1. Right-ecopopulism

We can start with examples from Western Europe. Under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, France’s far-right party Rassemblement National (RN, formerly the Front National) has championed what it calls “patriotic ecology” in explicit opposition to the European Union’s emissions-cutting Green Deal policy programme.Footnote ⁷ In the run-up to the European Parliamentary elections in 2024, as farmers in France and elsewhere in Europe were protesting over environmental regulations, rising costs, and trade policies, the RN’s president Jordan Bardella declared support for rural communities while condemning what he called the EU’s “punitive ecology.”Footnote ⁸ Aligning environmental well-being and national territorial integrity with anti-immigration sentiment, Bardella remarked in 2019 that “the best ally of ecology is the border.”Footnote ⁹ Appealing to a natural condition of rootedness and belonging, the RN’s environmentalist platform disparages what it calls “the nomad.” Speaking ahead of the 2019 European elections, Le Pen declared that “environmentalism [is] the natural child of patriotism, because it’s the natural child of rootedness … if you’re a nomad, you’re not an environmentalist … Those who are nomadic … do not care about the environment; they have no homeland.”Footnote ¹⁰ The nomads in question here are not only immigrants but all agents of global, transnational, cosmopolitan life that are deemed to undermine the stability of local communities, cultural homogeneity, and national integrity.Footnote ¹¹ This yoking of the “ecological”—not as mainstream green policy but as protection of land, people, and tradition—with populism helped yield electoral successes. The RN beat Macron’s centrists in 2019 and achieved a historic breakthrough in 2024, surpassing 30 percent of the national vote.

The RN exemplifies a broader tendency towards what might be described as right-ecopopulism, in which familiar populist claims are reframed through an ecologically-inflected language. It is true that the European far right in general remains vociferously anti-green and pro-fossil capital.Footnote ¹² But even vocally climate-denying far-right parties such as Vox in Spain are now undergoing something of an “ecological turn,” promoting renewable energy on a small scale amenable to rural communities.Footnote ¹³ Vox president Santiago Abascal, responding to recent floods and wildfires, has been able to cast extreme weather events as part of a litany of government failings: “It doesn’t matter if it’s a volcano, a pandemic, a migrant invasion, a flood, a blackout—or now, wildfires. The state has been collapsed and occupied by a corrupt mafia.”Footnote ¹⁴ Despite—or because of—the ambient sense of crisis being invoked here, the ecological, the biological, and the demographic are given unity through the classic opposition between an authentic people and a corrupt establishment. Following a similar rhetorical impetus, the climate-denying AfD in Germany have opposed large-scale wind turbines on the basis of a defence of local landscapes, with the party’s extremist (and now disbanded) youth wing proclaiming “nature protection begins in nearby, native spaces.”Footnote ¹⁵ In July 2025, a far-right coalition calling itself Patriots for Europe, chaired by Bardella, gained control of the European Parliament’s drafting process for the EU’s 2040 climate target.Footnote ¹⁶ The far right now have significant power in shaping Europe’s environmental policy.

Anxieties about climate collapse are increasingly integrated into far-right rhetoric as a communicative strategy. The role of storytelling, to which the environmental humanities give special emphasis, is central to this.Footnote ¹⁷ The classic populist drama—in which, as Federico Finchelstein puts it, “the people” are defined in opposition to “the antipeople”—provides a cultural form through which powerful stories of natural unity or ecological wholeness under threat can take shape in the public mind.Footnote ¹⁸ Such stories need not be coherent, consistent, or empirically true in order to be politically effective. This enables far-right movements not only to command mainstream attention around multiple crises but also to reframe anti-immigrant and nativist politics in ways designed to distance them from the explicit racism of more classically fascist movements.

