Which brings us to Part II, where things go from dumb to actively terrifying. Because the far right has started to adapt. Especially in places where denial doesn’t work, they’ve started repurposing the crisis for their own ends.
Pour yourself a drink. It gets worse from here. More espresso, more depresso.
Same Fear, Different Accent: Europe’s Far Right vs. the Climate
In Part I, we unpacked how the Green Scare narrative in the U.S. set the stage for a sprawling climate denial apparatus: think tanks, contrarian scientists, and a steady-stream of fossil-fuelled doubt.
Across the Atlantic, the Green Scare logic resurfaces frequently.
Germany’s AfD rails against mass unemployment and slams “pseudo-climate protection” as nothing less than “a program for the destruction of industry and jobs.” Across the continent, far-right leaders frame climate measures as elitist projects that punish “ordinary citizens” with higher fuel prices and heating costs, fuelling rural resentment and working-class backlash.
Besides economic woes, climate policy is positioned as a foreign imposition, a threat to national sovereignty: the AfD cries “Klimadiktatur”, accusing Brussels of “bypassing national parliaments”; Orbán calls EU climate policy an economic assault on Hungary; France’s National Rally denounces a green agenda crafted by others, for others.
Here, climate action becomes perfect fodder for the far right’s anti-EU sentiment — fuelling everything from scepticism to full-blown “-exit” campaigns. (France leaving the EU would be catastrophic for many reasons, but I personally would never recover from having to read the word “Frexit” on a daily basis.)
In all of this, the echo of the original Green Scare is unmistakable. Just as the American right once cast climate science as crypto-communist, the European right now casts it as a vehicle for economic sabotage, supranational control, and cultural erosion.
Green Is the New Brown: Econationalism and the ugliest rebrand in modern politics
However, over the past decade, a new development has taken hold among Europe’s far right — and to a lesser extent in the U.S. As the public is growing increasingly concerned about climate change (because, you know, things do be burning), the “it’s a Chinese hoax” school of thought has become a much harder sell. In Europe, for instance, a vast majority see climate change as a serious threat (77%).
So the far right has adopted a deliberately murky, two-track strategy: deny the science when it’s inconvenient, weaponise it when it’s useful.
The first trick in the eco-nationalist playbook is simple: reframe environmental protection as an act of nationalist loyalty. The land isn’t sacred because it’s part of a shared global ecosystem — it’s sacred because it’s ours. Patriotism becomes the test for environmental virtue, and if the land belongs to “us,” then by default, it’s degraded by “them.”
This rebrand (and, inarguably, massive glow-down) is most explicit among fringe parties, like the German party Der III. Weg, which openly runs slogans like “Umweltschutz ist Heimatschutz” (“Environmental protection is homeland protection”). But the same logic is echoed — more politely, more electorally — by established far-right parties across Europe.
In France, Marine Le Pen (who served as the leader of the far-right National Rally until she was convicted of embezzlement in March of this year), launched a “New Ecology” platform aimed at reclaiming environmentalism from the left:
“Environmentalism [is] the natural child of patriotism, because it’s the natural child of rootedness. If you’re a nomad, you’re not an environmentalist. Those who are nomadic … do not care about the environment; they have no homeland.”
Spain’s Vox calls for a “patriotic green” agenda that defends Spanish landscapes from cultural erosion. Germany’s AfD taps into Heimat nostalgia to paint environmentalism as a defence of national soul and soil. Austria’s FPÖ backs renewables, but only to “protect Austrian nature for Austrians.” In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom has deployed similar logic, blaming immigrants for environmental decline and depicting Dutch identity as under siege.
Across the pond, Arizona’s Republican attorney general sued the federal government in 2021 over its immigration policy — not on national security grounds, but environmental ones. The lawsuit bizarrely argued that immigrants “drive cars, purchase goods, and… result in the release of pollutants, carbon dioxide,” thus accelerating climate change.
In the econationalist logic, if nature can only be protected by “natives”, it follows that immigrants must be kept out. Scholars Joe Turner and Dan Bailey call this ecobordering. Reviewing 22 far-right parties across Europe, Turner and Bailey found this logic widespread, warning how it “portrays effects as causes and further normalises racist border practices and colonial amnesia within Europe.”
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And the argument doesn’t stop with who’s already here. Many far right parties have started to sparsely acknowledge climate change, only to frame it as a source of a future migration crisis. The AfD and Orbán’s Fidesz party, for example, have warned that drought and desertification in Africa would send shockwaves of migrants north.
I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day. The link between migration and rising (or even just expected) temperatures has long been established. But, true to form, the right’s solutions are about as useful as handing out pool noodles on the Titanic. Instead of cutting emissions or pursuing global cooperation, far-right parties call for fortified borders, national isolation, and reject recognising climate migrants as refugees, worried it might open yet another door for “them” to get in.
Blood, Soil, and Biodiversity
If you’ve made it this far and still have hope, allow me to fix that. Because what do you get when you take a burning planet, mix in some economic precarity, and blame it all on migrants — supposedly taking your jobs and ruining your sacred soil? Right. An absolute dumpsterfire.
Meet the final boss of the far-right’s climate radicalisation pipeline: ecofascism. Ecofascism can be defined as blaming “the demise of the environment on overpopulation, immigration, and over-industrialization, problems that followers believe could be partly remedied through mass murder of refugees in Western countries”. Less “save the planet,” more “purify it.”
