#06 Peter Staudenmaier on Ecofascism: Where environmentalism and the far right meet

In this new episode of Spoken Earth, Adam Weymouth speaks with Professor Peter Staudenmaier, about the historical overlap between environmentalism and far right thought, and the growing trends of ecofascism today. Staudenmaier is a professor of modern German history at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and his work focuses on Nazism and Fascism, the history of racial thought, and the political history of environmentalism. Staudenmaier has been an active participant in the anarchist movement, the green movement, and the cooperative movement in the United States and Germany for over two decades. In 1995, he co-authored the book Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, a work that grew out of what he saw as a lack of awareness of the history of environmentalism amongst his fellow activists. In it, he documented how Nazism frequently intersected with ecological thought in everything from organic farming through to the mantra of ‘Blood and Soil.’ But far from being confined to history, the resurgent far right is again adopting its own creed of environmentalism, and some of it is bleeding over into more mainstream views. We discuss the history, and these new worrying trends.