The path leading from the standard climate denial agenda that has, since the 1980s, been the norm for most right-wing ideology to the current manifestations of right-ecopopulism is complex and cannot be covered here in any detail.Footnote ¹⁹ I offer only a brief and schematic account, highlighting a key difference between American and European contexts. As Naomi Oreskes and Eric M. Conway have shown in their eye-opening book Merchants of Doubt, a concerted effort to spread uncertainty and confusion about climate science began as the Cold War was ending and the American New Right was shifting away from the anti-communism that had sustained it. Environmentalists became the new enemies of free-market capitalism.Footnote ²⁰ But some within the European New Right, notably figures such as Alain de Benoist in France, saw environmentalism as a repertoire by which the far right could “metapolitically” reimagine itself in cultural, rather than openly racial, terms.Footnote ²¹ Over time, some of these currents have converged. Today’s far right have realised that aspects of environmental consciousness speak deeply to some of its core concerns: immigration, territorial attachments, erosions of tradition, and disdain for everything global.

The idea that hard national borders and nativist identity can provide ecological solutions is now an established feature of far-right rhetoric in many European countries. Even when the AfD and Vox denounce climate policy and science, they also promote organicist imaginaries of traditional farming and rooted communities. Joe Turner and Dan Bailey have noted what they call “ecobordering” positions within 22 European far-right parties: “Ecobordering casts immigration (of which migration from the Global South is made hyper-visible) as a threat to the local or national environment and consequently presents borders as forms of environmental protection.”Footnote ²² Longstanding uses of land and territory for stories of national identity are being adapted in response to climate collapse and the new forms of human mobility resulting from it.

This is not something that is seen only on the radical fringes. A visual example of ecobordering appeared in the form of a cartoon published in the mainstream British conservative magazine The Spectator in November of 2022.Footnote ²³ Responding to the small boat crossings by asylum seekers from the French port of Calais, the cartoon showed a menacing tidal wave composed of brown bodies looming over the famous “white cliffs” of England’s Dover coastline. The classic attitude of climate denial is transformed into something else in this image. Ecological dangers such as extreme weather are recognised but on the condition that an engulfing migrant population is the real problem and that the existential risks threaten not all of humanity or the biosphere but the white nation specifically.

This kind of rhetoric accomplishes two main things. Avoiding a direct racist language, it naturalises racial hierarchies through an environmentalist framing acceptable to mainstream discourse. It also displaces the apocalyptic urgencies of environmental crisis onto questions of national territorial security. While European citizens overwhelmingly support environmental policies and are deeply concerned about climate breakdown, many are (rightly) sceptical of top-down, technocratic approaches and the effectiveness of institutions to make the needed changes.Footnote ²⁴ It is only in the context of repeated failures to deliver meaningful environmental governance—a state-led programme to abandon arbitrary GDP growth targets, for example, which drive inequality, intensive resource use, and unnecessary consumption—that a far-right ecopopulism can gain ground.Footnote ²⁵ A public-facing environmental humanities play a key role in envisioning our paths towards a just climate future. But as climate science and other forms of expert knowledge are undermined, we should also recognise how far-right environmental imaginaries can be deployed to naturalise hierarchy and exclusion – that is to say, we should be attuned to the multiple ways in which the imagination can be politicised.

2. Ecofascisms, old and new

While shifts towards environmentalism might be read as cynical manoeuvres by more recent far-right actors to distance themselves from the older fascist party lines, fascism in the classical sense did in fact rely on notions of nature (human and nonhuman) and the environment in ways we tend to overlook or underestimate. In 1898, the French writer and politician Maurice Barrès, one of the most vocal of the anti-Dreyfusards, coined the term “socialisme nationaliste.” He proclaimed organic and ancestral ties to the nation through the expression “la terre et les morts”—soil and the dead—and exalted the peasantry in novels such Les Déracinés (The Uprooted, published 1897).Footnote ²⁶ Mussolini’s fascists were urban-based, like the Nazis, and some of the earliest squadristi violently attacked agrarian trade unions and peasant socialists.Footnote ²⁷ Mussolini came to champion the peasantry, however, and promulgated the ideal of il buon contadino (the good peasant), even though the regime had relied heavily on urban elites and landowners.Footnote ²⁸

These questions have been explored in historical research and political theory, although the environmental humanities have only recently begun to address them in any depth.Footnote ²⁹ The term “ecofascism” is highly contested in the scholarship, with some questioning its analytic coherence and others defending its usage as a necessary, if imprecise, label for current anxieties and potential futures.Footnote ³⁰ Whatever the scholarly opinion, the term is put to use by far-right actors themselves. Ecological imagery circulates widely within far-right online cultures to suggest ideas of “natural” masculinity, health, and purity.Footnote ³¹ “Ecofascism,” in this context, is more a meme than an ideological position, a quirky identifier that seems edgily dissonant and amenable to the ironic, or post-ironic, cultures of social media.Footnote ³²

