By Sara Hill
When an extremist opened fire on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, murdering 51 people and injuring many more in 2019, headlines around the world began talking about ‘ecofascists’, a label the shooter had claimed in his manifesto. When that attack was followed by another a few years later using the same label, ecofascism once again hit the headlines again, prompting a lot of public discussion about this apparently contradictory ideology where the far-right meets environmentalism.
What is Ecofascism?
The historical development of ecofascism can be traced to Volkisch philosophy in late 1800s Germany, through Nazi ‘Blood and Soil’ narratives and into the modernity of far-right extremism, where it resides as a transnational, (mostly) online network. Ecofascism embraces a romanticised, mystical imaginary wherein ethnopluralist standpoints are ‘justified’ through a naturalised connection with the land, meaning that only those ‘from that land’ can truly steward it. Migrants therefore become an environmental threat as they lack the connection to the land to which they have migrated, although notably this belief is not transferred to white residents of settler colonial nations such as the United States. From this, it joins with Great Replacement theory and adds a sprinkling of neo-Malthusian scarcity rhetoric to result in violent far-right anti-immigration sentiment under the cover of climate concern.
It’s this supposed concern for the environment which really differentiates ecofascism from many other standpoints within the far-right umbrella, which are often characterised by climate denialism or scepticism. Although it is true that this may be changing more broadly as climate change becomes harder and harder to ignore, this is by no means a common feature of far-right extremism. For ecofascists, climate change is a real and existential threat for humanity, however it is viewed in the previously described narratives. Therefore birth rates in the Global South are blamed for climate damage and destructive migration is both a cause of and result of environmental damage. The solution to climate change, in this construction, is therefore enforced ethnopluralism and increasing border securitisation. We see this construction in the manifestos of mass shooters and, increasingly, influencing more mainstream discourse in the form of ecobordering as a policy proposition from far-right parties in Europe.
It’s worth noting at this point that some scholars question the word ‘ecofascism’ and its analytical usefulness, preferring instead the broader category of ‘far-right ecologies’ to describe intersections between the far-right and environmental narratives. My research will involve interviewing activists and campaigners working to counter hate speech online whose reports use the term ‘ecofascism’. Therefore, whilst I acknowledge some issues with its definition, I am choosing to align my language with that of my participants while attempting to situate these narratives within the wider picture of the global far-right and extremism.
Bringing a Political Economy Lens
My upcoming research focuses on ecofascism and ecofascist narratives’ appearance online in social media platforms. There are many studies of course into the appearance of the far-right online, and for good reason. In the ecofascism sphere, the Christchurch shooter’s own response to the question of where his views were developed was “The Internet, of course.” My questions focus less on the extremist end of this ideology however and more towards if, how and where these narratives may be being normalised in more mainstream social media platforms.
Coming from a political economy background, I also intend to explore an aspect of the issue that I believe deserves more attention; namely the monetisation and profitability of online content. This goes beyond the well known method of revenue generation on social media, the adverts users inevitably try to skip, and into the labyrinthine mechanics of user profiling and generating vast quantities of behavioural data for use in revenue generation. Shoshana Zuboff’s ‘Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ is a key work in explicating these mechanics but has yet to be analysed in combination with the proliferation of the far-right online. Considering these together is vital in understanding how the political economy of the internet creates perverse incentives to promote problematic and dangerous content to social media users. There is insufficient space here for a full accounting of Zuboff’s thesis and how it applies to extremist content, but one dangerous aspect of social media in this context is content funnels.
This creation of content funnels can have problematic unintended consequences, as evidenced by a recent study showing that interaction with transphobic content on TikTok leads a user down a funnel towards far-right violence with startling rapidity. In the ecofascist context, content related to climate change, which gains attention from across the political spectrum, can inadvertently expand the audience for ecofascist narratives by providing another funnel into extremism. A user who paused in shock at a racist video and also displays interest in the environment may find themselves swiftly in the realms of “Save trees not refugees” slogans. Crucially, whether a user agrees with this content or not does not detract from the extraction of data for monetisation. Therefore the economic imperative to create and promote extremist content remains and the more of this content is created the more potential it has to seep into culture.
What Next?
In our increasingly complex and interconnected digital world, the factors which generate normatively problematic outcomes are more myriad than ever. With perverse incentives created by vast profits, we have created a data economy that supports a perfect storm of vulnerabilities open to exploitation. Since the private hands in which the power of social media platforms lies are notoriously difficult to regulate, we must work to better understand how the mechanics contribute to the spread and mainstreaming of extremist narratives. I hope my work will contribute to this and am actively recruiting for interview participants to speak to about this currently. Please feel free to get in touch!
Sara Hill is a doctoral researcher in the School of School of Sociological Studies, Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on ecofascism and its normalisation into public discourse.
This blog post is part of a series featuring contributions from presenters at the VOX-Pol Next Generation Network Conference 2025, held at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic.
Image: Carsten Koall/Getty Images, shutterstock