Eco-Authoritarianism
The Core Argument
Eco-authoritarianism holds that ecological survival requires the suspension of liberal and democratic norms. It is a diverse tradition, but two strands dominate.
Far-right ecologism
The first is what we might call, following Balša Lubarda, “far-right ecologism.” Far-right ecologism is an “overarching term” that captures the complex intersection of far-right ideologies and ecological thought. It incorporates fascism, conservatism, and national populism into a single ideal type and has several foundational elements such as spirituality and mysticism, organicism and naturalism. These are connected to its more potently ‘green’ elements, which prize autarky, authority, nostalgia, and a Manichean worldview.
There is plenty of diversity within this strand. As Bernhard Forchtner notes in The Far Right and the Environment Politics, Discourse and Communication, “land and landscape are being significant for and deeply linked to the nation,” a starting premise that differs markedly from post-1960s left-liberal environmentalism, which emphasizes our common humanity. Far-right ecologism can have softer and harder edges. Sam Moore and Alex Roberts address the distinction between them in The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right. As they say, “far-right ecologism has been, by and large, intellectually parochial, concerned with nature in a curtailed and limited form. Its sense of nature has been flattened by fixation on particular species or a single place.” That fixation can be (relatively) less harmful, but has also “been capable, at times, of genocide.”
At the softer edge lies a more conservative ecologism which, as Grace Truslow has written, “to the extent that it is open to addressing environmental challenges at all, it is only willing to do so in a way that leaves the present social order largely intact.” It is therefore more pragmatic than revolutionary, though it remains committed to the nation as a bounded, landed collectivity and remains suspicious of liberalism and mass democracy. At the harder edge one finds the specter of ecofascism, which stretches the connection between land and nation further into ethnonationalism and appeals to “blood and soil.”
Kristy Campion has defined the term this way: “Ecofascism is a reactionary and revolutionary ideology that champions the regeneration of an imagined community through a return to a romanticised, ethnopluralist vision of the natural order.” Ecofascists are anti-modern and oppose industrialization, urbanization, materialism, individualism, multiculturalism, and immigration. Campion further notes that ecofascists believe that “purifying” their countries will have an inherently “positive effect on the ecosystem.” “Because the community is often imagined in racial terms, the ecofascist vision of ecological harmony manifests as racial segregation based on privileged claims on territory.” Others, such as Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, have chosen to focus more pointedly on “actually existing ecofascism,” which is defined simply as “the preoccupation of authentically fascist movements with environmentalist concerns”—a notably more fluid and open definition.
Far-right ecologism today is unique insofar as it must confront anthropogenic climate change, which was simply not on the radar of its historical predecessors. Moore and Roberts group these splinters into three categories: far-right parties increasingly interested in ecological questions, a younger generation which is more agile and less connected to institutional power, and finally ecofascist terrorists. The first of these categories is noticeable in certain European parties, like France’s National Rally, whose leader has called for a ‘patriotic ecology,’ and Austria’s Freedom Party, which has framed sustainability as a ‘duty to protect the homeland.’ The second can be seen most pointedly in cyberspace, in what Moore and Roberts call the “nebulous, ill-defined spaces of the online far right,” which are heavily populated with young people and which, while small now, have “the capacity to develop into important viable subcultures with widespread impact.” Finally, the question of ecofascist terrorism can be seen in a spate of recent mass shootings, especially those that occurred between 2019 and 2022 in Christchurch, New Zealand, El Paso, Texas, and Buffalo, New York. The perpetrators of these atrocities all either self-identified as ecofascists or cited ecological concerns in their manifestos, as Eszter Szenes has noted.
Ecotechnocratic authoritarianism
Far-right ecologism is not the only strand of eco-authoritarianism, however. A second strand is focused not on a racialist premise but on a technocratic/elitist one, stating that liberal democracies are structurally incapable of responding to ecological catastrophe in time, and that some form of centralized, expert-led, coercive rule may be a regrettable necessity to save the planet.