While the question of “how green” the Nazis actually were is a matter of historical debate, the convergence of the environmental and the biopolitical visible within today’s far right has some striking historical precedents in German National Socialism.Footnote ³³ As with the Italian fascists, the Nazis emerged as an urban movement but required the support of rural voters to become a serious national party.Footnote ³⁴ After the agrarian crisis of the late 1920s, Hitler increasingly propagated agrarian myths of national identity, and the peasantry was idealised as the racial “blood source” of the nation.Footnote ³⁵ In the Third Reich, belonging to the nation was not conferred by legal citizenship or residence but by race and blood, which were seen to have continuity with the natural world. Richard Walther Darré, Hitler’s minister for food and agriculture, popularised the phrase “blood and soil,” a term that harked back to Bismarck’s rhetoric of “blood and iron.”Footnote ³⁶ The Volk or people were imagined not as a citizenry but as a biotic community (Lebensgemeinschaft) close to nature, the animal world, and regional landscapes.Footnote ³⁷ In its own grotesque ways, Nazism incorporated the more-than-human and developed its own kinds of environmental consciousness.

The historian Frank Uekoetter writes that while environmentalist causes enjoyed some support among some Nazi leaders, “the Nazis never made the protection of nature a truly urgent part of their policy.”Footnote ³⁸ Which is to say, the regime—or elements within it—preferred the rhetoric of nature protection and the Romantic vision of a people bound to nature over what we would recognise as genuine environmentalist commitment. Whether or not the Nazi regime was substantively committed to environmental action, ideals of wildness and natural innocence operated within its self-representations. As the historian Jean Chapoutot writes,

Chapoutot quotes from an article that appeared in an SS officers’ magazine in 1939: “Just as the tree is not a sum of its branches, its offshoots, and leaves, but rather an organic product of all its parts, a people is not merely a mass of individuals brought together by chance, but an organic entity.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This idea had been given cinematic expression in the Nazi propaganda film Ewiger Wald (1936, The Eternal Forest), which visually and narratively fused nature, race, and nationhood to portray the German people as a forest community with ancient tribal lineage, predating Christianity.Footnote ⁴¹ We see images of the forest coming under existential threat from foreign invaders. The closing shots feature Maypoles draped with swastikas, promising rebirth in earthy, pagan fashion.

That such visions of natural holism could exist alongside the Nazi war machine, the Final Solution and the horrors of the death camps are something that scholars of fascism have struggled to make sense of. In many respects, the matter comes down to nationalism and Romanticism’s nature aesthetics. In Germany in the nineteenth century—before and after unification—critiques of industrial modernity coming from the left and the right intersected with yearnings for a greater sense of national unity. The influence of Darwin and Social Darwinism brought forth biologised notions of race, meanwhile, which were fused with mysticism and volkisch discourses of community.Footnote ⁴² The violence of Darwinian struggle was embraced but also modified through spirituality and heroic theses on the rise and fall of civilizations. Nazi ideology has been described by some historians as a “religion of nature,” bent on creating a new “natural man” freed from the corruptions of modern civilization.Footnote ⁴³ The Nazis were not fundamentally anti-modern or anti-industrial. They sought, rather, to transpose the experience of modernity into racist myths of destiny that did nothing to challenge the class basis of capitalist society.

Rebecca Solnit puts it succinctly: “there might be virtuous ways to love nature, but the love of nature is no guarantor of virtue.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Jonathan Glazer’s extraordinary recent film The Zone of Interest captures the terrible dissonance involved in grasping the fascist love of nature. The film depicts the life of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, and his family, who live in an idyllic country villa adjacent to the camp. The family’s world is composed of rustic domestic order, accompanied by blossoming gardens, lush meadows, rivers, picnics, bees, and birdsong. To chilling effect, the film evokes the violence of the camp only in the most subtle and indirect ways through distant shouts, gunshots, and plumes of black smoke that hang menacingly in the sky. Death lies beyond the frame, but its presence is there, seeping out from behind the verdant backdrop.

Claims about “green” Nazis take on a new resonance in the context of recent far-right acts of terror. A series of white supremacist terrorist attacks, beginning with the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand in 2019, were carried out by men explicitly identifying as ecofascist. The Christchurch gunman framed his violence as a defence of both “European” identity and ecological well-being, portraying migrants as cultural and environmental pollutants. As Sam Moore and Alex Roberts write in The Rise of Ecofascism, in the shooter’s mind, “intimate connections between land and people and the fixation on the destruction that immigration entails are conflated with climate change.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Similar ideas appeared in the “manifestos”—in reality, disjointed and often plagiarised screeds—of the El Paso (2019) and Buffalo (2022) attackers, each linking white supremacy to the protection of land and resources. These atrocities placed the term “ecofascism” at the centre of public debates on extremism and radicalisation.

There are dangers, without doubt, in trying to understand today’s far right and right-populist political currents on the basis of the fascisms that first appeared over a century ago. Historical contexts need to be carefully acknowledged, as does the spectrum of radicalism that the term “far right” covers. Yet, as Finchelstein argues, even where contemporary right-populists are not fascists in the classical sense, they can still be understood in relation to fascism’s afterlives, through continuities in political style and performance, rhetoric, and the cultivation of enemies.Footnote ⁴⁶

3. From the iron guard to beekeeping

Environmental politics as we know it was shaped by two key junctures in the latter half of the twentieth century that also impacted the formation of mass political movements. The first was the countercultural ferment of the 1960s and its confrontation, although the spectre of the Bomb, with the prospect of planetary annihilation. Preventing the next world war was central to the popular currents that brought environmentalism to mainstream consciousness.Footnote ⁴⁷ The second juncture came with the end of the Cold War, a period marked by optimism about global unity, the rise of international institutions such as the IPCC (founded in 1988), and the language of planetary stewardship that continues to characterise the UN’s COP summits.

Activists from the Global South, meanwhile, have stressed that talk of shared responsibility—which so often devolves into technical jargon and empty promises—is anything but innocent: it masks the fact that the poorest and most marginalised communities endure the worst threats to life and livelihood.Footnote ⁴⁸ For much of the world, Earth system breakdown unfolds through the still-living structures of colonialism and dispossession.Footnote ⁴⁹ As David Naguib Pellow writes, “power flows through the multi-species relationships that make up life on Earth, often resulting in violence and marginalization for the many and environmental privileges for the few.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The environmental awareness stemming from the global “grand narrative” of the Anthropocene—the idea that we have entered a new epoch in which the actions of “Man” are leaving indelible imprints on the Earth—is still conditioned by a colonial geography.Footnote ⁵¹ Today’s far-right environmental imagination is ultimately only explicable by reference to the fact that mainstream liberal approaches, prioritising market mechanisms, expert consensus, and incremental reforms, already preside over an environmentally unjust planet. Over the past two decades, the environmental humanities have been increasingly shaped by the concerns of environmental justice, Indigenous studies and decolonial movements. In contrast to the tendencies of liberal environmentalism, these approaches have foregrounded crucial questions of inequality and power.

Despite these changing contexts, it remains too easy—and too comforting—to dismiss far-right nature as nothing but cynical opportunism and thus disconnected from earlier fascist naturalisations of the political. The agrarianism that marked the development of fascist movements in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere is visible today with a figure such as Călin Georgescu, who surprised most observers by winning the first found of Romania’s presidential election elections in 2024 with 23 percent of the vote. The election was subsequently annulled, and Georgescu has evidently withdrawn from political life, following allegations of Russian interference among other things. But his rise is very instructive for understanding the strange politics of far-right nature.

