Hard green

A buncha tree-huggers Environmentalism

Save the rainforests!

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Watch that carbon footprint!

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Hard green refers to a branch of the environmental movement that considers humans solely as a polluting influence on the environment, and claims that whatever action is needed to repair human-generated environmental damage should be undertaken without regard for the effect on humanity. Hard greens typically oppose any industrial, agricultural, or resource extraction activity at all, as well as any aspects of consumerism and shopping.

These views fall under vaguely developed philosophies such as "biocentrism," which views all life as central to the planet, claiming "equal rights for all species" and opposing the view of human society as central. While it is hard to say how many people actually feel this way (probably quite a bit fewer than wingnuts claim exist), the existence of groups such as the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement and of ecoterrorism activities testify that there are at least a few who do.

This has virtually nothing to do with effective or sensible environmentalism and more to do with extremism.

Click to embiggen.

At the bookstore[edit]

Between hard greens and anti-environmentalists, finding useful information in the ecology section of any bookstore may as well be a snipe hunt. Hard green beliefs acquired a certain radical chic mystique among hip intellectuals during the 1990s because of several writers' and numerous celebrities' adoption of hard green philosophies and activism. One of the big influences was Edward Abbey, whose writings, rooted in the National Park Service ranger culture of the postwar era, have often been pointed to as a progenitor to later radical environmentalism, especially with his 1975 novel The Monkey-Wrench Gang, his provocative and outrageous tone, and his themes of conflict between personal liberty and technological advancement and modern society. It was only after his death in 1989, however, that the personality cult of Abbey-as-prophet arose, peaking in the mid-1990s. This has caused a steady output of hard green philosophy hitting the bookshelves, and conversely, led to a rash of environmental denialism books in response. The two extremes seem to feed off each other and leave the sane, scientific center getting somewhat less attention than perhaps it should.

Peakniks and doomers[edit]

Books making drastic claims of impending doom and disaster unless humanity drastically reduces its activity or population are perennial favorites in the environmental section, and most such predictions made in the past have turned out to be premature or inaccurate. A partial list of predictions that have not come to pass could begin with the opinions of Thomas Malthus; in the modern era, The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich and The Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome should be mentioned (although many scientists agree that human population growth is causing problems to the world's homeostasis). Dozens of recent books of the same sort can be found in the ecology section today. While often risible in their content, they do real harm by confusing public discourse on environmental issues. When a doomsday prophecy fails to materialize, deniers can seize the opportunity to slander authentic scientists. A common trend among doomers themselves is to attack climate scientists, claiming they're suppressing the truth to downplay how doomed the world really is.

The peak oil theory has become an apocalyptic fad at present, spawning a cottage industry of scary books predicting the end of civilization-as-we-know-it. The terms "peaknik" and "doomer" refer to believers who are in no way optimistic about the prospects for the future, and expect widespread starvation, ecological collapse, and economic collapse to sweep the earth shortly. Peak oil is often combined with an excessively pessimistic view of both overpopulation and global warming, and "peak-everything-else" theories like "peak coal" and "peak uranium". Some peakniks have turned to survivalism, others to radical hard-green views that not only declare civilization irreversibly corrupted, but assert that this outcome is just. Others take it even further to suggest that humanity was damned from the moment it discovered fire.^[1] Notable doomer and peaknik authors include Albert Bartlett, James Howard Kunstler, Paul Roberts, Guy McPherson, Richard Heinberg, Paul Kingsnorth (Dark Mountain Project), Carlos Taibo (and basically most of Iberian current environmentalism) and Jem Bendell. Jorgen Randers is an interesting case as, though he thinks civilizational collapse would be a tragedy, he does not think it is possible for us to avoid that fate either.^[2] Support would also be likely in the comments section of any Guardian article about climate change. Pentti Linkola, an unusual doomer, goes one step further by actively hoping for the collapse of civilization (basically like the most recent anarcho-primitivist claims). Roy Scranton, author of books with lovely titles such as We're Doomed, Now What? and Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, has also got into several Twitter slapfights, including with actual climate scientists, and responses to him nicely illustrate the delusions of grandeur doomers like him exude.^[3][4]

Deep ecology[edit]

"Deep ecology" (DE) is one variant of hard green philosophy with the term DE being coined by Arne Næss, a Norwegian environmental philosopher, in 1973, partially inspired by Felix Guattari and further elaborated by George Sessions and Bill Devall in their 1985 book of the same name.