Like far-right ecologism, this second strand’s roots stretch back into the twentieth century. One of its definitive statements in our own time comes from David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith’s 2007 book, The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy. The book begins with a simple claim: “We have known about these impending problems for several decades. Each year the certainty of the science has increased, yet we have failed to act appropriately to the threat.” The authors suggest that authoritarianism naturally follows democratic government given all the problems the latter creates. Authoritarianism, then, as they state plainly in the book’s preface, “is the natural state of humanity.” They thus advocate for selecting elites who are “just and wise” and giving them extraordinary power to do what must be done to save the planet.
Around the same time, James Lovelock published two works, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity (2006) and The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning: Enjoy It While You Can(2009). As he explains in the second, “Earth was colonized by life at least three and a half billion years ago, its temperature and surface composition have been set by the preferences of whatever organisms made up the biosphere.” Today, this colonization by (human) life is approaching its destructive zenith. Without ontologizing authoritarianism à la Shearman and Smith, Lovelock nonetheless presents authoritarianism as a path towards climate renewal. For him, “orderly survival requires an unusual degree of human understanding and leadership and may require, as in war, the suspension of democratic government for the duration of the survival emergency.” Though for Lovelock, this may be only temporary and democratic government may be restored after the once-unwilling populace is forced to see the light.
Eco-authoritarianism has grown in strength as China has been seen as a model of green authoritarianism. These developments led Mark Beeson, as early as 2010, to predict “the coming of environmental authoritarianism” and to conclude that “forms of ‘good’ authoritarianism, in which environmentally unsustainable forms of behaviour are simply forbidden, may become not only justifiable, but essential for the survival of humanity in anything approaching a civilised form.” This model has captured the imaginations of some contemporary eco-authoritarians. As Dan Coby Shahar has written, “Today’s eco-authoritarians believe that if governments built on the Chinese model could only be directed toward addressing the ecological crisis, they would be capable of achieving a much higher degree of success than will likely be possible under democratic market liberalism as we know it.” Shahar disagrees and finds the authoritarian solution wanting. Nonetheless, China continues to present itself as a global leader on climate change, and its appeal resonates in some ecologist quarters.
Philosophical Roots
The roots of the far-right ecologist strand are present in the genealogy of ecologism: the word “ecology” was coined in 1867 by German zoologist and eugenicist Ernst Haeckel, who connected the purity of nature to the purity of race. More pointedly, its roots lie in German Romanticism and its revival in the interwar period. While Romanticism was a diverse, rich intellectual movement, the idea of “blood and soil” (Blut und Boden) specifically focused on the supposedly organic relationship between racial descent and territorial belonging. Its practical effect “means that nature, which had been restored by the Romantics as an active and mysterious force against rationalist and scientific postulates, is presented as a part of the nation,” as Daniel Rueda put it.
The German “folkish” (völkisch) movement of the late nineteenth century can be seen as a precursor to far-right ecologism, especially its ecofascist wing. As Jonathan Olsen notes, “Völkisch ideologues extolled the virtues of rural life, condemned the neglect of tradition and the decay of morals, and lamented the destruction of the natural environment.” Nazism would co-opt some of the themes and developed a radical ecologist strain, as Peter Staudenmaier has investigated in his The Politics of Nature in Nazi Germany: Environmental Ideals and the Myth of Blood and Soil. Ever after Nazism’s defeat and discreditation, the ideas of nature and nationalism persisted “in a sub-culture of ultraconservatives and the Far Right” and then gained traction as the memory of the Second World War began to fade. It is also important to note that, while far-right ecologism may have its roots in Germany, its cause was taken up globally from the very beginning, as seen for example in Philip Coupland’s recent book, Farming, Fascism and Ecology: A life of Jorian Jenks.