Georgescu is an avowed admirer of Putin and Trump and gained popularity largely through TikTok, amassing significant support among young people. His ideological roots, however, are old. They can be traced to the Iron Guard—Romania’s fascist, Orthodox Christian movement established in the 1920s—and are firmly embedded in the traditionalist, religious, and conspiratorial anti-science views often found across the far right.Footnote ⁵² But Georgescu also holds a PhD in pedology—a subfield of soil science—and has worked both for the Environment Ministry and for the UN as a special rapporteur fighting water pollution and the dumping of hazardous waste. As the political theorists Mihaela Mihai and Camil Ungureanu write, he presents himself as an environmental expert and “frequently discusses catastrophic ecological scenarios, which are otherwise well-founded in scientific data about global warming.”Footnote ⁵³

Like most others in the European far right, Georgescu strenuously opposes the EU’s Green Deal. Romania has the largest agricultural population in Europe. His election manifesto, titled “Food, Water, Energy: A Return to the Roots of the Romanian Nation,” pledges support for organic farming and smallholders, opposes synthetic pesticides and the privatisation of natural resources, urges beekeeping as a national priority, and recommends transforming rivers into sacred spaces.Footnote ⁵⁴ Most liberal greens would readily support such positions. The manifesto’s ecologism is run-through with ideas of religious–nationalist identity and authoritarian governance, however—of ideas of living in harmony with nature and God, of traditional family values, the importance of youth, and the vitality of the nation. Populist attacks on green policies imposed from malign outside forces are fused with a mythos of national renewal.

This kind of rhetoric of renewal is familiar to scholars of fascism. Historian Roger Griffin, one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject, has influentially argued that fascist movements can be defined in terms of what he calls “palingenetic ultranationalism,” meaning an ideology centred on the rebirth (palingenesis) of the nation out of a state of terminal decline.Footnote ⁵⁵ Rebirth here means something mythic and total, epoch-making.Footnote ⁵⁶ This totality does not include everyone, but only a privileged people, often racially defined. Although distinct in form, fascisms in Italy, Germany, and Romania were animated by drives towards revolutionary, utopian, and epoch-making changes. The peasantry, beleaguered by economic crises and hardships, were able to be mobilised by fascism’s naturalisations of struggle and community. The ideas of figures such as Georgescu, filtered through social media algorithms, resonate with these earlier currents, echoing the same promises of national renewal through radical transformation.

4. America’s natural man

The contemporary far right in Europe is able to develop ecopopulist imaginaries in direct opposition not only, or even primarily, to scientific facts on climate but to environmental policies deemed elitist, bureaucratic, and disconnected from place-based, “down-to-earth” realities. By framing climate action as the imposition of distant institutions upon ordinary folk, the far right’s green discourse goes beyond the standard anti-environmentalist strategy of creating doubt about scientific consensus. That “post-truth” aspect is certainly present but it is lent mobilising urgency through the invocation of a place-based, authentic people as political protagonist. Interpreting this solely through the lens of science denial is insufficient. Populism’s force lies in its appeal to the sensuous, grounded truths of daily life, to experiences unmediated by authorities.

The environmental humanities have long recognised the affective force of place-based attachments and the local, but these can be mobilised in both emancipatory and exclusionary ways, as can denigrations of the placeless. As I have suggested, the pro-fossil positions deeply woven into far-right ideology are able to sit alongside pleas for local landscape conservation and animal protection without apparent contradiction. Windmills injure birds; solar farms are a blight on the countryside. As Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective point out, fossil fuels can be regarded in tangible, embodied forms as a “national stock” materially embedded in—or under—familiar landscapes:

Of course, oil and gas flow with global range, but they are also held tightly within the national body, their flows permitted only by hypermasculine extractive labour.

Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement demonstrate very little that is directly comparable to the ecopopulism of the European far right. Nevertheless, Trump has successfully cultivated an image of down-to-earth realism. Fossil fuels and extractive labour are essential to this image. Since his first presidential term, he has repeatedly described coal as not only economically beneficial but “clean” and “beautiful.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Trump is probably the world’s most famous climate change denier, but there is more going on here than simple denial. To use Cara Daggett’s resonant term, the “petro-masculinity” associated with extractivism is aligned by Trumpism with nostalgia for a society based around heavy industry.Footnote ⁵⁹ That means honest (invariably, white) men doing honest work. In an inversion of the notion that fossil fuels are dirty, beauty and cleanliness evoke the pure body of labour and the integrity of the national body. The latter is seen as compact, deep, and difficult to penetrate, a solid earth rather than an abstract globe.