DE has itself branched out into more or less cranky versions with Næss' being a rather vague "we should care about nature" approach unlikely to scare away even mainstream politicians, but couched in language that could easily be interpreted in far more radical ways. Thus other, more extreme versions of DE incorporate a hodgepodge^[5] of vaguely Oriental mysticism, spirituality, appeals to nature, hardcore Malthusianism, the Gaia hypothesis and, to put it bluntly, the belief that human beings are equal in value to the rest of Mother Earth's children, including rabid possums, spiders, slime molds, polio and the AIDS virus.^[6] Making all species equal would do nothing but destroy any concepts of human rights that have been developed and fought for over the past few centuries, because killing a human would be morally equated to eating a peanut butter sandwich (Think of the poor peanuts!). However, even extreme DE advocates are not necessarily vegetarians or vegans and eat meat, seeing this as part of the "natural order", fetishizing biodiversity but not caring about the individual rights of humans or animals. As for their attitudes to technology, deep ecologists may or may not be out-and-out Luddites, but even the former can have more than a hint of Luddism, including just asking questions about the benefits of technology and expressing a patent distaste for "unnatural" technological solutions.^[7]

Among the unsavoury aspects of the crankier subsets of DE are their adherents' support for misanthropic and racist ideas such as top-down enforced population control.^[6][8] Though these DE adherents may be rather vague about how this would happen in practice, it still puts their ideas where the far left wraps around and meets the far right.^[9] "Eco-nazi" is actually a fitting slur for such versions of DE when you consider that, despite the fact that First World countries use many times more resources per capita,^[10] DE proponent Bill Devall said that a population decline needs to happen in Third World countries.^[6] Similarly, David Foreman, founder of Earth First! suggested that we should "allow Ethiopians to starve"^[6] in order to reduce human numbers for the good of Gaia.

By contrast, the Næss version of DE simply advocates family planning which, while a laudable strategy for a host of reasons wholly unrelated to ecology (deep or otherwise), smacks more than a little of Sunday school environmentalism, since family planning doesn't appear likely to bring about any substantial population decline in the foreseeable future, but merely a less steep increase in world population. However, given the recent panic in the West, even in countries with very expansive welfare programs and low cost of childrearing, about low birth rates, it seems like Næss might've had a point.

Among the DE proponents who take a more spiritual(ist) approach which shades into the Gaia hypothesis is the Australian rainforest activist John Seed who runs large group awareness training seminars incorporating rebirthing (he calls it "re-earthing") and similar New Age practices which are supposed to help attendees break through their human-centered attitudes and become one with the planet! Something similar can be said about some prominent ecofeminists, such as Caroline Merchant or Starhawk, with special fixation against the scientific method (in favour of a new age/neo-pagan approach with gender-essentialist tropes).

We'll mine and log the other planets later[edit]

"Earth First!" (with the obligatory exclamation point) was an early and vigorous proponent of deep ecology philosophy. It was founded in the early 1980s by five former lobbyists from mainstream environmental groups who felt those groups and the U.S. government had sold out wilderness preservation during the RARE II (Roadless Area Review and Evaluation) process during the Carter administration as well as earlier during the Glen Canyon Dam debacle of the early 1960s.^[11] The group cultivated a reputation that was, at least at first, more hard-line than they actually were,^{[note 1]} said reputation attracted a bevy of supporters who were even harder green than the founders, with the result that the founding members had mostly left for more mainstream pastures by 1990.^{[note 2]}

Earth First!'s influence probably peaked in 1990 with a large media/protest event called "Redwood Summer," protesting logging in northern California. After that, the group largely fell apart in infighting, and attracted an even more radical fringe element, mostly anarchists, who caused the cycle to repeat itself again and drove out those who in 1990 had driven out the original founders. The group still exists today but is decidedly irrelevant.

A conspiracy theory popular on the right-wing is that Earth First! was founded by and secretly funded by mainstream environmental groups (e.g. the Audubon Society and the Wilderness Society) in order to make them look tame and reasonable by comparison.

The Earth Liberation Front is a group who feel Earth First! still isn't militant enough, and practice ecoterrorism, usually arson. Their most infamous action was the 1998 arson of the Vail, Colorado ski area, to prevent what they felt would be destruction of the lynx habitat.

Vigilantes on the high seas[edit]

Greenpeace may or may not qualify as hard green, depending on who you ask. However, Sea Shepherd, founded by a former Greenpeace co-founder who left or was expelled (depending on who you ask) in a dispute over Greenpeace's non-violence policy, definitely is one. Sea Shepherd fights whaling and seal hunting, not in the courts nor by appealing to international agencies, but by direct action, in this case ramming and scuttling the ships in question. These vigilante actions take place on the high seas and Sea Shepherd claims they are acting under the color of international law; Japan, the country of origin for most of the ships scuttled and rammed, vehemently disagrees.

