The Rise of Ecofascism. Alex Roberts

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Название The Rise of Ecofascism
Автор произведения Alex Roberts
Жанр Афоризмы и цитаты
Серия
Издательство Афоризмы и цитаты
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781509545391



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       Climate Change and the Far Right

      Sam Moore

      Alex Roberts

      polity

      Copyright © Sam Moore and Alex Roberts 2022

      The right of Sam Moore and Alex Roberts to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

      First published in 2022 by Polity Press

      Polity Press

      65 Bridge Street

      Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

      Polity Press

      101 Station Landing

      Suite 300

      Medford, MA 02155, USA

      All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

      ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4539-1

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941110

      The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

      Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

      For further information on Polity, visit our website:

      politybooks.com

      Happy acknowledgements pages are all alike; every unhappy acknowledgements page is unhappy in its own way. It is therefore a pleasure to report the perfect blandness of what follows.

      We would like to thank our editor Dr George Owers and our three anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful and generous feedback on the first draft of this book. We are indebted to Ian Tuttle for his speedy and exacting copyediting, as we are to Julia Davies at Polity for her assistance throughout the process. We would also like to thank the rest of the team at Polity for putting together this book.

      I (Alex) would like to thank my family and Sam for his infinite patience in writing this book with me.

      I (Sam) would like to thank Alex, Andrew and Cameron, my sharpest interlocutors. I would also like to thank my family for their emotional support during the writing of this book, their feedback on the manuscript, and for making me who I am in the first place, although I’m not sure anyone else thinks that was such a good idea. And to Amelia, thank you for everything.

      On 13 January 2020, we first put pen to paper for this book. Our argument felt clear and horrifying: as climate systems broke down, the centre of political normalcy would collapse, and people would find themselves looking for more drastic solutions. The escalating climate crisis would provide opportunities to all parts of the far right. Seductive neo-Malthusian arguments about overpopulation would bolster hardline security policies and borders, and give seemingly compelling justification for the radical deepening of racist politics in the Global North. The cultural tropes of uncleanliness, pollution and pestilence, which for centuries dictated the hierarchy of different people’s places within, and access to, nature, would become more potent as people once again encountered the natural world as their antagonist. The interests of capital would swing behind authoritarian governments as a means to protect profits and growth. While we disagreed with some who had said that ‘ecofascism’ would be a direct and unavoidable consequence of climate breakdown, we thought such a project couldn’t entirely be ruled out.

      Much of the response to the pandemic avoided talk of the climate crisis directly. This is perhaps because the diverse ecological problems facing us have sometimes been simplified into the correlation of two measures: the parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the rise in global average temperatures. Such a simplification cannot account for the increasing risk of pandemics, among a host of other events. COVID-19 wasn’t caused by a rise in CO2 levels, but it was arguably a product of the transformative effects modern capitalist societies have had on the environment.1 It was perhaps the moment at which we should have collectively and decisively moved in our understanding – and not just in our terminology – from ‘global warming’ to ‘climate systems breakdown’.

      This book is not about the coronavirus pandemic, and we should not expect the politics that emerges in response to major climate events