The eco-authoritarian strand finds more recent roots in the 1970s. Robert Heilbroner’s An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (1974) has become a classic, updated several times by the author. In it, Heilbroner strikes a decidedly pessimistic tone about whether we may escape the ecological catastrophe that endless growth has put us in, and muses in the first edition that “the exigencies of the future…point to the conclusion that only an authoritarian, or possibly only a revolutionary, regime will be capable of mounting the immense task of social reorganization needed to escape catastrophe.” William Ophuls’s Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977) struck a similar chord. While argued with nuance, Ophuls insists there is a temptation, or at least a possibility, for authoritarianism in the move towards a steady-state society. This is because, fundamentally, this transition will necessarily “move [societies] from liberty toward authority.” And even though this authority may be limited, as he says, it need not be.
To cite this article: Ethan Sarwer and Aaron Irion, “Eco-authoritarianism.” Vivatopia: The Lab of Political Imaginaries, September 2026.
To Know More
Beeson, Mark. “The Coming of Environmental Authoritarianism.” Environmental Politics 19, no. 2 (2010): 276–294. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644010903576918
Biehl, Janet, and Peter Staudenmaier. Ecofascism Revisited: Lessons from the German Experience. AK Press (2011).
Campion, Kristy. “Defining Ecofascism: Historical Foundations and Contemporary Interpretations in the Extreme Right.” Terrorism and Political Violence 35, no. 4 (2023): 926–944. https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2021.1987895
Coupland, Philip. Farming, Fascism and Ecology: A Life of Jorian Jenks. Routledge (2016).
Forchtner, Bernhard, ed. The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse and Communication. Routledge (2020).
Heilbroner, Robert L. An Inquiry into the Human Prospect: Looked Again for the 1990s. W.W. Norton and Company (1991).
Lovelock, James. The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity. Penguin Books (2007).
Lovelock, James. The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning: Enjoy It While You Can. Penguin Books (2010).
Lubarda, Balša. “Beyond Ecofascism? Far-Right Ecologism (FRE) as a Framework for Future Inquiries.” Environmental Values 29, no. 6 (2020): 713–732. https://doi.org/10.3197/096327120X15752810323922
Lubarda, Balša. “Right-wing Ecologies: Background Clatter or a Serious Force in Environmental Politics?” Illiberalism Studies Program. August 8, 2025. https://www.illiberalism.org/right-wing-ecologies-background-clatter-or-a-serious-force-in-environmental-politics/
Moore, Sam, and Alex Roberts. The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right. Polity (2022).
Olsen, Jonathan. Nature and Nationalism: Right-wing Ecology and the Politics of Identity in Germany. Palgrave Macmillan (2024).
Ophuls, William. Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity: Prologue to a Political Theory of the Steady State. W.H. Freeman and Company (1977).
Rueda, Daniel. “Neoecofascism: The Example of the United States.” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 14, no. 2 (2020): 95–125. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/26/article/762913/pdf
Shahar, Dan Coby. “Rejecting Eco-Authoritarianism, Again.” Environmental Values 24, no. 3 (2015): 345–366. https://doi.org/10.3197/096327114X13947900181996
Shearman, David, and Joseph Wayne Smith. The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy. Praeger (2007).
Spencer, Richard, and Adam Vaughan. “China Declares Itself Global Climate Leader.” The Times. September 25, 2025. https://www.thetimes.com/world/asia/article/china-global-climate-un-7bsf3bx25
Staudenmaier, Peter. The Politics of Nature in Nazi Germany: Environmental Ideals and the Myth of Blood and Soil. Cambridge University Press (2026).
Szenes, Eszter. “Building Resiliency to Ecofascist Radicalisation: Preventing an Emerging Threat.” The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT). November 16, 2023. https://icct.nl/publication/building-resiliency-ecofascist-radicalisation-preventing-emerging-threat
Truslow, Grace. “Ideological Innovation and Environmentalism on the Right: An Introduction to a Shifting Landscape.” Illiberalism Studies Program. November 18, 2025. https://www.illiberalism.org/ideological-innovation-and-environmentalism-on-the-right-an-introduction-to-a-shifting-landscape/
Tyldesley, Mike. “The German Youth Movement and National Socialism: Some Views from Britain.” Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 1 (2006): 21–34. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30036368
