Ecofascism, can be used in two different ways:

1. The term is used as a pejorative by political conservatives, centrists, and leftists to discredit deep ecology
   Deep ecology
   Deep ecology is a contemporary ecological philosophy that recognizes an inherent worth of all living beings, regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs. The philosophy emphasizes the interdependence of organisms within ecosystems and that of ecosystems with each other within the...
   
   , mainstream environmentalism
   Environmentalism
   Environmentalism is a broad philosophy, ideology and social movement regarding concerns for environmental conservation and improvement of the health of the environment, particularly as the measure for this health seeks to incorporate the concerns of non-human elements...
   
   , radical environmentalism
   Radical environmentalism
   Radical environmentalism, is a grassroots branch of the larger environmental movement that emerged out of an ecocentrism-based frustration with the co-option of mainstream environmentalism...
   
    and other ecological positions.
2. As a self label used somewhat less commonly by various white nationalist and third positionist groups who incorporate environmentalist positions into their ideology.

Ecofascism as an attack term

"..."ecofascism" has come to be used mainly as an attack term, with social ecology roots, against the deep ecology movement and its supporters plus, more generally, the environmental movement. Thus, "ecofascist" and "ecofascism", are used not to enlighten but to smear."

David Orton

David Orton (deep ecology)

David Keith Orton was a Canadian writer, thinker and environmental activist who played a leading role in developing "left biocentrism" within the philosophy of deep ecology. Orton and his collaborators added the word "left" to biocentrism to indicate their anti-industrial, anti-capitalist...

 - Ecofascism: What is It? A Left Biocentric Analysis

Accusations of ecofascism can come from either the left, as in social ecologist

Social ecology

Social ecology is a philosophy developed by Murray Bookchin in the 1960s.It holds that present ecological problems are rooted in deep-seated social problems, particularly in dominatory hierarchical political and social systems. These have resulted in an uncritical acceptance of an overly...

 Murray Bookchin

Murray Bookchin

Murray Bookchin was an American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher. A pioneer in the ecology movement, Bookchin was the founder of the social ecology movement within anarchist, libertarian socialist and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books on politics,...

's use of the term, or the right, as in Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh

Rush Hudson Limbaugh III is an American radio talk show host, conservative political commentator, and an opinion leader in American conservatism. He hosts The Rush Limbaugh Show which is aired throughout the U.S. on Premiere Radio Networks and is the highest-rated talk-radio program in the United...

 and other conservative and Wise Use Movement

Wise use

The wise use movement in the United States is a loose-knit coalition of groups promoting the expansion of private property rights and reduction of government regulation of publicly held property. This includes advocacy of expanded use by commercial and public interests, seeking increased access to...

 commentators. In the latter case, it is sometimes a hyperbolic

Hyperbole

Hyperbole is the use of exaggeration as a rhetorical device or figure of speech. It may be used to evoke strong feelings or to create a strong impression, but is not meant to be taken literally....

 use of the term that is applied to all environmental activists, including more mainstream groups such as Greenpeace

Greenpeace

Greenpeace is a non-governmental environmental organization with offices in over forty countries and with an international coordinating body in Amsterdam, The Netherlands...

 and the Sierra Club

Sierra Club

The Sierra Club is the oldest, largest, and most influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States. It was founded on May 28, 1892, in San Francisco, California, by the conservationist and preservationist John Muir, who became its first president...

.

Accusations of ecofascism are not uncommon, but are usually strenuously denied. For some, cries from mainstream ecologists for regulation of human reproduction and reduction of the world population

Overpopulation

Overpopulation is a condition where an organism's numbers exceed the carrying capacity of its habitat. The term often refers to the relationship between the human population and its environment, the Earth...

 are suggestive of anti-humanist

Humanism

Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....

 Nazi policies. However, proponents of population control

Population control

Human population control is the practice of artificially altering the rate of growth of a human population.Historically, human population control has been implemented by limiting the population's birth rate, usually by government mandate, and has been undertaken as a response to factors including...

 policies have reacted strongly against these comparisons, regarding them as merely attempts to slander certain sections of the environmental movement (see the article on deep ecology for more details).

In the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

, the Third Way

Third Way (UK)

The National Liberal Party – The Third Way is a United Kingdom political party that was formed on 17 March 1990 as The Third Way. In 2006, the Third Way registered the name National Liberal Party – The Third Way with the Electoral Commission....

 political party has been accused by left-wing watchdog groups of ecofascism, although Third Way says it has renounced all fascist ideology and describes itself as in the "radical centre". There has been a history of environmentalist views being held by the far-right in the UK, notably by Henry Williamson, Rolf Gardiner

Rolf Gardiner

Henry Rolf Gardiner was an English rural revivalist and sympathizer with Nazism. He was founder of groups significant in the British history of organic farming, as well being a participant in inter-war far right politics.-Early life:...

