Chapter 3 turns to one of the best known but most controversial instances of ecological practice under Nazi auspices. It centers on the coterie of “advocates for the landscape” responsible for environmental planning on a series of major Nazi public works projects, most famously the building of the Autobahn system. The group was led by Alwin Seifert, whose title was Reich Advocate for the Landscape. Seifert was a pivotal figure in the development of the post-war environmental movement in Germany, and the work of his landscape advocates on the Autobahn has been the subject of several important previous studies. The focus of the chapter extends far beyond the Autobahn project to include many other fields in which the landscape advocates took an active part, styling themselves “the conscience of the German countryside.” The chapter shows that Seifert and the landscape advocates consistently applied ecological techniques even in the face of concerted resistance from other branches of the Nazi bureaucracy, with the support of a surprising range of high-level party and state functionaries. Though their achievements were limited in significant ways, through a modernized version of blood and soil ideology they conjoined Nazi ideals with environmentally sustainable policies.

The relevance of ecological ideals in lands occupied by Nazi forces would seem to be completely overshadowed by the ruinous impact of war. The book’s final chapter challenges this view through a thoroughly documented alternative analysis. Hitler’s vision of creating “a garden of Eden in the east” imbued longstanding racial myths with an ecological dimension, a call to restore harmony to the natural world, which in turn provided a crucial opening for environmentalists. The landscape advocates worked closely with German military authorities throughout occupied Europe on “green” programs that combined martial and environmental values. After the 1941 dissolution of the Reich League for Biodynamic Agriculture, leading biodynamic figures found a new institutional home in Himmler’s SS, working on settlement activities in the East and designing idealized rural communities founded on blood and soil precepts. The large biodynamic plantation at the Dachau concentration camp, growing organic products for the SS, served as a training center for environmental renewal as an integral part of occupation policy. Far from being consigned to insignificance, the full panoply of ecological aspirations came into their own in the midst of war. Their realization was prevented not by internal obstruction but by Germany’s defeat.

Introducing our interlocutors and our research

Our methodological approach was based on semi-structured interviews conducted between October 2022 and February 2023. These interviews involved indigenous, Afro-descendant, and Campesinx leaders from academia, labour unions, and social movements. We conducted the interviews in person through video calls, email, and phone. Due to the diversity of the participants, the interviews were performed in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. We had the support of native and bilingual speakers to review the translations1 and shared the final version of the document with the interviewees.

The research highlights the perspectives of several influential voices, including Ana Lucía Ixchiu Hernández, a K’iche’ indigenous social leader and renowned activist for climate and cultural rights in Guatemala; Jen Deerinwater, an award-winning journalist and community organizer from the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma in the United States (US); Eliana Asprilla, an Afro-descendant environmental engineer specializing in urban and management planning from Colombia; Ana Lilia Felix, an academic who aligns with the Zapatista movement's ‘Sixth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle’ in Mexico; and Maria Estélia de Araújo and Luciomar Monteiro, members of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) and the Catholic Church's Land Pastoral Commission (CPT) in Brazil. For the interviewees’ biographical information and guiding questions, please refer to Appendix 7A in this chapter.

In terms of our selection criteria for interviewees, we employed a non-random sampling approach, specifically purposive sampling. This selection was based on the significant roles that these activists play in the social and environmental justice arenas within both their individual countries and the broader region.

Chapter 1 examines three distinct organic farming movements that arose in Germany in the 1920s as pioneering examples of environmental ideals in practice. Though disparate in their origins and political commitments, all three organic tendencies found considerable common ground with Nazism, in some cases well before the Nazis came to power. Tracing their divergent fates under Hitler’s regime after 1933, the chapter offers a dense historical reconstruction of early environmental ambitions that were sometimes thwarted and sometimes fulfilled through active cooperation with Nazi agencies. A core aspect of the analysis centers on the implicit and explicit influence of racial ideologies within the emerging organic milieu and the opportunities and challenges this opened up under the conditions of Nazi rule. The chapter is built around a comprehensive range of archival sources, many of which have never been examined before, and provides the fullest portrait yet in German or English of the inception of organic farming currents in the context of proto-environmental politics.

