The Völkisch Origins of Environmentalism

A few helpful insights, courtesy of fellow historian Stefan Rindlisbacher

Today, we’ll enquire into the history of the ‘green’ movement after the Second World War, courtesy of fellow historian Stefan Rindlisbacher and Die Presse.

As always, translation and emphases mine, as are the bottom lines.

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The New Right Is Turning Green Again

Are environmental protection and right-wing conservatism mutually exclusive? No, emphasise actors like Björn Höcke (AfD)

By Cornelia Grobner, Die Presse, 12 April 2024 [source (paywalled)]

Since the end of the Second World War, right-wing extremists have been trying to anchor their blood-and-soil ideology in nature and environmental protection. A Swiss researcher traces continuities in German-speaking countries.

After the Second World War, National Socialists almost seamlessly connected their ideas to the German-speaking environmental protection movements. At the end of the 1980s, their endeavours were forgotten. ‘But for a few years now, the New Right has been trying to pick up on these ideas again and make an offer to right-wing conservative environmentalists,’ says Stefan Rindlisbacher from the University of Bern. The historian spent two years researching the history of the ecological New Right in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland; in this, he was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and spent time at the University of Vienna and the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam. On Friday, he presented some of his findings at the 15th Austrian Contemporary History Conference at the University of Graz.

When Environmentalism Became a Left Issue

In Graz, Rindlisbacher focussed on the beginning of a new environmental awareness in the 1970s, when the environmental movement became a mass phenomenon and right-wing conservatives wanted to claim the issue for themselves. He emphasises that the warnings from anti-fascists against the ‘brown pied pipers in environmentalist garb’ were urgent at the time. The battle over the political orientation of environmental protection was correspondingly fierce—because the accused saw themselves as the only ‘true’ ecologists and felt they had been unjustly defamed. ‘The debate disappeared from public perception after the right-wing actors were successfully pushed out of the emerging green parties.’

In his research, Rindlisbacher traced continuities between right-wing extremism and environmental protection since the post-war period. In the beginning, there was a nature conservation movement that wanted to preserve demarcated spaces, certain forest areas, or specific river courses. ‘In the fifties and sixties, this transitioned into environmental protection, where people became convinced that it was not only necessary to protect something locally, but entire ecosystems’, he explains. ‘The right-wingers are part of this transition.’ Ideologically, he does not see any significant differences between the national groups; these would only become apparent in the historical context. One thing is certain: many German and Austrian representatives of the ecological right in the post-war period were active National Socialists, some of whom were already active in the völkisch movement and practised nature conservation there. Closely linked to this: eugenics and biopolitics.

Lorenz’s Fears of Degeneration

Even among the nature conservation and homeland protection pioneers around 1900, there would have been those who subscribed to a blood-and-soil ideology. Rindlisbacher:

According to this, a certain population is naturally connected to an existing landscape and only they can thrive here. All other people are excluded. This leads to a desire to protect this idealised nature.

An endeavour that could not last long during the Nazi era, however— overshadowed by the war economy. [quite a stunning argument, which betrays the lack of enquiry by both Rindlisbacher and Die Presse—as Burton Klein showed long ago (Harvard/MIT Press, 1959), there was little military spending by Germany until spring 1939]

Rindlisbacher mentions Konrad Lorenz (1903-89) and Günther Schwab (1904-2006) as prominent ecological right-wing figures in Austria in an interview with Die Presse. ‘The behavioural scientist Lorenz was active in National Socialism and took many ideas from there with him, which has only been realised in the last 20 years,’ he says:

Typical for him is the idea of degeneration, the defence against a liberal society and a progressive mindset. He interprets this as the cause of social and moral decline, but also of health, biological and genetic decline.

In the 1960s, nuclear energy was added as a new threat, and in this context Lorenz succeeded in bringing old fears of degeneration into the [left or right? Neither Rindlisbacher nor Die Presse say] environmental protection movement.

Rindlisbacher analysed Günther Schwab’s role in the ecological New Right primarily on the basis of his estate in the Literature Archive of the Austrian National Library. In his book Der Tanz mit dem Teufel [The Dance with the Devil], published in 1958, he addresses environmental problems such as pesticides, air and water pollution, and deforestation of the rainforest, which had not been on the radar until then [i.e., a wee bit before Silent Spring (1962)]: ‘Schwab linked the new environmental concerns with the old blood-and-soil thinking.’

Health as a Racist Idea

According to the Swiss historian, the public health ideas of the 1920s and 1930s, which were orientated towards nature and came from the life reform [orig. Lebensreform] movement, were transported most strongly into the present. ‘This was a collective movement of vegetarianism, naturopathy, alternative medicine, and free-body culture with a back-to-nature impulse,’ says Rindlisbacher. ‘Health is something you can work for by living the “right” way.’ Those who do not bow to the supposed laws of nature will degenerate and decay. [hi there, vegans]

Politically, that’s very connectable. In the far right, the pursuit of purity and health is linked to racism and anti-Semitism and transferred from the individual to a collective. [on the ‘left’, it is linked to a ‘common humanity’ and exclusionary practices and also collectivist]

The focus is not on the individual doing good for themselves:

Everything is extended to an imagined “race” [‘humanity’] that is to be kept intact. It’s about creating a homogeneous ethnic community [of like-minded people] that lives a healthy life and is related to German nature [Gaia being fine].

