Conservative Environmentalism? Hardly - It's Rapidly Becoming Just Another Anti-Immigrant Weapon
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Republicans, aware that many of their own younger voters are turned off by the relentless climate denial as they see their futures wreathed in wildfire smoke and flood water, have sensed an opportunity. “The right is reclaiming that older Malthusian population rhetoric and is using that as a cudgel in green terms rather than unpopular racist terms,” said Blair Taylor, program director at the Institute for Social Ecology, an educational and research body. “It’s weird that this has become a popular theme in the US west because the west is sparsely populated and that hasn’t slowed environmental destruction,” he added. “But this is about speaking to nativist fears, it isn’t about doing anything to solve the problem.”
The spearhead for modern nativism in the US is, of course, Donald Trump who has, along with an often dismissive stance towards climate science itself, sought to portray migrants from Mexico and Central America as criminals and “animals” while vowing to restore clean air and water to deserving American citizens. If there is to be another iteration of a Trump presidency, or a successful campaign by one of his acolytes, the scientific denial may be dialed down somewhat while retaining the reflex nativism.
The Republican lawsuit in Arizona may be a prelude to an ecological reframing of Trump’s fetish for border walls should the former president run again for office in 2024, with migrants again the target. “We will see weird theories that will spread blame in all the wrong directions,” Taylor said. “More walls, more borders, more exclusion – that’s most likely the way we are heading.” A recasting of environmentalism in this way has already branched out in different forms throughout the US right, spanning gun-toting preppers who view nature as a bastion to be defended from interlopers – “a ‘back to the land’ ideology where you are an earner and provider, not a not soft-handed soy boy,” as Taylor describes it – to the vaguely mystic “wellness” practitioners who have risen to prominence by spreading false claims over the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines.
The latter group, Taylor said, includes those who have a fascination with organic farming, Viking culture, extreme conspiracy theories such as the QAnon fantasy and a rejection of science and reason in favour of discovering an “authentic self”. These disparate facets are all embodied, he said, in Jake Angeli, the so-called QAnon shaman who was among the rioters who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January. Angeli, who became famous for wearing horns and a bearskin headdress during the violent insurrection, was sentenced to 41 months in prison over his role in the riot. He gained media attention for refusing to eat the food served in jail because it was not organic.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/21/climate-denial-far-right-immigration