Predictably, Sea Shepherd leader Paul Watson proclaims a "biocentric" and "deep ecology" philosophy and that their actions are justified based on dangers to the world's fisheries. He also claims to have had telepathic communication from a whale he was saving back when he was still with Greenpeace, which imparted to him his life's mission of defending the oceans.^{[note 3]} Watson and Sea Shepherd were, of course, parodied (or satirized, depending who you ask) by South Park.^[12]

Anarcho-primitivism[edit]

Another such hard green philosophy is a combination of anarchism with a belief that the industrial and agricultural revolutions must be undone, with society returning to a hunter-gatherer state of nature. This is most prevalent on the west coast of the United States, especially in places like Eugene, Oregon and Arcata, California. Some of them are just nutty kids who take silly butterfly pseudonyms and spend months sitting in trees protesting logging, or show their opposition to modern technology by adopting freeganism or some variation of the paleo diet,^{[note 4]} hopping freight trains for their transportation and squatting in abandoned or foreclosed houses, all of which are modern technology.

As with every fringe tendency, anarcho-primitivism has its serious philosophers and academics. John Zerzan^[14] is particularly influential here. Live Wild Or Die, an infrequently published newspaper started circa 1988-89 by some former Earth First! activists who felt Earth First! was too conservative and stifling anarchist participation in the movement, had an anarcho-primitivist orientation, and anarcho-primitivist ideas have gotten considerable space in such anarchist periodicals as Fifth Estate^[15] and Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed,^[16] influencing anarchism as a whole to some degree. Primitivist thought is part of the stew making up "insurrectionary anarchism," and the "post-left anarchism" of Bob Black. Its influence found its way into the vegan straight edge punk scene as well, with outfits like the "metalcore" band Earth Crisis espousing ecotage and the dismantling of civilization in their lyrics,^[17] all while jamming on electric instruments. Vegan Reich and the Hardline movement^[18] took this further into oblivion with religious asceticism and hyper-puritanical morality.^[19] Curiously, many anarcho-primitivists don't seem to have a problem using digital technology and the Internet, while those anarchists who do make a point of refusing to use computers at all on ethical grounds, such as The Match publisher Fred Woodworth, seem to hold very little truck with anarcho-primitivism.^[20]

Unabomber[edit]

The Unabomber (Theodore Kaczynski) was not really affiliated with anarcho-primitivism per se, but advocated a similar return to a primitive society without technology. His manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future^[21] was based more on psychology than ecology, and had more in common with radical traditionalism and libertarianism of the "rugged individualist" variety than any sort of environmentalism. In fact, the first section of his manifesto is devoted to a discussion of what he considered the "psychopathology" of the modern left, among which he included "animal rights and environmental activists".

For some odd reason, he is often lumped in with hard greens due to tenuous similarities. Claims from conspiracy theorists that he was working hand-in-hand with Earth First! or ecoterrorist groups are not well-established, and there is little beyond circumstantial evidence to support this claim.^[22] Ted had communicated with anarcho-primitivists such as John Zerzan in the past, but he disagreed with many tendencies and ideas of the anarcho-primitivist movement, and wrote some pretty good arguments dispelling a lot of their delusions (though again, wrapped up in his own mythmaking about primitive society being a land of freedom).^[23]

Misanthropy and human rights abuses[edit]

At the ludicrous extreme are those who advocate (as opposed to merely predicting, which is bad enough) a mass die-off of humans in the name of defending the planet. The most notorious and noxious of these was probably Finnish philosopher Pentti Linkola, who was sort of the Fred Phelps of the environmental movement, issuing statements celebrating people dying in mass disasters as progress toward lessening humanity's destructive influence on the planet.^[24] The radical environmental group Deep Green Resistance, which calls for militant action aimed at the destruction of industrial civilization, has outright admitted that "the mass of civilized people will never be on our side" and that a mass die-off of humans would be the logical end result of their primitivist program, and as such has been accused of endorsing mass murder.^[25][26]

U.S. environmentalist Garrett Hardin advocated a just-barely-toned-down version of the same thing, which he termed "lifeboat ethics." Believing the planet's resources were limited with not enough to go around, he advocated the rich countries (which he likened to "lifeboats") cut off all aid to poor countries and let "nature" (in this case, mass starvation) run its course. (The fact that the rich countries are, in fact, simultaneously playing a disproportionate role in environmental destruction and insulated from its worst effects seems to have been lost on him.) Hardin's chief influence on the mainstream ecology movement as a whole came with his 1968 essay "The Tragedy of the Commons",^[27] but his lifeboat ethics has been highly controversial and led to some rather extreme positions finding their way into the Cornucopian vs. Malthusian debate.^[28]

