Happy Earth day...

In order to mark Earth Day today, my daughter’s school requested that parents ensure their children’s lunches do not include any litter: everything must be in a recyclable container.


I was quite the environmentalist as a young adult, but now I don’t give a shit about Earth Day or environmentalism at all. Nature should be protected from undue and unnecessarily damage to its eco-systems: everyone is agreed upon that by now, and I’m not sure how many had an opinion against such a notion, prior to recent times. To my mind, modern environmentalism has become a pagan cult, at best; at worst, it is a cult, still, but a misanthropic death-cult that sees human beings as a cancer or parasite upon the face of the earth.


On the other hand, I cannot conceive of the tools of civilization that environmentalists deride so much, as being other than achievement. Plastic, for example, I view as about the greatest thing since sliced-bread (which, in fact, is less great than many things, and certainly, less so than plastic). More pragmatically, though, the ideas and theories that have supported environmentalism have been proven wrong, again and again.


In the 1970s, and for long after, the environmental movement was quite taken with the notions of overpopulation and resource depletion. “By 1980,” it was said, “much of Africa and Asia will be starving, and supplies of basic commodities such as crude oil, copper and what have you, will be exhausted.” But, when 1980 approached, environmentalist doomsayers simply brought the timetable forward: “by 1985...”, and then it was, by “by 1990,” and so on.


However, during the 1990s, environmentalists switched the focus of their predictions of apocalypse from overpopulation and resource depletion, to the “greenhouse effect”, or as it became known then, “global warming” (this is before yet another term was invented, to account for the lack of global warming — “climate change”). As someone who believes that, in fact, human activity is having at least some influence upon the climate, I came to believe long ago that environmentalists were using global warming to make assertions about the present and future climate, that were nowhere justified by the scientific research available. “Global warming” became a political cudgel to bash those who didn’t keep in lockstep with the environmentalist agenda: those questioning it were maligned and stigmatized without even the courtesy of having their arguments fairly reviewed and refuted. This is, as a said, the behaviour of a cult, not a secular, liberal political movement.


But again, the predicted warming of the climate has not transpired since 1995, at the latest, according to an admission by the former director of the climate research unit at East Anglia university in the U.K., in the Times of London some time ago. Even now, though, environmentalists and their many supporters in the news media continue to tout climate change as though the East Anglia researchers were not shown to be engaging in anti-scientific practices in order to get the “right” answers about climate change (ie., that the earth is warming up) and which forced the resignation of the director just mentioned above.


Given the fact that climate change ideology has long become dogma to the transnationalist elite, I cannot accept that their real interest in promoting climate apocalypse is to prevent global warming, rather than to control the little people. After all, this same elite (which by now includes para-governmental organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace) exhausts thousands of tons of carbon dioxide not only when jetting to one international conference after another on climate change; but the conferences themselves emit far more carbon than do millions of ordinary people.


Environmentalism did not originate as a political movement in the 1960s, as is usually assumed. In fact, it was the National Socialist German Workers party which introduced pioneering regulations and laws to protect the environment from human activity. This is one of the ways in which the Nazi economy was far from being “laissez-faire” (another was the Nazis effort to stamp out tobacco smoking). Ernst Lehmann, a German botany professor, stated in a book published in Munich in 1934, “We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought.”


Historian Peter Staudenmaierm writes that concern for the environment among the Germans, goes back long before the birth of Adolf Hitler in 1889. In fact, environmentalism was one of the pillars of reaction against capitalism, industrialism and democracy in the German lands (which were not unified until 1871) after the collapse of the Buonapartiste regime. He writes, “In 1867 the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term 'ecology' and began to establish it as a scientific discipline dedicated to studying the interactions between organism and environment. Haeckel was also the chief popularizer of Darwin and evolutionary theory for the German speaking world, and developed a peculiar sort of social darwinist philosophy he called 'monism.' The German Monist League he founded combined scientifically based ecological holism with völkisch social views. Haeckel believed in nordic racial superiority, strenuously opposed race mixing and enthusiastically supported racial eugenics.” Haeckel lived into the post-World War I era, in fact, and became involved in the secret-society movements that provided the foundation of the Nazi party, itself a “secret society in broad daylight.”


Staudenmaiern observes, “The pioneer of scientific ecology, along with his disciples Willibald Hentschel, Wilhelm Bölsche and Bruno Wille, profoundly shaped the thinking of subsequent generations of environmentalists by embedding concern for the natural world in a tightly woven web of regressive social themes. From its very beginnings, then, ecology was bound up in an intensely reactionary political framework.”


The “granola-crunchers” of the contemporary environmental movement seem a long way off from the Brownshirts and the SS. But Staudenmaiern make the case that for the pre-Nazi environmentalists at least, a pristine environment was closely linked to racial purity: Ludwig Woltmann, a student of Haeckel, “took a negative attitude toward modern industrialism. He claimed that the change from an agrarian to an industrial society had hastened the decline of the race. In contrast to nature, which engendered the harmonic forms of Germanism, there were the big cities, diabolical and inorganic, destroying the virtues of the race.” Today’s environmentalists adhere to no racial theories. Rhetorically, at least, environmentalists look down on modern Occidental society, and axiomatically praise the non-Western world for its supposed living in “harmony with nature.” But it is easy to detect among the more ardent of environmentalists at least, a disdain for human beings that, while not connected to a racial ideology, is not altogether different from the anti-Enlightened, reactionary ideas whence Nazism came.


