With the current administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord as well as many other actions with the first week, we are seeing Project 2025 playing out to the letter. But as the Climate Crisis ramps up, I believe that within the next four years ‘the environment’ is going to be used an an excuse to further fascist agendas. This can be shortened to ‘eco-fascism.’
What is Fascism?
I actually wrote a post about Fascism is Democracy’s Pollution back in 2020. The sad reality is the pollution has only gotten worse. I won’t list all the same points again, but almost everything has gotten more extreme in the United States.
What is Eco-fascism?
How does the environment change ‘the flavor’ of fascism? In short, fascists use the environment to further their agenda. For example, when Hitler was sending Jewish people to concentration camps, he used ‘the economy’ as a reason. To paraphrase, “to protect the economy we need to kill these people.” I believe soon we will see “to protect the environment, we need to kill these people” said from US officials as a response to natural disasters. We are already seeing fascists blame “DEI Hires” on the fires in LA.
I’m going to start using the beaver as a key argument against eco-fascism.
Retrieved from Wikipedia.
Beavers Behaving Boldly
Beavers are known as a keystone species. The work that they do helps maintain an environment that allows other animals to flourish. To quote the linked article,
“By storing surface water & recharging groundwater, beaver-formed habitat tends to persist & offer sanctuary when conditions are tough elsewhere. On the whole, beaver presence can be the key for maintaining vibrant plant & animal communities along rivers & streams through time.”
This means that beavers always improve the environment, right?
Beavers Behaving Badly
75 years ago, 10 breeding pairs of beavers were introduced to Patagonia from Canada to ‘develop a fur trade.’ The trade failed to launch, but the beavers took hold. They loved the beech trees so much that now the beaver population is around 100,000 individuals today. Those beech trees didn’t evolve to grow fast like the ones in North America, so they couldn’t recover fast enough. These beavers have drastically altered ancient ecosystems from flooding to soil erosion.
Like humans, they are actively emitting C02 from the environment to ramp up the Climate Crisis. But the main difference between humans & beavers is we can choose our actions.
murder as a ‘solution’
Now, is the beaver a ‘bad actor’ that needs to be destroyed? Not at all! It does great when the community it is in has adapted to what the beaver does. That hasn’t stopped people from trying to outright kill the beaver in Patagonia, since it doesn’t have any natural predators down in the region. The end result has been a small impact on beaver population, but a lot of damage done to native species.
Just hunting & traps fall into the same mindset as concentration camps. “If we just kill these [people or beavers], the problem will go away.” Of course it doesn’t do anything except kill a lot of organisms. If eco-fascism doesn’t actually protect the environment, what is the solution?
Diversity
Biodiversity strengthens habitats to withstand against disasters, changes, etc. Finding native plants in Patagonia to help against soil erosion will help mitigate the damage done by the introduced beavers.
Diversity in our culture helps strengthen our democracy in the same way. Fascism has so much power at the moment thanks to dismantling of our checks & balances culturally & in our government. It is only by working together that we have any hope to get it back.