The 1968 book The Population Bomb by Paul and Anne Ehrlich advanced a similar view, predicting famine and societal collapse in the next twenty years if population control measures were not taken immediately, with suggestions ranging from incentives for sterilization to cutting off food aid to developing countries (the Ehrlichs cited India specifically as a case study in unchecked population growth). This book not only led to a generation of human rights abuses in the name of "population control", from forced sterilization to China's one-child policy,^[29] it also led to the convergence of the interests of environmentalists and nativists in the '70s and '80s. John Tanton, the godfather of the US' modern anti-immigration movement, first came up through the Sierra Club and Zero Population Growth before turning to nativism due to fears of overpopulation.^[30] Edward Abbey also wrote in the essay "Immigration and Liberal Taboos" (collected in his 1988 book One Life at a Time, Please) that most immigrants were "hungry, ignorant, unskilled, and culturally-morally-generically impoverished" and brought with them an "alien way of life", and that the US needed to close its borders to protect the environment and its "open, spacious, uncrowded, and beautiful" society lest it turn into Latin America.^[31] Ironically, while birth rates did rapidly decline starting in the late 20th century, it was not through any effort on the part of governments to fight overpopulation. The Ehrlichs wrote The Population Bomb before the concept of the demographic transition, the phenomenon of nations' birth rates naturally falling to replacement levels or lower once they hit a certain level of wealth and development, was well understood.

Ecofascism[edit]

Ecofascism is this taken to its most extreme conclusion: the mixture of green politics with the far-right, often with a wholehearted embrace of the most totalitarian aspects of fascism.^[33] To ecofascists, the liberal ideals of individualism and human rights encourage overpopulation and wasteful consumption, and therefore, a heavy, authoritarian hand is necessary to bring society in line and "cull the excess population". The mainstream environmental movement is seen as having sold out to the left, refusing to confront the "real problem" of there being too many people and instead seeking to use the teeming masses as its power base. Much like regular fascism, ecofascism is often quite vigorously racist, with a love of the natural world tied to ethnic identity in a "blood and soil" fashion while non-white and Jewish people are seen as "parasites" who, lacking any attachment to the places in which they live, destroy the natural world out of selfishness.^[34][24]

Marine Le Pen, head of the far-right National Rally party in France, is possibly the leading example of this mix of environmentalism, identitarianism, and localism, having stated that "borders are the environment's greatest ally", that she wants to make Europe the "world's leading ecological civilization", and that only a people rooted in the land can have a true ecological ethic while "nomadic" people (i.e. immigrants and jet-setting "(((globalists)))") inherently lack such, while also using animal rights as a cudgel against the halal food industry and fear of American agribusiness and GMOs as a nationalist talking point. This is a far cry from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who denied the existence of human-induced climate change and dismissed environmentalism as solely the domain of limousine liberals.^[35] Similar views can be found throughout Europe, where several political parties exist such as the Nouvelle Droite (or European New Right) of Alain de Benoist, the "Third Way" in the United Kingdom (a "green" splinter from the neo-fascist National Front), the Ökologisch-Demokratische Partei (Ecological Democratic Party, a right-wing splinter from the German Green Party), and groups espousing third positionism. The closest example of this from the U.S. is probably Virginia Abernethy, a Vanderbilt University professor who is both a widely cited expert on population and ecology and a self-avowed white separatist.^[36] Another American example would be the Wolves of Vinland, a group of Norse neopagans who have been described both as "eco-punks" and as white nationalists.

