A contemporary reflection on ecofascism and our learnings to reset course on mutual aid to save the biosphere’s complex life

Much is said and written on greenwashing in recent years. Little is yet written about the neo-ecofascism of our times. This little pamphlet is an invitation to the larger regeneration movement to reflect its holistic context.

Geopolitical times develop in s-curved cycling spirals – just like nature. From seed to flower, from placenta to intermediary climax, from one cycle on to the next – the more abundant or scarcer cycle.

As ecosystems remember and empower (or disempower) the next iteration, so too do social systems with their generations of lived experience, memories, (his)stories, cultural heritage, and material roots.

Just as we know how successions in ecosystems unfold, we know how successional patterns develop in societies – from past lessons and today’s context.

As Mark Twain said and Hindus have believed for millennia: History doesn’t repeat itself – it rhymes.

One of today’s daunting rhymes of accelerated moral degradation is neo-ecofascism: Once again, some believe they are the avant-garde of natural restoration, of homeland, of health – while embodying neocolonialism, gerontocracy, and racist patriarchy.

As Karl Marx said about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and history: Hegel somewhere remarks that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

One might be induced to reflect: Rather than regenerate, such neocolonial and racist actors spoil the earth with ill-rooted minds, lost in cognitive dissonance, social toxicity, and ultimately self-annihilating righteousness – all while lecturing the world on cover crops, cows, living systems, and system change.

While many in our regeneration movement have grown degrading ecosystem functions into regenerating ones, the deeper ancient social viruses of patriarchy and gerontocracy live on prevalently among many.

It appears, understandably, that practical pioneers of ecological succession often lack deep socio-historical knowledge – and thus the holistic capacity to pro-socially steward the complexity of social systems.

On the other hand, many socio-politically educated, ethically sound ‘progressives’ know little of successional ecology, photosynthesis, syntropy, or humanity’s proper role in the biosphere.

The symbioses of their knowledges and perspectives – the ecological and social ‘avant-garde’ – is tantamount. It is the imperative of our re-indigenisation. The forward return to syntropic bioeconomies and matristic societies.

This reflection is not written to discredit the marvellous achievements and unwavering commitments of the regeneration and nature conservation movements. It is here to offer positive disturbance – a reflection on the larger whole – so that we can all become better stewards as we together strive forward – ever stronger.

Biodynamic Holocaust in Germany

Our societies have now outgrown the last lived experiences of the Holocaust. Yet humanity has suffered many genocides since. Only the imperial West doesn’t care about those genocides. Quite the opposite, the Western powers – the unity of exploitative industrialists, oligarchs, statesmen and women – give their best to ignite genocides and profit from them. Hence the Western media also doesn’t hammer the stories of the genocides of non-white people into the consciousness (if that can be called one) of the affluent consumers in the Global North or upper strata of societies in the global majority.

The German biodynamic and conservation movements strongly supported the Holocaust. While executing pogroms against Jews, Roma, Sinti, gays, political enemies, and disabled people, the Nazis conducted the greatest national soil health inventory in human history. “Just as German soils ought to be pure and powerful – so too our Aryan blood.” ‘Blood and Soil’ – the Nazi battle cry.

In Germany, 60 percent of all nature protection organisation members joined the Nazi Party by the late 1930s. Adolf Hitler demanded his food come exclusively from biodynamic farms. This is documented, for example, in Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience by Biehl and Staudenmaier.

Fast forward to 2024: a director of Germany’s largest nature protection agency waves the flag of a fascist state committing genocide. The director is convinced it is his moral duty to defend a colonial right to exist that uproots 2,000-year-old trees and kills unborn babies at will. Meanwhile, the German Green Party demands organic food for the rich while equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism – and supporting indiscriminate state violence against those not ready ‘to eat that sh*t’. How little have we learned of our own past? I may ask as an ashamed German citizen.

Genocide in the name of wilderness in the United States

Likewise on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. In the United States, some regen pioneers now laud hyper-imperialist president Donald Trump for placing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Liberal fascist ranchers applaud Kennedy’s and Trump’s report on the dangers of pesticides while actual food safety laws on salmonella levels in poultry are swept under the rug of Capitol Hill just a few metres over.

But we are jumping the historical queue. Let’s zoom out a bit to better understand the historical context.

Historically, as in Germany, US conservation pioneers were white supremacists. John Muir and Charles Lindbergh exemplify this.

Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, held racist views, seeing Indigenous peoples as inferior and wilderness as land “untouched” by humans – ignoring millennia of Indigenous stewardship for syntropy (see for example the marvellous study Architects of Abundance). National parks were built on lands stolen from Indigenous nations, contributing to cultural erasure and violent removal.

In that iteration of the enclosure of our commons, Indigenous people were at last excluded even from these most infertile corners of their Turtle Island, precisely as those lands were designated as national parks.

