“A woman come up to me and [said] that migrants arrive in Canada and then use more resources than they did in their original country, so the solution to climate change is to keep people out,” said Kate Hodgson, a fourth-year First Nations and Indigenous studies student and organizer at UBCC350.
Eco-fascism is a small but growing ideology held by some on the far-right that the solution to environmental decline is depopulation and restricting immigration. With this community growing online and offline through terrorist acts, is there a risk of eco-fascism being present at UBC?
Notable eco-fascists include the Christchurch mosque shooter, who mentioned Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Breivik in his manifesto, and the El Paso shooter who believed that reducing the human population would help solve environmental damage.
Eco-fascism isn’t a new idea, as it was present even in Nazi Germany. The notable Nazi phrase “Blood and soil” was popularized by the minister of food and agriculture Richard Walter Darré, who held the belief that race is entirely tied to agriculture and physical land. This phrase was chanted by the far-right crowd at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, reviving this idea in the mainstream.
“We in the global north have created a crisis that is forcing people out, either through extreme weather events or environmental changes that are brought on by climate change, or by other forces that are the product of colonization and capitalism, which are so intricately tied with the climate crisis,” said Hodgson.
With such a large amount of environmental activists on campus and the noticeable move toward sustainable practices on campus, it’s worth questioning whether or not the more extreme ideologies of environmentalism have been a problem at UBC.
Michelle Marcus, a fifth-year environmental science student and organizer at UBCC350, said she has seen these underlying ideologies.
“When I come across [eco-fascists], they don’t explicitly identify as eco-fascist, but I think there's a lot of ways that people look at the climate crisis and solutions to it that are eco-fascist or at least racist, in particular conversations around population,” said Marcus.
“So often people will say that the climate crisis is a population issue, we have too many people, people need to have less kids and that ends up targeting racialized communities, communities in the global south, it becomes a question of who has the right to live, who has the right to have children.”
Rachel Cheang, another organizer from UBCC350 and third-year human geography student, believes the way to combat eco-fascism is to understand that the climate crisis is caused by systems of oppression.
“We need behavioural change on an individual level, but also recognizing that the urgency of climate change doesn’t just require everyone to stop using plastic straws, but for everyone to actively understand that climate change was build on systems of capitalism, oppression and colonialism, and how we can take action against that, more so I think within campus groups,” Cheang said.
The Student Environment Centre (SEC), an AMS resource group funded by student fees, mainly focuses on funding environmental activism on campus using allotted resource group money that comes from student fees. Co-chair of the SEC Ella Kim-Marriot has never seen anything as extreme as eco-fascism be brought forward in her work.
“I’ve only been one of the co-chairs for the past year, so I'm not sure in the past if we've gotten requests for things like that, but in the past year, we haven’t gotten many requests that we've turned down,” she said.
“We definitely haven’t experienced anything as extreme as that.”
Kim-Marriott says there are measures in place to prevent eco-fascists from being funded and enabled.
“Whenever we get funding, we try to think of it in terms of how many students it's going to benefit, and then whether it's going to benefit the community at large or not … If we're using funding from the AMS, then technically that funding is for all of us combined. So we can't really go ahead with the project if it would hinder like the goal of one of the other.”
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