The mixture of ecological ideas and far-right nationalism has gone on more or less since the emergence of both. Ernst Haeckel, who coined the term "ecology" in 1867, was also an enthusiastic promoter of scientific racism and a firm believer in the superiority of the Nordic people who sought to apply contemporary biological ideas to humanity, which he viewed as just one component of a wider ecosystem with a clear place in its natural hierarchy. The Völkisch movement in late 19th century Germany fused nature mysticism with ethnocentrism, seeking to bring Germans "back to nature" towards the ways of their ancestors and away from a modern urban industrial lifestyle that they perceived as decadent. The Völkisch movement was very influential on the National Socialist German Workers' Party, which (in propaganda, at least) placed a strong value on nature, the environment, and animals as part of the heritage of the Aryan race and felt that destroying the environment left a rootless people detached from their ravaged land, all while their policy of lebensraum emphasized creating a new rural frontier in Eastern Europe where, after it was cleared of its original inhabitants, German settlers could recultivate their ties to the soil. The propaganda slogan "blood and soil", in fact, was originally coined by the Völkisch movement before it was co-opted by the Nazis. However, this combination of vitalism and romantic traditionalism was in competition with a vision dominated by an emphasis on modern industrial manufacturing that would ultimately win out in Nazi Germany, due to the practical need to make lots of guns, tanks, warships, and airplanes in preparation for war. So, rather than an Arcadian vision of some sort of rural and artisanal idyll with reinvented guilds and restored medieval hierarchies, Nazi Germany would double down on mass production in collaboration with the captains of industry. The hard green version did not entirely disappear from the broader ideological debate, however, and thus Savitri Devi, an avowed Nazi sympathizer before the war and a neo-Nazi afterward, espoused animal rights, argued that animal slaughterhouses were worse than Nazi war crimes, and claimed that the Jews had destroyed the harmony of nature by elevating humanity above all other species.^[24]

In August 2017, the drama miniseries Manhunt: Unabomber premiered on the Discovery Channel, causing a renewed interested in Theodore Kaczynski and his philosophy.^[37] As a result, a faction of the alt-right has now started embracing ecofascism, going by "pine tree gang" on Twitter and liking what Kaczynski has to say about leftists.^[38] Their beef with modernity has more to do with multiculturalism than anything else. They advocate that everyone should live on the land their ancestors gave them, a funny claim to make for a bunch of white people living in North America. Among the most prominent figures is Mike Ma, who embodies all the worst tropes of the alt-right millennial: after being a Vine celebrity, Mike became a Breitbart journalist, but now he is a self-described accelerationist and ecofascist.^[28] There also exists a subsection of neo-Nazis that follow ecofascism and use the Algiz rune (a Norse rune appropriated by the original Nazis) as their symbol alongside tree, earth, or mountain emojis.^[39]

Ecofascism has been especially influential on the more terroristic and "direct action" oriented strains of the far right. One now notorious example of an avowed ecofascist is Brenton Harrison Tarrant, the Australia-born shooter behind the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand that killed 51 people and injured 50 more. In his manifesto The Great Replacement (named after the French far-right theory of the same name by writer Renaud Camus), he declared that he was "an Ethno-nationalist, Eco-fascist" in addition to being "a racist" and a "kebab removalist" (in reference to a Serbian Yugoslav Wars song bashing Bosniak Muslims). Patrick Crusius, the white supremacist who killed 23 people and injured 23 more in a shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, also titled his manifesto The Inconvenient Truth after Al Gore's documentary on climate change, and freely mixed anti-capitalist and environmentalist stances with rabidly anti-Latino xenophobia, ranting about hordes of Mexicans stripping America's natural environment bare. The aesthetic of "terrorwave", which glorifies terrorist violence, has also cropped up frequently in ecofascist circles.^[24][28]

Other uses[edit]

The term "hard green" is used in a different sense by Peter Huber of the loopy think tank, the Manhattan Institute, who advocates in his 1999 book Hard Green that a distinction be made between what he terms "soft green" issues (such as global warming, organic food, and opposition to pesticides), and what he terms "hard green" issues (mainly, setting aside open space and wildlife habitat, and active management of public lands.) His distinction between the two seems to play on a bit of an appeal to masculinity. "Soft green," to Huber, is the wonky, wimpy environmentalism of those who obsess over such things as their carbon footprint, traces of PCBs in the environment, or whether their coffee is organic and shade grown. Huber's "hard green" is land conservation, period, and it is done because we can and because we want to for aesthetic reasons, not because of any ethical mandate to. Huber invokes Theodore Roosevelt throughout this "conservative manifesto" for the environment, as an ideal of "hard green," and Al Gore as the archetypal "soft green." His book was an apparent attempt to get political conservatives on board with at least some environmental protection (wilderness and wildlife habitat), while simultaneously slamming Gore and most of the mainstream environmental community for prioritizing what he thinks are non-issues. His book got some attention when published,^[40] but in terms of actual influence proved to be a dud, as neoconservatives during the Bush era did not seem to be interested in any environmental protection whatsoever. Most environmentalists and scientists categorize Huber's book as a denialist book, due to his poo-pooing of just about every other environmental issue other than land conservation.^[41]

See also[edit]

• Animal rights
• Anti-nuclear movement
• Car-free movement
• Gaia hypothesis
• Watermelon

Notes[edit]

References[edit]