,
Jorian Jenks

Jorian Jenks

Jorian Edward Forwood Jenks was an English farmer, environmentalism pioneer and fascist. He has been described as "one of the most dominant figures in the development of the organic movement".-Early life:...

 and the "Blackshirt Farmer" Bob Saunders. Some have also accused the "radical antiquarian" John Michell

John Michell (writer)

John Frederick Carden Michell was an English writer whose key sources of inspiration were Plato and Charles Fort...

 of holding ecofascist views. In his 1995 book The Village That Died For England, concerned with the Dorset

Dorset

Dorset , is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The county town is Dorchester which is situated in the south. The Hampshire towns of Bournemouth and Christchurch joined the county with the reorganisation of local government in 1974...

 village of Tyneham

Tyneham

Tyneham is a ghost village in south Dorset, England, near Lulworth on the Isle of Purbeck. It remains a civil parish.-Location:The village is situated northeast of Worbarrow Bay on the Jurassic Coast, about south of Wareham and about west of Swanage. It is part of the Lulworth Estate. Tyneham is...

 which was requisitioned by the British Army

British Army

The British Army is the land warfare branch of Her Majesty's Armed Forces in the United Kingdom. It came into being with the unification of the Kingdom of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. The new British Army incorporated Regiments that had already existed in England...

, Patrick Wright details much of the history of British ecofascism during the Second World War.

Pentti Linkola

Pentti Linkola

Kaarlo Pentti Linkola is a radical Finnish deep ecologist, polemicist, and fisherman. He has written widely about his ideas and is a prominent thinker in Finland, but, at the same time, is also an extremely controversial figure. He lives a simple and austere life. Linkola was occupitional...

 can be most accurately described as a kind of totalitarian deep ecologist, and although he does not specifically endorse fascism per se, he has expressed admiration for the German National Socialist regime for its efficiency in killing large numbers of human beings in a short period of time, describing the massacres of the Holocaust and Stalin's Great Purge

Great Purge

The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...

 as "massive thinning operations." He advocates a strong, centralised ecological dictatorship, with harsh population control measures and brutal punishment of those he considers to be environmental abusers. Needless to say, Linkola has attracted considerable controversy both in his home country and worldwide.

The influential European Nouvelle Droite

Nouvelle Droite

Nouvelle Droite is a school of political thought founded largely on the works of Alain de Benoist and GRECE .-Etymology and history:...

 movement, developed by Alain de Benoist

Alain de Benoist

Alain de Benoist is a French academic, philosopher, a founder of the Nouvelle Droite and head of the French think tank GRECE. Benoist is a critic of liberalism, free markets and egalitarianism.-Biography:...

 and other individuals involved with the GRECE think-tank, have also attracted accusations of ecofascism from the Left, due to their blend of anti-globalism, environmentalism, and European ethno-nationalism. However, De Benoist himself dismisses fascism as "brown Jacobinism", and condemns racial prejudice and populist-nationalists like Jean-Marie le Pen

Jean-Marie Le Pen

Jean-Marie Le Pen is a French far right-wing and nationalist politician who is founder and former president of the Front National party. Le Pen has run for the French presidency five times, most notably in 2002, when in a surprise upset he came second, polling more votes in the first round than...

.

The actual number of organisations that could properly be described as ecofascist is extremely small. A related group is the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party, whose emblem is the Nazi swastika on a green background, symbolising the party's synthesis of ecology with National Socialism. The latter gained controversy due its connection with high-school killer Jeff Weise

Jeff Weise

Jeffrey James "Jeff" Weise was an Ojibwe Native American adolescent, and a student at Red Lake Senior High School in Red Lake, Minnesota. He murdered nine people and wounded five others in a shooting spree on March 21, 2005, in the Red Lake Indian Reservation located in northwest Minnesota...

, though some have suggested that it may be a web-based parody, as it is not an actual active political party.

The term "ecofascist" has also been used by Mark Potok

Mark Potok

Mark Potok is a spokesman and director of publications and information for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, a nonprofit organization that arose from the anti-segregation movement to counter extremism and hate crimes....

 of the Southern Poverty Law Center

Southern Poverty Law Center

The Southern Poverty Law Center is an American nonprofit civil rights organization noted for its legal victories against white supremacist groups; legal representation for victims of hate groups; monitoring of alleged hate groups, militias and extremist organizations; and educational programs that...

 to describe James Jay Lee, the ecoterrorist who took several hostages at the headquarters of Discovery Communications

Discovery Communications

Discovery Communications, Inc. is an American global media and entertainment company. The company started as a single channel in 1985, The Discovery Channel. Today, DCI has global operations offering 28 network entertainment brands on more than 100 channels in more than 180 countries in 39...

 on September 1, 2010. Potok also connects ecofascism with nativists who appeal to environmentalists by arguing that immigration causes environmental degradation.