Interwar fascisms imagined the past and future on cosmic scales. Their historical imagination was planetary and epochal, joyfully envisioning a virile “new man” cleansed of corrupting influences. In his 1934 book Revolt Against the Modern World Julius Evola, an Italian fascist intellectual with a taste for esotericism, spoke of the “Kali Yuga.” This term from Hindu cosmology denotes the current dark age of decline and depravity, which is destined eventually to be destroyed in order to make way for a new cycle.Footnote ⁶⁰ Elements within the MAGA world dabble in this kind of esotericism. Evola has been name-dropped by Steve Bannon and Richard Spencer.Footnote ⁶¹ The Kali Yuga has been mentioned by Joe Rogan on a few occasions. Nevertheless, Evola’s esoteric traditionalism sits uneasily within the Trumpian imagination, which is often crassly transactional, televisual, and petty.

Trumpism does not exhort the kind of mythic palingenesis that Griffin describes, even if there are parallels to be drawn. Griffin has resisted the idea that Trump should be described as fascist.Footnote ⁶² Some on the Christian right may attribute messianism to Trump, but MAGA looks to a recent, not a mythic or legendary, past. Its historical frame is narrow, not cosmic. Trumpism is often imbued with a longing, as philosopher Alberto Toscano writes, for “the ‘Fordist’ heyday of Big Capital and Big Labour (generally coded as male and white) and for a certain ideology of modernisation.”Footnote ⁶³ Nostalgia for a (certain) modernity is always going to be riven with contradictions. It is also filled with resentment and melancholy, as if a world of solid, earthy objects and bodies had become lost to globalisation, big government, and cultural liberalism.

There is a sense in which far-right nature can be seen as part of the Trump project. How else are we to understand the strange entry of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into Trump’s orbit as the secretary of Health and Human Services and his influential role in the wider MAGA sphere of influence? Kennedy emerged from the COVID-19 era as an influential vaccine sceptic and conspiracy theorist with significant far-right support. He has become a leader of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, which stresses the toxification of environments and diets as the root cause of health conditions, especially among children.Footnote ⁶⁴ MAHA draws grassroot support from a mixed constituency of conspiracy theorists, anti-vaccine networks, wellness influencers, parents’ groups (such as the “MAHA moms”) as well as the podcasts and blogs of the manosphere.Footnote ⁶⁵

The person of Kennedy, shrouded in the mystique of his family dynasty, has become a rallying point for a health-and-purity-focused rhetoric of nature. For much of his career, he was best known as an environmental attorney litigating against corporate polluters such as General Electric. In 2020, he stepped down as president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, a global network of environmental organisations dedicated to fighting for clean water. In 1999, the year he founded the network, Time magazine featured Kennedy in its environmental series “Heroes for the Planet.”Footnote ⁶⁶

In his 2004 book Crimes Against Nature, Kennedy attacked the rollback of environmental regulations taking place under George W. Bush’s first presidential term, describing it as an “unholy marriage between polluting industries and the radical right.”Footnote ⁶⁷ He pointed to Bush’s efforts to dismantle advisory panels of the Environmental Protection Agency and to replace “accomplished scientists and public health leaders with industry-friendly representatives.”Footnote ⁶⁸ He railed against “junk-science.”Footnote ⁶⁹ But tellingly, Kennedy also described his environmentalism by way of a vague, nonpartisan sense of corporate responsibility and a respect for free markets, which he deemed “core American values.”Footnote ⁷⁰ He even commended oil giants such as Shell, BP, and Hess who have “acted aggressively to deal with global warming and have behaved responsibly towards the environment.”Footnote ⁷¹ Despite its apparent radicalism, then, his environmentalism was based on the patriotic conservationist model of Theodore Roosevelt.Footnote ⁷²

