In this ClimateGenn episode, I am speaking to authors, podcasters, and activists, Sam Moore and Alex Roberts whose recently published book, The Rise Of Ecofascism, explores the characteristics of past, present, and potentially future ‘ecofascism’.
The risks posed to society from extreme politics on the right and the left has been rising in recent years. Even in the last week or so, a cache of information was leaked via the Anonymous hacking group linking Putin’s regime to the financing of far right-wing groups across Europe.
More evidence of the rise in far-right and fascist groups is seen in places like the UK, France, Italy, or Hungary, where political ground can become an objective.
Sam and Alex’s work aims to be a pragmatic guide to identify these tendencies and emerging ideas in order to be able to stop them from rising into dominant movements, which as they evidence in the book, never deliver on the grand promises they make.
They also provide a long history of how the far-right has developed relationships to nature that recur in history and are also echoed today in political narratives around climate denialism and delays in ridding ourselves of the fossil fuel era that is destroying the world as we know it.
Thank you for listening to the ClimateGenn series. In the next episode I am speaking with Dr Paul Behrens on the risks of food system shocks arising from the Ukraine crisis and how this is a signal of how vulnerable our overall food system is in a worsening climate and ecological crisis.
We also had our first Cambridge Climate Series event last week with Professor Lord Martin Rees and Professor David Keith discussing the complexity and major issues surrounding the deployment of geoengineering. The session was moderated by students from Cambridge and covered a lot of ground, so if you are interested in geoengineering then it is worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeytTkICcDI