Our Vulnerability to Ecofascism (Podcast)
Transcription of main content from this podcast.
Ecofascism is something I never thought I’d be talking about. And, yet, in the past year, I’ve noticed that there’s a particular vulnerability that we have to normalising the language that will lead us to ecofascism.
Some people would say that we already have ecofascism and, depending on your definition, depending on the context, that could be true. Let’s tease it out a bit.
If ecofascism is about people with power offering solutions about climate and ecological breakdown and the solutions blame a particular group of people or sacrifice them, that we could consider to be fascism, ecofascism, to be exact.
And we have to be careful about being glib and saying, “Oh we’ll all ecofascists.” First of all, who do you mean by all? If you mean kind of Western middle class people who rely upon and use technology that relies upon the mining of minerals in places like Colombia, where I am, and the land is taken from indigenous peoples and activists who are fighting it are murdered, then you might say we are complicit in the West — the middle class West is complicit in this kind of sacrificing of humans and land for our own way of life.
So maybe there’s a difference between being complicit and being explicit.
The main thing is, I don’t want us to be glib. Like when we say, “All money is dirty” or “There’s no such thing as ethical eating.” Obviously, there’s some truth to that. But the glibness switches off our critical thinking. And in the workshops that I deliver, my main goal is to switch on that critical thinking. To create reflective spaces for us to look deeply at deeply uncomfortable things.
And so, rather than just glibly saying, “Oh, we are all ecofascists” or “We are all complicit”, let’s look at what we’re actually talking about and how solutions being offered to us, especially when we’re kind of sitting with a lump of fear inside of us about the future, solutions that promise to make everything okay, are going to very tempting and the way that we numb ourselves out to look at the way the system really works means that we’ll grab onto that idea of everything is going to be okay, if we can just get to zero emissions.
But the danger of having a numerical goal, which is a white supremacist culture pattern, is that we’ll just look for evidence that we are moving toward that goal and not look at how we’re getting to the goal. And then we fall into the trap of zero by any means possible. And this is dangerous. Because we don’t see who or what is being sacrificed around the world.
And we do have a responsibility because we are all connected and it is possible to learn how to take care of one another and keep each other as safe as possible. This will only happen if we develop our critical thinking skills and we lose the glibness, lose the numbness and spend time reflecting and thinking about what is being offered to us by politicians, by movements, by leaders, and keeping ourselves completely aware that fear is used to manipulate us. So I hope you’ll join me in an upcoming ecofascism workshop.
So thanks so much for listening to this episode of KeduziCast. This has been Heather Luna and if you are able to make any sort of donation to help us out here in Colombia, every little bit goes a long way, you can make a donation through the website at keduzi.org or you can do it through PayPal and the username for PayPal is heatherluna1. Otherwise, do go to Keduzi.org to see what upcoming workshops we’ve got and look for us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Medium, LinkedIn, Twitch, YouTube. Until next time, chau!
