Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience Review

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(More customer reviews)In this fascinating and compelling book, authors and social critics Peter Staudenmaier and Janet Biehl look at ecofascism in Germany. The book is really a compilation of two essays. In the first essay, Peter Staudenmaier looks at the history of ecofascism in nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany, and shows how integral ecology (or at least a certain version of ecology) was to the Nazi Party. In the second essay, Janet Biehl shows how ecofasism is alive and well in Germany, seeking (sometimes openly) to reestablish Nazi policy even while aligned with left and libertarian ecological groups.
I must say I found this book to be absolutely fascinating. I have read about the Nazi's attachment to certain quasi-religious, quasi-New Age philosophies, but Peter Staudenmaier's essay does an excellent job of showing the interlocking wholeness of the Nazi "Blood and Soil" philosophy. Janet Biehl's essay on the fascism of today's anti-human, anti-technology Green movements is sobering, even terrifying.
Now, Peter Staudenmaier and Janet Biehl are committed leftists and ecologists, so this book is certainly not intended to be any sort of an attack on ecology. But, what it is is a very sobering and informative look at modern ecology, and a call to arms by those who do not wish to see a resurgence of fascism on the world stage...even if it's a green-fascism. I highly recommend this book to all thinking people.

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The reappearance of fascism in many western countries threatens all the freedoms the left movements have managed to gain over the last half century. Equally disconcerting is the attempt by fascist ideologists and political groups to use ecology in the service of social reaction. This effort is not without long historical roots in Germany, both in its nineteenth-century romanticism and in the Third Reich in the present century. In order to preserve the liberatory aspects of ecology, the authors, as social ecologists, explore the German experience of fascism and derive from it historical lessons about the political use of ecology. Comprised of two essays—"Fascist Ideology: The Green Wing of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents" and "Ecology and the Modernization of Fascism in the German Ultra-Right,"—Ecofascism examines aspects of German fascism, past and present, in order to draw essential lessons from them for ecology movements both in Germany and elsewhere.

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