Right-wing extremist groups such as the Identitarians or Junge Tat and parties such as the AfD [note the media spin that everything of ‘the Right’ is, therefore, ‘extremist’] are currently trying to pick up this thread again. Rindlisbacher has been observing this since 2008 and the rise of climate protection. In Germany, Götz Kubitschek, publisher of the magazine Sezession, started this, and for a few years now the topic has also been discussed in the decidedly ecological magazine Die Kehre [lit. Hairpin Bend]: ‘The who’s who of the New Right writes here.’ They are trying to reactivate right-wing conservative nature and environmental protection. ‘This is intended to replace climate protection, which is framed as left-wing and is also associated with degeneration.’

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Bottom Lines

Full disclosure—I’ve met Stefan Rindlisbacher a couple of times back in 2018, and we spent a few hours discussing many things. His above-related work commenced thereafter, hence I’m unsure how he put it together (apart from curiosity). See his faculty page.

In a different piece, available here courtesy of the Internet Archive, he explained his interest in the following way:

Ecology and Right-Wing Extremism: Lacunae in Historical Research

The episodes from the coronavirus pandemic…shed light on a problem that was last much discussed in the 1980s and 1990s during the founding of the first green parties…nature and environmental protection, alternative lifestyles and diets, alternative medicine, esotericism, and physical culture are not only topics of a democratic, solidarity-oriented civil society, but can also have authoritarian, exclusionary traits…

While the social and political sciences have been dealing with right-wing extremist activities in the areas of environmental protection, health, and esotericism for decades, historical research into this topic remains a research desideratum…although the history of ecological concerns in nationalist, fascist, and National Socialist movements was intensively researched for the period before 1945, there is a lack of comparable studies for the second half of the 20th century. On the one hand, this is due to the fact that the contemporary history of the extreme right is still insufficiently researched and has only increasingly become the focus of historical scholarship in recent years. On the other hand, the lack of research interest can be explained by the fact that nature and environmental protection issues have been regarded as typically left-wing concerns since the 1980s and the role of right-wing actors has therefore been overlooked or ignored.

During the coronavirus pandemic, this gap in research meant that the historical categorisation of opponents of the mandates remained mostly superficial. While the political and social sciences debated at length about how to explain the unusual coexistence of green-alternative and far-right positions, little differentiated consideration was given to whether comparable constellations had existed in the past. Due to the confusing research situation, journalistic articles attempted to explain the historical predecessors of the opponents of the mandates with a potpourri of esotericism, anthroposophy, naturopathy, Wandervogel and life reform. Unfortunately, this contributed little to a better understanding of the coronavirus protests.

I’ll stop quoting from that other piece by Rindlisbacher here, for it might warrant a separate posting. (If you’d like to read it, let me know in the comments). He is, however, correct when he points to the farcical repetition of this alliance of left-right-ish anti-mandate protesters so often discussed in these pages.

While I readily acknowledge this, we must also consider the implications: what, or which themes, might allow for the positive transcendence of perceived or real ideological positions?

‘Climate Change™’ and ‘Environmentaliom™’—I’m using the trade-marked version here to indicate the (GO)NGO-ified, corporate versions—while mainstreamed, are not genuine, ‘organic’ movements.

What made the anti-mandate protests ‘work’ across these ideological boundaries (blinders) appears to be their ‘organic’ nature (no pun intended). It had shared values (bodily autonomy, the sovereign individual) and shared concerns (state overreach, technocracy), as well as pointed to certain like-mindedness in terms of shared, if individual, spiritual/transcendent roots.

Of course, given the kind of careerist, ignorant sell-outs attracted by corporate businesses and corporatised ‘government’ services alike, it is obvious that this multi-variate constellation could not be correctly by perceived, much less anticipated.

Hence, the arrogant, top-heavy, and condescending agit-prop (‘anti-vaxxers’, ‘anti-Science™’, ‘Covid deniers’, or ‘Granny killers’)—for none of the careerist, ignorant sell-outs attracted by corporate businesses and corporatised ‘government’ understood the mish-mash of esoteric, spiritist, theosophic, and partially spiritual considerations that underpinned the anti-mandate protests.

This is also why it’s so hard to maintain the post-mandate momentum for these movements, as the one uniting force (the Covid mandates) is no longer there. Sure, the absence of any kind of reckoning or even an honest apology is bad, but as long as the careerist, ignorant sell-outs attracted by corporate businesses and corporatised ‘government’ services aren’t bringing back a new WHO-declared, so-called ‘Pandemic™’, the powers-that-be are probably going to be o.k.

Now, if I’m right in my above analysis, we’ll probably soon find out…