How climate change ‘doomerism’ fuels violent extremism

In October 2019, an environmental researcher named Jenny Rowland-Shea co-wrote a report for the left-leaning Center for American Progress about the rapid loss of American wildlife and natural areas. In it, she included a statistic that the United States was losing a football-field-sized swath of nature every 30 seconds.

Soon, she recalls, she started seeing that fact, and her report, cited in a variety of blog posts and opinion articles. But these pieces of writing took a very different tone. 

“They were always twisting the statistic to support some rhetoric that we certainly were not aiming to support [such as] criticizing immigrants and people of color and saying they were responsible” for environmental damage, says Ms. Rowland-Shea, now the deputy director for Public Lands at the Center for American Progress. 

When she and her colleagues started researching the posts, they found a landscape of environmental rhetoric and organizations with nativist, and even fascist-leaning, underpinnings. Although they were taken aback at first, Ms. Rowland-Shea recalls, they learned from colleagues that what they were seeing was far from unique.

Over the past few years, mainstream environmentalists and climate activists have watched with alarm as a new brand of right-wing eco-consciousness has started to gain traction in the United States and western Europe. On its extreme edge, proponents have explicitly embraced the label of “eco-fascism.” The alleged perpetrator of this month’s mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, claimed this identity, as did those in the 2019 El Paso, Texas, and Christchurch, New Zealand, massacres. Each blamed migrants, and people of color in general, for denigrating nature, and claimed that killing to lower population numbers was helpful for the environment – a clear throwback, scholars say, to Nazi rhetoric. 

But as disturbing as those cases are, some climate advocates say that even more worrisome is the way eco-fascism’s underlying concept – the violent defense of a romantic, and racially white, image of “nature” – is seeping into the mainstream. This is particularly true, they say, as fewer people argue over whether climate change exists, and more debate whether humans can do anything about it. And it has caused soul searching for many environmental activists who have long worked to convey the seriousness of the climate crisis, and who now find themselves needing to advocate against despair. 

“Many have used doomsday narratives thinking that they were useful to scare people into action,” says Betsy Hartmann, professor emerita of development studies at Hampshire College and author of “The America Syndrome: Apocalypse, War, and Our Call to Greatness.” “I don’t want to diminish the urgency of these environmental issues. But to put it in this apocalyptical mode encourages people to suspend their basic ethical frameworks. If it’s an apocalypse coming, anything is possible, and it’s easier for all kinds of racialized stereotypes to come up.”

That is particularly true, she says, in conversations about “climate refugees.” For many on the progressive left, the idea of people needing to leave their homes because of climate change sparks sympathetic action. For those on the right, though, it can create fear and prompt talk about solidifying national borders. In fact, she says research shows that much climate migration will happen within a country – people deciding to move from wildfire-prone California or drought-starved New Mexico to another part of the U.S., for instance.  

“There may be climate factors involved in people’s decisions to migrate. But usually decisions to migrate are much more complex,” Dr. Hartmann says. “I think we have to be wary about the way climate and migration have been linked in national security circles, and even in progressive environmental circles. It often serves as yet another reason to beef up our borders.”  

Climate “doomerism” as license to exclude 

Meg Ruttan Walker, a climate activist based near Toronto, saw a similar kind of extreme despair as she worked to help local municipalities embrace climate action plans and lower emissions. She says that in public meetings and rallies, she would regularly encounter opposition – not from climate change deniers, but from those who said that the world was simply doomed. The best approach to global warming, these opponents argued, was to tighten borders, reject immigrants, and prepare individually for civilization’s collapse. 

“Climate change scares me,” says Ms. Ruttan Walker. “But this – this is terrifying. It’s what happens when people in the developed world say it’s too late to do anything. Doomerism gives people the permission to do anything they want to survive.”  

Indeed, despair is a key link between a growing global ultra-right movement and a fringe eco-fascist environmentalism, says Jeff Sparrow, an Australian writer who published the book “Fascists Among Us,” about the Christchurch massacre. 

“Fascism is a movement of despair,” he says. “It’s ‘The world is falling apart, we don’t feel we can make it better in any way – so let’s unleash violence and find redemption.’ … Nothing good comes out of despair.”

Yet for decades, says Dr. Hartmann, environmental rhetoric has leaned toward apocalyptic warnings. These have been about everything from food shortages to water running out to the dire effects of overpopulation, she says.  

That last point has been particularly problematic, she says. In 1968, a bestselling book by Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich, “The Population Bomb,” predicted that a growing number of humans would lead to everything from global famine to world war. It helped usher in years of environmental ideology focused on the alleged problem of “too many people.”

But as Dr. Hartmann and other scholars have pointed out, that “too many” was rarely conceptualized as white Anglo-Saxons. Indeed, the whole concept of overpopulation had roots in the early 20th-century eugenics movement, which advocated building a “superior” human race through selective breeding – an approach that was deeply racist. 

In recent years, most mainstream environmental organizations have backed away from, and even apologized for, their focus on overpopulation during the ’60s and ’70s. But the rhetoric still comes up regularly in conversations about climate, says Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist at the University of Maine. This is despite clear research that shows fossil fuel use in wealthier, whiter countries has had a far greater climate impact than the number of people in any high-birthrate nation.

“It’s really hard to get people to accept that consumption is the problem, not how many people there are,” Dr. Gill says. “And that when we talk about overpopulation, there’s a dog whistle there that a lot of people don’t even realize that they’re blowing.”

Needed: “Radical solidarity”

The counterpoint to all of this, many climate advocates say, is a sort of gritty optimism that requires a shift from the alarm that has often characterized the warnings about global warming. 

“The world is changing so quickly, and the climate is changing so quickly, we’re really behind in how we’re communicating,” says Ms. Ruttan Walker.

She and others say that instead of doom and societal collapse, people need to learn that concerted action can make a difference and that many steps are happening to counteract climate-related damage – and also how they can work with others in what she calls “radical solidarity.” 

It also requires a reorientation on who climate change has hurt most and how to best fix those inequities, says Dr. Gill. After all, she says, the people eco-fascists tend to blame for environmental problems – immigrants, residents of developing countries, people of color – have done the least to create climate change, and are already suffering most from its impacts, she says. 

“The biggest uncertainty about our climate future is not what the planet is going to do, but what we’re going to do,” says Dr. Gill. “This is true from the scientific perspective in terms of emission pathways, policies, and decisions. But it’s also true in terms of rising social movements and other things that are hard to predict.”