The epilogue examines the persistence of the term ‘achievements’ in Egyptian governmental media today, which is indicative of the concept’s resilience. This persistence raises an important question around the social and historical reasons undergirding the continuity of achievement praxis. Why are cultural and media institutions reproducing the achievement state in Egypt? The answer would seem to be that the current bureaucratic apparatus inherited, via institutional means, certain ways of thinking and working established after the 1952 revolution. This simple answer belies my ethnographic experience, because contemporary bureaucrats – with few exceptions – have a very faint sense of the history of the bureaucratic apparatus prior to their own entry into the workforce. A more likely answer, I suggest, is that the institutional context within which bureaucrats work did not change in some identifiable ways since 1952. The continuity of achievement praxis is tied to the institutional environment in which it thrives, rather than a conscious will among state officials transmitted across generations.

Theatrical presentation encompasses diverging perspectives on water ecologies, ecological divisions and extremes of wet and dry in tropical and desert climates. While twentieth-century drama points to how water sources in Australia have been divided up to restrict access through land proprietorship, polarising attitudes and racial injustice, innovative twenty-first century performance emphasises the interconnectedness of water flows, seepage and below ground storage. An appreciation of water flow is particularly evident in First Nations performance, which includes the influential work of Bangarra Dance Theatre. Performance explores values and practices that resist the way water is polluted and detrimentally reconfigured in binary divisions to restrict access and divert flows and highlights the need for water availability for all species in a climate change era. Australian theatrical performance points to emotional feelings and values that protect and preserve water and its river flows even as human impact on the climate means its patterns are no longer predictable.

Introduction

Linkages between environmental risks and racial discrimination have long been areas of research and activism in the domestic sphere. The term ‘environmental racism’, coined by Rev. Dr Benjamin F. Chavis Jr and Robert D. Bullard in the 1980s, refers to racial discrimination embedded into the process of environmental decision-making, whether by a conscious design or institutional neglect (Bullard 1993, 17). The results are that communities of colour are disproportionately exposed to environmental issues (Bullard 1990, 1993; Schlosberg and Collins 2014). However, an unresolved theoretical issue in this conversation is applying such framework in the global order, particularly considering Global South countries1 in the realm of international negotiations on climate change. Such an application builds on scientific evidence that communities most at risk have emitted the least greenhouse gases (GHGs) and also have fewer resources to deal with climate change, and that climate change has generated and perpetuated vulnerabilities (IPCC 2022, 9–11). This is deeply intertwined with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR&RC principle), since it acknowledges that Global North countries should bear the higher costs of mitigation and adaptation to climate change, as well as recent discussions on climate justice and human rights – particularly considering the economic, social, and cultural (ESC) rights. However, the current understanding and operationalization of the CBDR&RC principle does not enhance climate justice and human rights, because it does not address the underlying root causes of climate change (see the third section).

Building on Chapter 1, Chapter 2 presents an in-depth case study of the fourth major organic farming movement in interwar Germany, biodynamic agriculture. With its Demeter and Weleda brands, this was the organic current that was most successful in garnering consistent support from Nazi patrons, and it remains the most high-profile form of organics in Germany today. Early biodynamic proponents particularly emphasized the ecological dimension of their work, framing their approach as the way to “heal the earth” from environmental harm. In part because of pre-existing ties to several groups of Nazi activists, the biodynamic movement flourished for much of the Third Reich until falling prey to intra-party disputes in 1941. Leading biodynamic figures worked closely with life reform officials within the Nazi apparatus, illustrating the active connections linking multiple strands of environmental advocacy across far-flung sectors of the regime. Through a detailed critical account based on previously unused archival sources, the chapter carefully delineates the reasons for the rise and eventual fall of the Reich League for Biodynamic Agriculture, concluding with a differentiated assessment of the space available for grassroots environmental initiatives in Nazi Germany.

