Ecofascism Explained and Why We All Need To Be Aware of it.

Humans are not the issue. Human nature is not the issue. Our systems are the issue, this is what needs dismantling, not people, not population.

I remember first learning about the idea of overpopulation in university, as we analyzed the findings of Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb”, a 1968 best-selling book on how population growth would exceed available resources, and that population needed to be controlled. However, this idea was not birthed in the last half century, it dates back to 1798 with the Malthusian Theory of Population, which posits that populations need to be reduced by food shortages, famines, war and national disasters. This perverse idea lives on today, and has even infiltrated the environmental movement, pinning pollution, climate change and other ecological issues on the fact that there are too many people. Yet, which people become the focus of this lens? You can take a good guess that it isn’t privileged, affluent, and primarily white people. 

This overpopulation argument is utilized by a perilous ideology, ecofascism, which “blames the demise of the environment on overpopulation and immigration”, and, specifically, the accountability is placed on marginalized people over those that have privilege and power. This not only ignores the roots of our ecological collapse, it also perpetuates racism and economic injustice. Unfortunately, with the rise of ultra-right Authoritarian governments, this ideology is gaining more momentum, especially as corporate and political leaders can no longer deny the climate and environmental crisis.

 As activist Michaela Loach states, “For example, with the overpopulation argument, they'll often cite countries in the Global South and say: ‘Because they have high population growth rates, they're the cause of the climate crisis. And what we need is have their populations’ growth slow down or decrease because too many humans is the problem.’”

I see a common example of this in my work all the time. If I had a dollar for every time someone mentioned to me that doing anything about plastic pollution in Canada is futile because a majority of marine debris comes from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa, I’d have enough to make all my animal husbandry and hot air balloon dreams come true. Yet, here I am, no animals, no hot air balloons, and still having to dismantle this broken argument. So, because consumerism produces mass amounts of waste, ecofascists incorrectly condemn developing nations, BIPOC and folks with a lower socioeconomic status for using single-use plastics and other cheap disposable products, yet fail to mention the damage executed by polluting petrochemical based corporations that heavily market their cheap products to developing nations. They also fail to mention the systems of oppression that keep people locked in poverty and having to rely on cheap consumer goods that are packed, wrapped, and packaged in plastic.

Now, let’s look at the facts. The lowest consumption rates and footprints are found in countries with higher populations. Again, it’s industrialized countries that comprise 20% of the world’s population but devour 80% of the earth’s resources. In Canada alone, we waste 40% of the food we produce. We produce enough food to feed the planet over, and this would skyrocket if we implemented regenerative agriculture on a global scale. So, the issue is not of populations, but of our systems that waste materials, degrade ecosystems, pollute, and privilege the richest in society to become even richer through systems of oppression and resource extraction. Oxfam released a study that found the richest 10% of people produce half of the planet’s individual-consumption-based fossil fuel emission, in addition to this, 100 companies are responsible for 70% of global emissions.

What’s nuts is that while the most affluent countries in the global north, again, namely multinational corporations and the richest sector of our society, it’s BIPOC and folks in the global south who suffer the most from the climate crisis and environmental degradation. Consider the people living in the south pacific islands like Tuvalu, whose homes are getting swallowed up by rising insurmountable seas. Or Indigenous communities in Northern Canada whose way of life is drastically changing as the climate warms, impacting hunting, fishing, culture, and all other aspects of people’s existence. It’s also BIPOC and lower socioeconomic communities that end up living closest to landfills, incinerators, mines, plastic refineries, and other polluting and environmentally degrading industrial activities, meaning they face disproportionate threats to their health and wellbeing.

We’ve also seen an ecofascism narrative emerge from the pandemic, with animals returning to ecosystems in the absence of humans and how this got spun to paint humans beings as the virus, and that nature will regenerate if we’re not in the picture. Again, this is a fascist logic because a pandemic taking the lives of over a million people, many of whom were vulnerable and marginalized, is not good for nature. Us being locked up in our homes is not good for nature. To truly address climate change, we need to address systemic racism and oppression, which is woven into the population argument, which, at this point, is a waste of time, puts at risk people in even greater danger, and distracts a lot of people from taking systems changed based action. We cannot let ourselves be detracted by this elitist fictional story, we must continue to spark systems change and ensure that justice is at the centre of our efforts as we work to decarbonize our society and shift to a more circular and equitable world. We need to denudate our cynical understanding of human nature as selfish and greedy. We need to embrace the truth that human communities can be active co-creators in a more biodiverse planet, again, as seen with the fact that 80% of the world’s biodiversity exists on Indigenous People’s land.

As Naomi Klein states, “We’re at a crossroads, where it’s not about who denies it anymore. I mean, I think that within a few years climate change denial as a force is going to have disappeared. The question is: In the face of this crisis, are we going to — we, in the wealthy world — hoard what is left, lockout everybody else, see this resurgence in these abhorrent ideologies, that never went away, and are would just going to take care of our own, as they say? Or are we going to recognize that our fates are interconnected? Are we going to completely reimagine borders? And are we going to share what’s left? And this is at the heart of the tremendous responsibility of our moment.”