Environmentalism on the American Extreme Right
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.23702Keywords:
Extremism, Radical right, Survivalism, White homeland, EnvironmentalismAbstract
American right-wing extremists have rarely explicitly stated environmental policies. However, they have exhibited implicit environmentalism. It has resulted from a fusion of three factors: an intense distaste for cities; a belief in the supremacy of small social and governmental units; and the self-sufficiency known as survivalism. These result in a romantic nostalgia for an agrarian, pre-industrial past when current environmental problems did not exist. The most extreme extension of this mode of thinking is the radical right’s belief in the creation of a ‘white homeland’ in the Pacific Northwest. Religion does not affect the character of the implicit environmentalism surveyed here but is evident in extremists’ millenarian or utopian ideas about the future.
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