Environmentalism Is Racism

Eric Englund
Lew Rockwell.com
Tuesday, Oct 21, 2008

The desire to subordinate people to organic nature led directly to racism. "The ‘scientific’ element of racialism can be traced back to Haeckel," writes the philosopher Karl Popper. Haeckel, as Robert Jay Lifton observes, in part quoting the historian George L. Mosse, "a towering figure in German biology and an early Darwinian, was also a racist, a believer in a mystical Volk, and a strong advocate of eugenics who ‘can be claimed to be a direct ancestor’ of the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ project." Indeed, as Daniel Gasman calls "Germany’s major prophet of political biology," someone who contributed significantly to the development of Nazi ideology: "The writings of Haeckel and the ideas of his followers…were proto-Nazi in character, and (as) one of the most powerful forces in nineteenth and twentieth-century German intellectual history, may be fully understood as a prelude to the doctrine of National Socialism."

"We do not need to strain at gnats to show there was a strain of ecological ideas among Nazis: the evidence is ample," writes Bramwell. As the historian Robert A. Pois observes, National Socialism was "a religion of nature," which called for the establishment of a utopian community, the Volksgemeinschaft, rooted in a perceived natural order." Throughout Hitler’s political career, writes Pois, "he would continually emphasize the importance of recognizing nature’s power over man. He scoffed at the notion of humans ever having the ability to ‘control’ or ‘rule over’ nature…Hitler sounded remarkably like contemporary environmentalists who, with ample reason, proclaim that a sharp-tempered Mother Nature… will eventually avenge herself upon those who, at least since the onset of industrialization, have tried her patience." He believed in "the sanctity of nature."

Indeed, Nazism was based largely on biological theory. As Hitler’s confidant Rudolph Hess insisted, the movement was nothing more than "applied biology" for restoring the "vitality of the German race." It sought "biological renewal" through building, said Heinrich Himmler’s legal aide, Werner Best, an "organically indivisible national community." And those who opposed these goals merely revealed themselves to be "the symptom of an illness which threatens the healthy unity of the…national organism."

Decrying man’s alienation from nature, many Nazi thinkers – among whom can be counted the philosopher Martin Heidegger – opposed what they saw as unnatural and decadent modern living. Heidegger complained that "technological domination spreads itself over the earth ever more quickly, ruthlessly, and completely…The humanness of man and the thingness of things dissolve into the calculated market value of a market which…spans the earth." Likewise, the Nazis blamed capitalists for driving farmers off the land and into towns in an effort to obtain cheap labor, thus undermining rural culture and promoting factory farms that used poisonous synthetic chemicals. Reestablishing the connection with nature, they believed, required crushing unnatural, non-German values. Private property had to be abolished, since it promoted commercialism, consumerism, and urbanization. Forests and wildlife, symbolizing Germany’s pre-Roman past, had to be preserved.

Therefore, soon after seizing power in 1933, the Third Reich launched a ruralization program to create a new more, primitive Germany. Subdivisions and private property were declared illegal. Vivisection was banned, and Hitler’s Germany became the first European country to establish nature preserves. In 1940 hedgerow and copse protection ordinances were passed "to protect the habitat of wildlife."

• Jacques-Yves Cousteau, environmentalist and documentary maker: "It’s terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized, and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn’t even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable."
• John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal: "I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems."
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University population biologist: "We’re at 6 billion people on the Earth, and that’s roughly three times what the planet should have. About 2 billion is optimal."
• David Foreman, founder of Earth First!: "Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental."
• David M. Graber, research biologist for the National Park Service: "It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."
• Alexander King, founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome: "My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem."
• Merton Lambert, former spokesman for the Rockefeller Foundation: "The world has a cancer, and that cancer is man."
• Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh, leader of the World Wildlife Fund: "If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels."
• Maurice Strong, U.N. environmental leader: "Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?"
• Ted Turner, CNN founder, UN supporter, and environmentalist: "A total population of 250–300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal."
• Paul Watson, a founder of Greenpeace: "I got the impression that instead of going out to shoot birds, I should go out and shoot the kids who shoot birds."

One thing is certain: Crimes against humanity are the product of an ideology that reduces people not to a universal but to a particular condition, be it biological, racial, or sociohistorical. By means of propaganda, the Communists succeeded in making people believe that their conduct had universal implications, relevant to humanity as a whole. Critics have often tried to make a distinction between Nazism and Communism by arguing that the Nazi project had a particular aim, which was nationalist and racist in extreme, whereas Lenin’s project was universal. This is entirely wrong. In both theory and practice, Lenin and his successors excluded from humanity all capitalists, the bourgeoisie, counterrevolutionaries, and others, turning them into absolute enemies in their sociological and political discourse. Kautsky noted as early as 1918 that these terms were entirely elastic, allowing those in power to exclude whomever they wanted from humanity whenever they so wished. These were the terms that led directly to crimes against humanity.

To do this, we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. This "double ethical bind" we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.