There are other parallels as well. Modern environmentalism is the direct offspring of the 1960s counterculture. It is, in some ways, a fusion of the hippie “back to nature” ethic with the left-wing anti-war activism of university campuses from that era. The hippie movement of the sixties, was itself foreshadowed in Germany in the early decades of the twentieth century. Staudenmaiern writes of the Wandervögel, the “wandering spirits” who were “a hodge podge of countercultural elements, blending neo Romanticism, Eastern philosophies, nature mysticism, hostility to reason, and a strong communal impulse in a confused but no less ardent search for authentic, non alienated social relations. Their back to the land emphasis spurred a passionate sensitivity to the natural world and the damage it suffered. They have been aptly characterized as 'right wing hippies,' for although some sectors of the movement gravitated toward various forms of emancipatory politics (though usually shedding their environmentalist trappings in the process), most of the Wandervöge were eventually absorbed by the Nazis.”


There is, on the other hand, a more direct intellectual link between Nazism and contemporary environmentalism: philosopher Martin Heidegger, who in spite of his status as an enthusiastic Nazi party member and idolizer of Hitler, is a main influence on the contemporary environmental movement with books such as the (completely unreadable) Question Concerning Technology. In any case, Staudenmaiern observes that “Drawing on the heritage of Arndt, Riehl, Haeckel, and others (all of whom were honored between 1933 and 1945 as forebears of triumphant National Socialism), the Nazi movement's incorporation of environmentalist themes was a crucial factor in its rise to popularity and state power.”


Nazi Germany was the first jurisdiction anywhere to establish a government agency especially for the protection of the environment. Staudenmaiern states that the Nazis’ commitment to nature protection was not merely rhetorical, but came from “firmly held beliefs and, indeed, practices at the very top of the Nazi hierarchy which are today conventionally associated with ecological attitudes. Hitler and Himmler were both strict vegetarians and animal lovers, attracted to nature mysticism and homeopathic cures, and staunchly opposed to vivisection and cruelty to animals. Himmler even established experimental organic farms to grow herbs for SS medicinal purposes. And Hitler, at times, could sound like a veritable Green utopian, discussing authoritatively and in detail various renewable energy sources (including environmentally appropriate hydropower and producing natural gas from sludge) as alternatives to coal, and declaring `water, winds and tides’ as the energy path of the future.” Staudenmaiern notes that, “Even in the midst of war, Nazi leaders maintained their commitment to ecological ideals which were, for them, an essential element of racial rejuvenation.” He quotes a decree from SS leader Heinrich Himmler, issued in 1942, in regard to recently conquered Poland: “The peasant of our racial stock has always carefully endeavored to increase the natural powers of the soil, plants, and animals, and to preserve the balance of the whole of nature. For him, respect for divine creation is the measure of all culture. If, therefore, the new Lebensräume (living spaces) are to become a homeland for our settlers, the planned arrangement of the landscape to keep it close to nature is a decisive prerequisite. It is one of the bases for fortifying the German Volk.”


Staudenmaiern says that while it has been the tendency of observers to view “the agrarian and romantic moments in Nazi ideology and policy [as being] in constant tension with, if not in flat contradiction to, the technocratic industrialist thrust of the Third Reich's rapid modernization.” But, he says, “What is not often remarked is that even these modernizing tendencies had a significant ecological component.” Walther Darré, who was the Nazi Minister of Agriculture between 1933 and ‘42, “worked to install environmentally sensitive principles as the very basis of the Third Reich's agricultural policy. Even in its most productivist phases, these precepts remained emblematic of Nazi doctrine. When the `Battle for Production' (a scheme to boost the productivity of the agricultural sector) was proclaimed at the second Reich Farmers Congress in 1934, the very first point in the program read `Keep the soil healthy!' But Darré's most important innovation was the introduction on a large scale of organic farming methods, significantly labeled `lebensgesetzliche Landbauweise,' or farming according to the laws of life. The term points up yet again the natural order ideology which underlies so much reactionary ecological thought.”


Darré’s environmentalist philosophy proved influential on the post-war “green” movement that emerged in Germany after the student protests there in the 1960s. Modern German Green-party members and thinkers ignore or downplay Darré’s association with the Nazis, but Staudenmaiern notes, “Darré's published writings alone, dating back to the early twenties, are enough to indict him as a rabidly racist and jingoist ideologue particularly prone to a vulgar and hateful antisemitism (he spoke of Jews, revealingly, as `weeds’). His decade long tenure as a loyal servant and, moreover, architect of the Nazi state demonstrates his dedication to Hitler's deranged cause. One account even claims that it was Darré who convinced Hitler and Himmler of the necessity of exterminating the Jews and Slavs.”


Meanwhile, Fritz Todt, an engineer and a very powerful minister of infrastructure in the Nazi regime prior to his death (in a plane crash) in 1942, was responsible for the construction of the autobahn, or national system of highways (that was in fact already in advanced planning prior to the Nazis coming to power). Due to his efforts, says Staudenmaiern, “one of the largest building enterprises undertaken in this century” was carried to with maximum “sensitivity” to the environment: “The ecological aspects of this approach to construction went well beyond an emphasis on harmonious adaptation to the natural surroundings for aesthetic reasons; Todt also established strict criteria for respecting wetlands, forests and ecologically sensitive areas. ... these environmentalist concerns were inseparably bound to a völkisch nationalist outlook. Todt himself expressed this connection succinctly: `The fulfillment of mere transportation purposes is not the final aim of German highway construction. The German highway must be an expression of its surrounding landscape and an expression of the German essence.’”