NPR podcast explores how environmentalism overlaps with racism and Nazis
NPR's 'Consider This' claimed environmental movement 'founded on white supremacy'
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}An NPR podcast spent their Thursday show exploring how environmentalism overlaps with racism and Nazis.
During the "Consider This" podcast, host Ari Shapiro and his guests had a discussion which was titled, "The Growing Overlap Between The Far-Right And Environmentalism. " The pair explained connections between environmentalism and a violent white supremacist mindset.
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{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Climate activist and Indigenous community members hold signs during a rally and march in Solway, Minnesota on June 7, 2021. - Line 3 is an oil sands pipeline which runs from Hardisty, Alberta, Canada to Superior, Wisconsin in the United States. (Getty Images)
"There’s this earlier, very nativist, very exclusionary, environmental thought. It was very much based on this idea of nature as a violent competitive hierarchical domain where, you know, White Europeans were at the top," Blair Taylor, researcher at the Institute for Social Ecology, said.
Shapiro noted that Taylor’s research found "in some ways the environmental movement was founded on ideas of white supremacy." Furthermore, there was even some connections to Nazism.
"The idea that natural purity translates into racial or national purity, that was one that was very central to the Nazis’ environmental discourse. 'Unspoiled’ forest goes hand in hand with racial purity or something like that. The Nazis saw themselves as environmentalists," Taylor said.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Researcher Alex Amend insisted that this side of environmentalism has been "rediscovered" by the alt-right and could be used in a form of eco-fascism.
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), Austrian-born German statesman. Ca. 1930. Coloured photograph. (Photo by adoc-photos/Corbis via Getty Images) (Getty Images)
"As climate change sort of turns up the heat, there’s going to be all sorts of political consternation around these issues," Amend said.
Dr. Dorceta Taylor, professor of environmental justice for Yale, further traced the beginnings of the environmental movement to backlash against integration and racial mixing.
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"We see the taking of Native American lands to turn into park spaces that are described as empty, untouched by human hands, pristine, to be protected. So this is where the language of preservation really crosses over into this narrative of exclusion," Taylor said.
She added, "White elite, especially white male elites, wanted to leave the spaces where there was racial mixing and this discomfort around racial and mixed neighborhoods infused the discourse of those early conservationist leaders."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Redwood forest with sunshine (iStock)
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Earlier this month, MSNBC published a similar op-ed that tied fitness to the Nazi party.
"Physical fitness has always been central to the far right. In ‘Mein Kampf,’ Hitler fixated on boxing and jujitsu, believing they could help him create an army of millions whose aggressive spirit and impeccably trained bodies, combined with ‘fanatical love of the fatherland,’ would do more for the German nation than any ‘mediocre’ tactical weapons training," Miller-Idriss wrote.