Environmentalism on the American Extreme Right

Abstract

American right-wing extremists have rarely explicitly stated environmental policies. However, they have exhibited implicit environmentalism. It has resulted from a fusion of three factors: an intense distaste for cities; a belief in the supremacy of small social and governmental units; and the self-sufficiency known as survivalism. These result in a romantic nostalgia for an agrarian, pre-industrial past when current environmental problems did not exist. The most extreme extension of this mode of thinking is the radical right’s belief in the creation of a ‘white homeland’ in the Pacific Northwest. Religion does not affect the character of the implicit environmentalism surveyed here but is evident in extremists’ millenarian or utopian ideas about the future.