At the core of this ideology is a modern remix of Malthusian thinking. Thomas Malthus, an 18th-century British cleric with a bad vibe and worse math, argued that population growth would inevitably outstrip food supply, and that the only fix was fewer births, ideally among the poor, non WASP-y population (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, short WASPs).
His theory has been debunked time and again by economists, but it just won’t die. Mostly because it offers a tidy, pseudoscientific excuse to say what many racists are already thinking: maybe the problem isn’t carbon. Maybe it’s just… too many brown people.
Today’s ecofascism has deep historic roots. In Nazi Germany, the 1935 Reichsnaturschutzgesetz, one of the first national conservation laws in the world, wasn’t just about conserving forests or regulating land use. It codified the concept of Blut und Boden (“Blood and Soil”), the mystical connection between the Aryan race and its territory.
This ideology drew from earlier völkisch movements that romanticised rural life while blaming cities, modernity, and especially Jews for social and ecological decay. But it wasn’t just fascists on the far right who used that trope: Stalin infamously coined the term “rootless cosmopolitans”, casting Jews as outsiders who undermine the spiritual bond between people and place.
And even the American environmentalist legacy we discussed in Part I has a not-so-hidden racist underbelly. The “wilderness ideal” of those early conservationists was an inherently white, male domain; a settler colonial fantasy of an “untouched and pure” land, empty of Native Peoples.
Roosevelt may have built national parks, but unsurprisingly, he also held some pretty racist beliefs. Madison Grant preserved the American bison but he was also into eugenics, race science, and defining who counted as “fit” to inherit the land. (Grant published a pseudo-scientific, white supremacist work that warns of the decline of the “Nordic” peoples. Unsurprisingly, one of Hitler’s favourite reads.)
4Chan Went Outside: Ecofascism as the endpoint of nationalist environmentalism
Turns out, “protecting nature” has always been a bit too easy to pair with “but only for the right people.” In The Rise of Ecofascism, Moore and Roberts describe how ecofascism today is not a unified movement but a constellation of online subcultures: doomsday preppers quoting Ted Kaczynski like scripture, nature-worshipping survivalists, trad guys with windchimes in the background talking about forest renewal and fertility rates in the same breath.
Ecofascist propaganda targets a demographic that is primarily white, male, and very online. It does so effectively because it offers something modern life doesn’t: moral clarity. A villain, a solution, and an aesthetic that makes even rage feel meaningful.
Researcher Maria Darwish shows just how insidiously these channels weaponise nature and “cuteness”: kittens, forest animals, children’s cartoons. In one meme, Hitler hand-feeds a deer. In another, slogans like “Plant more trees, save the seas, deport more refugees” are posted against sunsets and AK-47s. The goal isn’t to debate policy — it’s to trigger a feeling: that something sacred is being desecrated, and that desecration must be avenged.
“Der Führer als Tierfreund” — “The Führer as an animal lover”
Source: From Maria Darwish’s paper. The author pulls a bunch of memes, graphics, pictures from Telegram and other encrypted channels. I don’t want to get shadow banned for posting a lot of Nazi imagery, so if you want to see more, you can here.
But this isn’t just edgy content in the wilderness of the internet. Sometimes the line between soft-focus propaganda and hard-edged violence vanishes quickly.
The shooter who killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 called himself an “ethno-nationalist eco-fascist,” and called for “ethnic autonomy” as well as “the preservation of nature, and the natural order”, linking climate change to overpopulation by non-Europeans.
A few months later, a mass shooter in El Paso, Texas, claimed the environment was getting worse every year and the only solution was to “decrease the number of people in America using resources.” His manifesto was titled “The Inconvenient Truth,” a direct and cynical reference to Al Gore’s 2006 climate change documentary. Even the infamous QAnon Shaman, who stormed the Capitol (yes, the guy with the buffalo horns demanding organic food in prison), once attended climate marches and said he was fighting for “cleansed ecosystems.”
Far-right parties may not openly endorse this kind of violence, but their rhetoric draws the map. Across the U.S. and Europe, right-wing policymakers are increasingly moving from denying climate change to exploiting it, using environmental collapse not as a call to cut emissions, but to support their deeply racist, xenophobic anti-immigration agendas. They don’t call it ecofascism — they call it “cultural preservation” or “environmental realism.”
As Naomi Klein, author and ideological godmother of the Green New Deal movement, puts it:
“There is a rage out there that is going to go somewhere, and we have demagogues who are expert at directing that rage at the most vulnerable among us while protecting the most powerful and most culpable.”
This is the logical continuation of what we explored in Part I: the long-standing tendency to use environmental concern as a political Rorschach test, a canvas onto which ideological fears are projected. Where the American right once cast environmentalism as a communist plot, today’s far right rebrands it as a nationalist imperative. And as the climate crisis accelerates — bringing more fires, more floods, more migration — this narrative will only get more seductive.
To avoid ending on the most depressing note of all time, it’s worth saying this: just as there are bad responses to the climate crisis, there are also good ones. Across the U.S. and Europe, green policy frameworks, movements, and organisations are pushing for a different path — one that sees climate action not as a threat, but as a chance to build something fairer, more just, and frankly, more survivable. They may not always be as loud as the deniers. But they’re just as undeniable.
Anyway, good luck out there. Stay cool. Compost a fascist.
