Ecofascism

Ecofascism joins love of the land to a claim about which people belong on it, and it answers ecological crisis by excluding those it counts as surplus. Scripture rejects that claim, teaching that all nations share one blood and that the earth has enough and to spare, and it asks Mormon transhumanists to watch for the same error in their own hopes.

Ecofascism is the belief that a people and its land form an organic whole that must be protected from outsiders, by authoritarian means if necessary, for the sake of the environment. The word joins eco-, from the Greek oikos, "house" or "household," which gave ecology its name in 1866, to fascism, from the Latin fasces, the bundle of rods carried before Roman magistrates as a sign of their power to punish. Together, the two roots describe a household governed by the rod, in which the first question is who may live there. Ecofascism is often treated as environmentalism carried too far, a reading that misplaces the problem. Its distinctive error of ecofascism is a doctrine of belonging, the claim that some people are surplus to the land, and scripture speaks to that claim directly.

Blood, Soil, and One Blood

Ecofascism has a documented history, and its central image of blood and soil runs against a verse its sympathizers have sometimes claimed.

In the early twentieth century an American conservationist who worked to save the bison also wrote a widely read defense of "Nordic" racial superiority, and in Germany the slogan Blut und Boden, "blood and soil," fused attachment to the land with racial purity and became Nazi policy. In 2019 mass shooters in Christchurch and El Paso cited environmental decline and overpopulation in the statements they published before attacking Muslims and immigrants. Paul's sermon at Athens answers the first half of the slogan: God "hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth" (Acts 17:26). It is significant that American segregationists seized on the verse's closing words, "the bounds of their habitation," as a divine order to keep the races apart, reading past the clause that makes every nation one family. The Book of Mormon describes the society its people reached after Christ's visit in the same terms, with no "manner of -ites," its people "in one, the children of Christ" (4 Nephi 1:17).

The Stranger in the Land

The law of Moses commanded Israel to love the immigrant in the very land it was charged to keep holy.

Leviticus joins care for the land, which must rest in its sabbath years, to care for the outsider: "the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Leviticus 19:34). The Hebrew ger, "stranger" or "sojourner," is a resident foreigner without inherited land; its root sense is "guest." Interpreters have long noted how often the Torah repeats the command to protect the ger, along with the widow and the orphan. Less often noticed is that the same law gives Israel the guest's status in its own country: "the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me" (Leviticus 25:23). Israel held the land as stewards and guests of its owner, so the holiness laws that protect the land also deny anyone the standing to declare others surplus to it.

Enough and to Spare

Ecofascism draws its urgency from scarcity, and Restoration revelation denies that the earth's limits make some people expendable.

In 1974 an American ecologist likened rich nations to lifeboats that would sink if they took in the poor, and a Finnish deep ecologist later welcomed mass death as relief for nature. A revelation of 1831 says that marriage is ordained so "that the earth might answer the end of its creation; and that it might be filled with the measure of man" (D&C 49:16-17). Another, given in 1834, places the problem in distribution: the Lord provides "that the poor shall be exalted, in that the rich are made low. For the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare" (D&C 104:16-17). Latter-day Saints read these verses as a promise of sufficiency conditioned on stewardship and sharing. The mass famines forecast in the late 1960s for the following decade largely failed to arrive as crop yields rose, though hunger and ecological strain persist. Mormon transhumanists see in such gains a reason to pursue technologies that let the earth support more people with less harm, among them higher-yield agriculture and clean energy that return land to wild things.

The Shadow in Transhumanism

Transhumanism shares part of its lineage with eugenics, so its adherents owe their own hopes the scrutiny they give ecofascism.

The biologist who coined transhumanism in 1957 became president of Britain's Eugenics Society two years later, and recent critics argue that parts of the movement still rank human lives by their projected value to the future. A technological program can make the same error as a green one, deciding which people are worth carrying forward and treating the rest as a cost. Restoration teaching leaves no category of surplus persons, since all nations are of one blood and the earth was made to be filled with them. The test for any environmental or technological program is whether it enlarges the earth's capacity to receive every member of the human family, the stranger included, or decides by the rod which people the household can do without.