Back to Nature

Procaccini’s audience of entrepreneurs might have been happier to hear about a “spiritual” version of ecological action rather than a “left-wing ideological” one, perhaps for their own rather “material” reasons. The conference at which he spoke, shortly before the last Italian general election, was meant to showcase his party’s pro-business mores. Hence for Fratelli d’Italia’s Ecology spokesman:

One hundred seventy-four years after the Communist Manifesto there is another specter haunting Europe, that of a degenerated form of environmentalism that preserves the same foundational elements of that Marxist idea, namely materialism, internationalism, hatred of business and the economy, and a certain violence in the way they assert their ideas against those who don’t think like them. Of course, we fight against the exploitation of the land, against pollution, in defense of biodiversity, and we fight against global warming, but our vision is completely different; it’s more sincere and coherent.

Like Scruton, he continued, the Italian right believes in ecology because it is an intergenerational compact, “between the dead, the living, and the not-yet-born.” For Procaccini, “life is sacred,” even before the moment of birth: hence ecology is “what leads us to fight for the life of a seal pup, but even more so for the unborn child in a woman’s womb.” Even aside from Fratelli d’Italia’s own habitual antiabortionism, other right-wing ecologists share this focus on defending “life” and “creation,” likewise emphasizing procreation and the raising of birth rates as a major challenge of our age.

The Catholic right-winger Bastié, a veteran of the Manif Pour Tous protests against same-sex marriage, has strongly attacked the idea of not having kids for fear of the effects on the planet. When in 2015 the then-twenty-three-year-old launched the “integral ecology” magazine Limite, the first issue bore the striking title “Degrow and Multiply” — a call to defend the planet, precisely in order to have more people.

For some right-wingers, progressive ideas on gender — destroying the lauded natural condition of the heterosexual, child-rearing family — undermine humanity’s roots in natural life. Yet this emphasis on harmony also has different, non-Catholic versions. It is a prominent theme in the writings of Alain de Benoist, a neo-pagan, theorist of the defense of ethnicity, and leading member of the French New Right that took form in the 1960s. De Benoist upholds the spirit of the “conservative revolution,” this time to restore humanity’s harmonious relationship with the natural world. Drawing from both ethnonationalist thinkers like Ernst Haeckel (the nineteenth-century German zoologist who coined the term “ecology”) and ecologists like Bernard Charbonneau, he builds a right-wing critique of progress. For De Benoist, “Ecology is fundamentally conservative, as it fights for the respect of ecosystems and natural cycles, it values rootedness, it rejects the plundering of landscapes, it has a sense of the land, it traditionally mistrusts the damage caused in the name of progress and productivism.”

De Benoist’s critique of “progress” extends to modern “techno-industrial society” and the twilight of the agricultural age in which “the environment and the economy were not radically distinct.” This is an explicit critique of the capitalist profit motive: for De Benoist, “More often than not, it has led to a search for short-term profitability, while the costs necessary for the reproduction or reconstitution of noncommercial conditions of production were pushed ‘outward’, that is to say, ultimately, onto society.” But if whoever wants to talk about environmental destruction should also talk about capitalism, the “productivist” paradigm extends also to the Communist-led states of the twentieth century: “This propensity for plundering or unconditionally depleting natural resources was also the rule in the countries of ‘actually existing socialism,’ as can be seen from the current situation of the natural environment in Eastern European countries, which is generally disastrous.”

De Benoist is likewise critical of efforts to integrate the profit motive into environmental planning, through instruments like carbon markets and the “polluter pays” principle. Even technocratic plans for sustainable development, he argues, belong to what Norwegian ecologist Arne Naess has called a “shallow ecology” that continues to respond to an instrumental and anthropocentric vision of nature. Here the state’s efforts at containing emissions are seen as merely a longer-term application of the profit motive.  It “stops at emphasizing the ‘responsibilities of man’ towards nature, which is primarily conceived as a capital that must not be recklessly squandered.” To this, De Benoist counterposes a “deep ecology” based on a wholly different philosophy of life: one that seeks not progress, but harmony, a “symbiosis between all living beings” and a “wisdom” based on the cultivation of rootedness. The defense of “plural” ethnicities — “plural” because they defend their distinctness — goes together with a defense of place and home.

In France, such ideas are common in the “identitarian” milieu, a set of currents broadly more radical than Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, even if some figures from this scene are also active in the party. Groups such as Terre et Peuple (Land and People) promote a Völkisch focus on the rootedness of ethnic identity in the soil. Founded by Pierre Vial — himself formerly part of De Benoist’s intellectual circle GRECE — this is a stoutly white-supremacist group, founded on the principle of “ethnic resistance.” Likewise publishers such as Culture et Racines (Culture and Roots) promote not only conspiracy-theorist literature about the pandemic, the “chains of usury,” and the “Great Reset” (with environmental, social, and governance objectives said to be a plot to subvert private property) but also a doctrine of “collapsology” and “survivalism” to cope with looming climate chaos. A recent Le Monde investigation found that there are even “vegans in Action Française,” the historic center of the French far right since the Dreyfus Affair of the late 1890s.

De Benoist’s ideas are also part of the cultural brew also of the Italian far right, also thanks to the anti-modernist influence of Julius Evola, especially in the circles of the neofascist youth in the 1960s, or the celebration of the premodern world in a thinker like J. R. R. Tolkien. Even today, a young writer such as Francesco Giubilei (a NatCon stalwart who briefly had a role in the Culture Ministry under the current government) can write of the Right’s focus on “community” and “tradition” over economic values. Still, in the electoral propaganda of Europe’s main hard-right parties, we find only a far more restricted version of this idea, notably in the idealization of farming as the embodiment of humanity’s closeness to nature. If they often ridicule consumerist left-wingers who preach ecology yet live wealthy lifestyles or want free trade with China, the accusation of progressive hypocrisy certainly does not imply a more full-throated critique of capitalism.

For Fratelli d’Italia’s Procaccini, “Our attention to the environment begins from territory, from the place we live, also with a spiritual approach that plans for the necessary integration between man and nature.” In this reference to “beginning from the place we live,” we should not only read an “inspiration” for ecological politics that comes from a defense of one’s home. It is, more than that, the banner of opposition to “globalist” and state frameworks for reordering production, opposing those who are green for “ideological” reasons and instead insisting that those spiritually inclined to defend their homes will take the necessary action.

Typical of this idea of man as guardian of nature was Procaccini’s response to massive floods in Germany and Western Europe in 2021 that killed almost 250 people. Doubting that such a timeless type of disaster could be attributable to global warming, Procaccini said that “unscrupulous interventions in nature” by building projects “altering the landscape” may have “deprived nature of its defenses” when faced with the floods.

The idea that those closest to nature are its best champions — and beef farmers defenders of cows — is also promoted by forces like the Dutch Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), a right-wing “voice for the countryside” that routinely insists that farmers are the best spokesmen for the natural world because they know it best. Founded in 2019, the BBB party drapes itself in the color green and the imagery of vast expanses of countryside and claims to speak for the irate farmers who now routinely clog the Dutch and other European capitals with tractors. BBB, the creation of a marketing agency, first emerged to channel the energy of farmer protests against a European ruling, ratified by the Dutch Supreme Court, that limits nitrogen emissions in protected areas. Aside from other low-tax (and anti-immigrant) policies, it is in effect a lobby for the expansion of agro-industry, removing limits on pollution and livestock numbers, in what is already the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter.

Against “Ideology”

BBB is also a Euroskeptic party, critical of the European Union’s Green Deal plan to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. This is a central EU investment project — mooting over €1 trillion in funds — and, even in its aid for private business, typical of the kind of politically directed economic reboot disliked by many right-wing critics of “progressive” greenism. It is increasingly criticized even by the main center-right group in the European Parliament, the European People’s Party (EPP), which includes parties like the German Christian Democrats.

In January, perhaps inspired by their American cousins, legislators from the EPP accused EU authorities of funding NGOs in order to push “shadow lobbying” for green causes, claiming that they had devoted “€5.5 billion to defame farmers, already burdened by standards that are out of touch with the reality on the ground [and] to attack our businesses.” A Politico investigation of the claims found that the money actually allotted to NGOs counted for under 0.3 percent of this €5.5 billion.

Procaccini is also the cospeaker of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), a right-wing group in the EU parliament mainly made up of free-marketeer, anti-immigration parties. This January, ECR allied with the Patriots for Europe group, which includes Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, in a call to suspend the Green Deal. In a letter outlining the call to halt the project, Le Pen ally Jordan Bardella argued that Europe needs “swift, massive and concrete action to protect our companies, our citizens and our future”; yet through the Green Deal “the Left . . . is threatening growth through ideology.” What is instead needed is a “pragmatic and realistic environmental ambition.” The letter was a bid for the attention of the EPP group, the largest in the EU parliament, citing also the words of Poland’s center-right premier Donald Tusk, who recently called for a “critical review” of the Green Deal and a priority on collective EU military spending.

At meetups like NatCon, nationalist speakers have often appealed for the creation of a right-wing vision of ecology, which asserts the priority of family, tradition, and the preservation of nature, while ridiculing green ideologues. They promote “localism” against “globalism,” the defense of a “people and its land” against cosmopolitan urbanites and immigration. Yet as they grow influential in European politics, able to make deals with mainstream pro-business conservatives, enter government with them, and even to seek to build a majority in the EU parliament, the moral reproach against capitalist anarchy seems to wilt.

The cultural critique of urban progressives who think that going vegan will save the planet alleges that middle-class youth are overeducated and ignorant of rural life. But in practical policy terms, the right-wing call for a “conservative ecology” rarely amounts to more than a defense of farmers and support for European industrialists over Chinese imports.

Europe is, Bastié notes, no longer a continent of growth and a sense of progress, and many voters find unappealing the idea of reducing their consumption even as Asian economic superpowers forge ahead. The degrowth that we actually get may not be so much a project for reordering our societies’ priorities, as a more pervasive austerian reality as longer lifespans and the aging population become a more expensive cost for those who are working.

The critical aspect of right-wing ecologism may indeed serve to tear down projects like the Green Deal, based on skepticism that it is a viable plan for creating jobs and alleging that its measures to rein in emissions will come at the cost of farmers. Far less clear is that the spiritual appeal to harmony, community, and defending our roots in the land will be able to hold up when faced with worsening climate conditions and declining living standards.