Introduction

According to estimates made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2019, the global agro-food system's emissions account for about 21 per cent to 37 per cent of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (IPCC 2022a). Almost half of those emissions can be attributed to deforestation and land use changes associated mainly with the growth of the agricultural and livestock borders (Ecologistas en Acción n.d.). In this context, the production of soy for animal feed and biofuel represents a major contributor to the carbon footprint (Ecologistas en Acción n.d.). An estimate of 85 per cent of the worldwide soy production is used to feed animals (Ritchie and Roser 2021; WWF 2007).

The prevalent agribusiness model in the Latin American Southern Cone is characterized by the large-scale cultivation of genetically modified (GM) seeds, mainly of soy, which have been developed to tolerate primarily glyphosate, among other herbicides. Moreover, this model entails high levels of land concentration and monocultures and is one in which few large transnational corporations have high levels of market share for the production and distribution of both GM soy seeds and glyphosate. The other end of the value chain mirrors this scenario, with only a few retail companies dominating the market.

Since its introduction to the market in the 1990s, GM soy seeds and associated pesticide use have become one of the major drivers behind the decline of South America's natural ecosystems, especially in the tropics (Fehlenberg et al. 2017). The use of both products together has increased substantially over the years as weeds have evolved to become resistant to glyphosate (Perry et al. 2016; Tsatsakis et al. 2017).

This chapter delves into everyday administrative work at the Ministry of Culture, with a specific focus on the Mass Culture Institute, the ancestor of the current General Organisation for Cultural Palaces. Based on the personal papers of Saad Kamel, this chapter provides a brief institutional history of the Institute and the low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats who worked to accomplish its mission of cultivating the rural masses. This mission was influenced by diverging ideas about Arab socialism after the socialist turn of 1961. Thus, this chapter contributes to an intellectual history of Arab socialism, by showing how the Mass Culture Institute enacted a grounded version of ‘the socialism of culture’ (ishtirakiyyat al-thaqāfa). Moreover, the chapter explores the key relationship between responsibility and achievement at the Mass Culture Institute. Low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats are constantly concerned by what falls under their responsibility, which is managed by both avoiding to take responsibility for problems and seeking to take credit for achievements (however small). These everyday achievements embody, on a smaller scale, the postrevolutionary state project.

The Epilogue begins with a critical consideration of the post-war careers of individuals featured prominently in previous chapters, tracking their contributions to the re-emergent German environmental movement after 1945. That movement failed to confront its links to the Nazi past for decades on end, leaving a distorted and misunderstood legacy that awaits resolution even now. Extending both the chronological and geographical framework, the Epilogue outlines significant new material on non-German examples of far right appropriation of environmental ideals over the past century, including Italian and British examples. These comparative cases are essential to understanding that the themes at the heart of the book are not a German peculiarity, while placing the specifics of the Nazi era into broader historical context. Last, the Epilogue points to the persistent political ambivalence of ecology. Environmental activists today are justifiably concerned that tying their predecessors to Nazism could discredit the politics of nature as a whole and play into powerful anti-environmental currents in contemporary culture. Historical perspective allows for a more informed approach to such charged questions. If guarding against a resurgence of neo-Nazism means paying closer attention to its history, honoring the environmental movement’s future requires taking an honest look at its past.

The increasing intensity of industrialisation is taking its toll on nonhuman animals, leading to what is now described as the ‘the sixth mass extinction’ cause by Homo Sapiens. Since European settlement in 1788, the Australian continent has recorded the highest rate of mammal extinction in the world, currently a ten percent loss since pre-colonial times, with hundreds of other endangered species at high risk of disappearing. The Australian plays and performances considered in this chapter, which include Extinction by Hannie Rayson, Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster and Green Screen by Nicola Gunn and Whale by Fleur Kilpatrick, explore what it means for humans to practice an ethical obligation of care for individual species, their place within particular habitats and ecosystems as well as the entanglement of human-nonhuman well-being and survival.