Environmentalism in Nazi Germany

Possibly explaining why Mein Kampf has no chapter on ecology

Ecology

Ecology is the scientific study of the relations that living organisms have with respect to each other and their natural environment. Variables of interest to ecologists include the composition, distribution, amount , number, and changing states of organisms within and among ecosystems...

, British academic Roger Griffin

Roger Griffin

Roger D. Griffin is a British academic political theorist at Oxford Brookes University, England. His recent efforts have focused on a definition and examination of fascism...

 has noted that "the place which a transformed relationship to nature occupies within the fascist scheme ... as well as the role played in it by pagan, "immanentist" or cultic concepts of nature can vary enormously..."

After the early 1930s, Hitler generally followed a vegetarian diet, although he ate meat on occasion. A fear of cancer (from which his mother died) is the most widely cited reason, though it is also asserted that Hitler, an antivivisectionist

Animal welfare in Nazi Germany

There was widespread support for animal welfare in Nazi Germany and the Nazis took several measures to ensure protection of animals. Many Nazi leaders, including Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring, were supporters of animal protection. Several Nazis were environmentalists, and species protection and...

, had a profound concern for animals.

In 1935, the Nazi regime enacted the "Reich Nature Protection Act". While not a purely Nazi piece of legislation, as parts of its influences pre-dated the Nazi rise to power, it nevertheless reflected Nazi ideology. The concept of the Dauerwald (best translated as the "perpetual forest") which included concepts such as forest management

Forest management

200px|thumb|right|[[Sustainable development|Sustainable]] forest management carried out by [[Complejo Forestal y Maderero Panguipulli|Complejo Panguipulli]] has contributed to the preservation of the forested landscape around [[Neltume]], a sawmill town in Chile...

 and protection was promoted and efforts were also made to curb air pollution

Air pollution

Air pollution is the introduction of chemicals, particulate matter, or biological materials that cause harm or discomfort to humans or other living organisms, or cause damage to the natural environment or built environment, into the atmosphere....

.

Author Frank Uekötter has described as a "gross error" claims that Nazi Germany was the first country in Europe to create wilderness reserves. The first European nature reserves were in Finland at the start of the 1800s. and there were in fact nature reserves in 1838 in the Czech part of Austria-Hungary. During their rise to power, the Nazis were supported by German environmentalists and conservationists, but environmental issues were gradually pushed aside in the build-up to the Second World War.

By contrast, non-German forms of fascism for the most part lacked any noteworthy ecological strand. One exception was the peasant-based Iron Guard

Iron Guard

The Iron Guard is the name most commonly given to a far-right movement and political party in Romania in the period from 1927 into the early part of World War II. The Iron Guard was ultra-nationalist, fascist, anti-communist, and promoted the Orthodox Christian faith...

 of Romania

Romania

Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...

, who saw capitalism, which they associated with Jewry, as being destructive to both the Romanian countryside and their Orthodox Christian culture. Elsewhere in Europe, ecological concerns were found individually rather than collectively, e.g. Julius Evola

Julius Evola

Barone Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola also known as Julius Evola, was an Italian philosopher and esotericist...

, an Italian writer and supporter of the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini

Benito Mussolini

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....

, who wrote books glorifying a primitive state of nature and denouncing modernity. Griffin has argued that "fascism repeatedly generates images which evoke a specious kinship with a "panenhenistic

Spiritual Naturalism

Naturalistic Spirituality and Spiritual Naturalism are interchangeable terms for the same philosophical perspective, with the latter term more commonly used...

" communion with nature" (pg.642) as a means of mobilising members of the fascists' ethnic group to the cause of ultranationalism. He cites the glorification of wilderness in Nazi art and the ruralist novels of fascist supporters Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun was a Norwegian author, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. He was praised by King Haakon VII of Norway as Norway's soul....

 and Henry Williamson

Henry Williamson

Henry William Williamson was an English naturalist, farmer and prolific author known for his natural and social history novels. He won the Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1928 with his book Tarka the Otter....

 as examples of this.
Some have associated French Esoteric Hitlerist and Hindu

Hindu

Hindu refers to an identity associated with the philosophical, religious and cultural systems that are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. As used in the Constitution of India, the word "Hindu" is also attributed to all persons professing any Indian religion...

 convert Savitri Devi with ecofascism, due to her support for animal rights and vegetarianism

Vegetarianism

Vegetarianism encompasses the practice of following plant-based diets , with or without the inclusion of dairy products or eggs, and with the exclusion of meat...

, which she linked to a condemnation of Jewish dietary practices.

External links

• Ecofascism: Lessons from the German experience, by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier
• Ecofascism: What is It?, by David Orton