Roosevelt also regarded himself as an opponent of corporate monopolies and a champion of nature protection. He was a friend and admirer of Madison Grant, a eugenicist and white supremacist whose book The Passing of the Great Race (1916) was a key source for Nazi racial doctrine.Footnote ⁷³ Roosevelt and Grant founded the American conservation movement on a concern for human and non-human nature under threat from the decadence of modern civilisation.Footnote ⁷⁴ These threats pertained most pressingly to the vitality of white American masculinity which, according to the Nordic racial myths Grant invoked, was forged in the harsh climes of northern Europe.Footnote ⁷⁵ Roosevelt, although not quite as extreme was Grant, feared that declining birthrates among white Americans, combined with immigration, would deplete the nation’s racial stock and lead to “race suicide.”Footnote ⁷⁶

The medical conspiracy theorising for which Kennedy is now best known suggests a similar preoccupation with nature under threat from a decadent modernity. His conspiratorial turn can be traced as far back as 2005, when Rolling Stone and Salon published his article “Deadly Immunity.” Here, Kennedy made unfounded links between autism and toxins supposedly found in vaccines, alleging governmental collusion with Big Pharma.Footnote ⁷⁷ Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy was able to synthesise his conspiratorial and denialist postures with MAGA populism. His claims that the virus was “ethnically targeted” to spare Jews and that Black people have a stronger immune system than whites echo eugenic ideas.Footnote ⁷⁸ The paranoid anti-vaccine imaginary can become a vehicle for new strains of biological race thinking.

While the racist nature politics of Roosevelt and Grant were elite and patrician, the one Kennedy represents is populist and explicitly formulated through concerns for personal freedom. Noting the rise of various far-right Freedom Parties in Austria, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, Toscano argues that we are confronted today with the apparently oxymoronic idea of a “fascist love of freedom.”Footnote ⁷⁹ This too is part of far-right nature, especially in its biopolitical variants. The anti-vaccine movement imagines its resistance to lockdowns, mandatory masking, and scientific expertise in an explicitly “anti-totalitarian” way, as when Kennedy compared vaccine mandates to conditions in Hitler’s Germany.Footnote ⁸⁰ We can thus speak of a crossover between the far right’s ecopopulism and what has been called “medical populism.” Gideon Lasco and Nicole Curato first offered this concept to describe a “political style” in which public health crises are dramatised as struggles pitting “the people” against “the establishment.”Footnote ⁸¹ Medical populists such as Kennedy do not just exploit health crises but “deliberately perform and perpetuate” them in spectacular ways.Footnote ⁸² The people—not experts or authorities—are cast as the main character in multispecies stories about truth and survival, stories that the environmental humanities are uniquely equipped to interrogate and contest.

5. A Crisis Discipline

We should acknowledge the crucial role played by mis- and disinformation while avoiding totalising diagnoses that seek to explain the effectiveness of far-right storytelling epistemologically, that is, by way of a lack of access to knowledge. Not only does this tend to reinforce populist claims about elites, it also downplays the necessity we face today of constructing new and better political imaginaries. Work in the environmental humanities has emphasised the reparative and transformative potential of storytelling, treating narrative as a means of generating ecological and ethical awareness. However, this emphasis must also reckon with the political volatility of narrative itself, how it can organise fear and exclusion, or lend weight to biological and territorial claims.

The environmental humanities can be regarded as a “crisis discipline,” as Imre Szeman suggests, but this cannot just entail the translation of the urgency of scientific findings into humanities terms.Footnote ⁸³ It must also involve articulating the multiple meanings of crisis. How we act on emergencies depends on how they are declared and with what institutional structures. In “Securing the Future of the Humanities,” Robert D. Newman writes that “we must reengage our storytelling prowess with an emphasis on the power of metaphor to extend the humanities beyond our current anthropocentric and circumscribed view of the human in order to bolster imaginative response” to “climate change and its consequences.”Footnote ⁸⁴ I could not agree more, but this imaginative engagement can only be fully effective when joined to political critique.

The humanities’ responsibility is to tell new stories without presuming a space free from power, and to challenge those that undermine human and nonhuman flourishing. Far-right nature is realised not through cultural forms alone, and not merely through metaphor, but through the way these forms are embedded within existing structures and institutions. Whatever institutional force the humanities can bring to bear on our situation does no doubt rest on the imagination, but the latter is open to multiple and competing politicisations. If environmental humanities are to be a crisis discipline, they should respond imaginatively to crises while also contesting the terms by which crises are understood and acted upon.