Introduction

On 13 January 2020, we first put pen to paper for this book. Our argument felt clear and horrifying: as climate systems broke down, the centre of political normalcy would collapse, and people would find themselves looking for more drastic solutions. The escalating climate crisis would provide opportunities to all parts of the far right. Seductive neo-Malthusian arguments about overpopulation would bolster hardline security policies and borders, and give seemingly compelling justification for the radical deepening of racist politics in the Global North. The cultural tropes of uncleanliness, pollution and pestilence, which for centuries dictated the hierarchy of different people's places within, and access to, nature, would become more potent as people once again encountered the natural world as their antagonist. The interests of capital would swing behind authoritarian governments as a means to protect profits and growth. While we disagreed with some who had said that 'ecofascism' would be a direct and unavoidable consequence of climate breakdown, we thought such a project couldn't entirely be ruled out.

On the day we began to write, 41 people were in a serious condition in a hospital in Wuhan, China, their lungs filled with a strange form of pneumonia, caused by a virus which did not yet have a name. In a matter of months, what came to be known as COVID-19 spread across the world, and some of the social stressors we had envisaged occurring with the onset of serious catastrophic climate breakdown arrived a decade or three early.

Much of the response to the pandemic avoided talk of the climate crisis directly. This is perhaps because the diverse ecological problems facing us have sometimes been simplified into the correlation of two measures: the parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the rise in global average temperatures. Such a simplification cannot account for the increasing risk of pandemics, among a host of other events. COVID-19 wasn't caused by a rise in CO2 levels, but it was arguably a product of the transformative effects modern capitalist societies have had on the environment.1 It was perhaps the moment at which we should have collectively and decisively moved in our understanding - and not just in our terminology - from 'global warming' to 'climate systems breakdown'.

The pandemic provided a glimpse into possible political responses to future climate breakdown. Past responses to climate crises such as extreme weather events had been shot through with environmental racism and state violence, but the scale of total social transformation implied by the word 'fascism' would have been hyperbole. Long imagined in disaster-movie style as a series of blazing hot summers and polar bears adrift, all punctuated by the occasional cataclysmic wave, it suddenly seemed to us that climate systems breakdown might actually look much more like the pandemic did: mass death events, sudden stresses on global supply chains, abrupt and previously unthinkable changes to everyday life, massive discrepancies in vulnerability across class and racial groups, a generally increased anxiety, racially displaced blame, the tightening of surveillance regimes, a sudden return to governments acting exclusively and aggressively in their national and class interest, the mainstreaming of conspiracy culture, talk of the end of globalization, a retreat to protectionism, unprecedented measures that suddenly seem entirely necessary, the sudden collapse of livelihoods for billions of the world's poor, and a deep economic shock worldwide.

This book is not about the coronavirus pandemic, and we should not expect the politics that emerges in response to major climate events in the future to resemble it exactly. Climate change contains other kinds of crises: extreme weather events, migration crises, chronic and acute food and water shortages, climate-related conflicts and the like. Each crisis will be encountered differently, each response will be, as the governance of crisis always is, complex and multifaceted, and often suddenly amplificatory of dormant social forms. It is in these unpredictable consequences of complex crises that the threat of the far right lies.

Mass far-right environmentalism will not be born from a vacuum. It would draw on the history of reactionary nature politics, which we call 'far-right ecologism'. In the first part of this book, we trace the history of these ideas and practices, from colonial nature management to the rise of scientific racism and eugenics to the 'green' aspects of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany through to the postwar overpopulation discourse, currents of environmentalist misanthropy, and lastly the securitization of the environment itself. It is tempting to lump all historical manifestations of far-right environmentalism together. But this would be wrong. Although Umberto Eco noted that fascists are prone to understanding their own politics as a 'singular truth, endlessly reinterpreted',2 we should resist this tendency. The history we cover is episodic and disparate, although consistent patterns do emerge. Time and again we see 'far-right ecologism' as animated by the profound tension between capitalism's expansionist dynamic, which often entails the destruction of parts of nature, and its continual production of social transformation. It is a history, therefore, not just of far-right ecologism's ideas but also of capitalism's nature-culture interface and its attendant crises.

And what this history shows is that far-right ecologism has been, by and large, intellectually parochial, concerned with nature in a curtailed and limited form. Its sense of nature has been flattened by fixation on particular species or a single place. If they have, like the environmentalist maxim, often 'acted local', they have rarely 'thought global'. Nevertheless, such intellectual parochialism should not be underestimated: it has been capable, at times, of genocide.

Now, the overarching form of environmental crisis is anthropogenic climate systems breakdown. Chapters 2-4 turn to the various far-right responses to this crisis. Climate systems breakdown is no local problem, nor can it be resolved by force. The consequences of failure cannot easily be made to affect a particular othered group. It will not be solved by anything the far right has historically proposed. But nor is it irrelevant to far-right politics. Far-right politics has, since its inception, been intimately involved in the defence of capitalism, and the most important cause of climate systems breakdown - the continued extraction and use of fossil fuels - is, in the words of Andreas Malm, 'not a sideshow to bourgeois democracy . it is the material form of contemporary capitalism'.3 Climate systems breakdown puts the structure of capitalism at risk and thus also the social order that the far right is committed to defend.

Faced with a crisis of such magnitude, the far right has diversified its nature politics once again, splintering into parts more or less accepting of the problem, more or less mystified, more or less ambivalent about the possible end of industrial modernity. There is no single far-right nature politics at the moment. Just as they have been throughout history, different actors are divided up by different ways of looking at the problem, various conceptions of what is and is not included in 'nature', profound disagreements about what the problem actually is, massive discrepancies in tactics, and conflict about long-term solutions to climate breakdown.

We have grouped them here according to their present political form: first, far-right parties and other parts of an emerging 'environmental authoritarianism'; secondly, the younger far-right and fascist movements whose comparative agility, lack of interest in immediate electoral success and lack of connections to institutional power make them arguably more dangerous in the long term than the current electoral far right; and thirdly, the 'ecofascist' terrorists, the best known of whom carried out the Christchurch mosque attack, killing 51 Muslims. Each of these groupings has distinct aims, distinct political methods, their own internal tensions and, often, pronounced antagonisms with other parts of the far right. Just as in our previous book, Post-Internet Far Right, the far right is treated not as an aberrant force external to and preying on wider society, but as the most extreme part of a distribution, involved in a complicated dance with the rest of society.4

The effects of climate systems breakdown are already widespread. But like any exponential process without end, it is almost all in the future. It is to this future that the final chapter of the book turns. Here, we address what we call the 'ecofascist hypothesis': the widespread anxiety that our political future might be 'ecofascism'. How are we to make sense of such a prediction?

We start with the future emergence of reactionary movements. In particular, we argue, the long history of climate change denialism on the right is likely to have unexpected, complicated effects on their future nature politics. Large numbers of people committed to mainstream right politics, most substantially in the US, have been lied to by those who denied climate change. When they confront this - and perhaps more importantly discover that in many cases this suppression of the truth imperils...