As such, the national parks are not great conservationist achievements, but rather a continuation of the genocides committed by European settlers and the subsequent US and Canadian governments against Indigenous peoples – through massacres and forced removals, the intentional spread of diseases to decimate populations, and the destruction of Indigenous cultures, languages, and identities via policies like the residential school system and systematic efforts to erase Indigenous existence.

The national park ‘enclosure-of-the-commons method’ is employed throughout the world – Palestine, Congo, Russia, and China, to name only a few of the many countries where national parks, built on the racist idea of some humans being superior to nature and other humans, have displaced people to empower the elites and the state. Lenin, in the Soviet Union nation-state comprising more than 90 different Indigenous nations, failed no less, when the national parks declared in the early 1920s (much earlier than in the US) excluded the Indigenous people from their lands. That happened although the ingenious Russian scientist Nikolai Vavilov (later purged by Stalin) had proven with his origin thesis that pro-social human development and biodiversity co-evolutionise.

Muir’s legacy continued through Theodore Roosevelt, who institutionalised this exclusionary conservation vision.

Charles Lindbergh, famous America First spokesman, praised Nazi aviation, criticised American Jews, and pioneered the support of endangered species protection – emblematic of the confused, incoherent and diverse palette of ecofascism as well as its dullness and repetitiveness in the way it presents itself today – again.

The US national park ideology, portraying wilderness as empty, sacred, and belonging to the nation state, parallels Zionist land narratives of redeeming empty and underused land. Both reflect settler-colonial environmentalism: imagining land as empty or degraded, erasing existing populations, and claiming to restore or redeem the land. US conservation ideology became a model for nationalist projects, including South Africa and Israeli apartheid land policy.

The ill-strained ‘GMO seeds’ of gerontocracy, patriarchy, and racism among the regeneration movement

Today we stand at the frontier of – or already deep within – ‘regenerative’ liberal neofascism.

Our regenerative movement has its heroes, whom we hesitate to challenge. Likewise, we praise ourselves for aiming to evangelise conventional farmers into better business with nature, not alienate them by considering ourselves morally superior – a typical pitfall of the organic movement.

As reader, I may invite you to reflect, positive disturbance does not create a rift in the ecosystem. It is using tools for putting those in their place that are failing their socio-ecological functions. Many ‘heroes’ of the movement are failing their obligations – as we all do – they and all of us ought to be grazed by high-stocked critique – or the risk of ever larger uncontrollable wildfires is only increasing.

I may ask those within the movement: How is it possible we lecture the world about the ecological function of the cow but fail to reflect on its social role? How come the regen movement advances the meaningful integration of livestock, but has not a thought to think or a word to say about the cow’s historical social functions in the development of patriarchy and gerontocracy – from the first Indo-European imperialisms predating even the Sumerian trade imperialism all the way through to today’s hyperimperialism?
The organic regenerative movement is faster than our shadow to call out greenwashing where we smell the not-fast-enough reduction of pesticide use.

However, when millions are bombed and robbed of their land, we shiver in fear of the repercussions the upright condemnation of the destruction of that life – from 2,000-year-old olive trees to starving children – may have for ourselves.

Some even go as far as arguing: ‘Sorry but killing life with pesticides or with bunker buster bombs is not the same.’ Sadly, they say that not because genociding the Palestinian people with the firepower of more than six atom bombs is beyond comparison – but because their sickened racist roots lead them to dehumanise Palestinian life much more than even the bee on their balcony.

The regen crossroad of our day

Like Galileo being hanged by the Vatican because he stood with his convictions to liberate the people from the mental and biophysical bondage of the monarchs and the church, today we face no less violent, no less emotionally sickening, no less rationally failing oppressors driven by patriarchy and gerontocracy underwriting our all-destructive capitalist nation state hegemons.

And no less than Galileo, Copernicus, Spinoza and Weil do we have pioneers thinking and acting far beyond their time’s numbed average – the renaissance women and men of our time. It is the marvelling beauty, the infinite hope, that in this, in our time, these people are farmers. Farmers that are not an inch ashamed of being farmers.
Farmers fully committed to biocultural diversity, including pro-social diversity in all forms, for regenerating full productivity in the most intimate cooperation of nature and communities. Those farmers are the seeds of the future.

They are the greatest hope of humanity. They are closest to our biophysical reality. Closest to true liberation as humanism = naturalism. Us people as nature becoming free – once again.

They hold the potential of inverse leadership of both people and nature for our shared liberty and health. They teach the paths of re-indigenisation.
They are the only ones having a proper lived experience of the real meanings of interdependence and autonomy as ontonomy. The sovereign, the supposedly absolutely independent and powerful, is an alien concept to them.

They sense that today’s sovereign liberal-absolutist nation state is nothing but a concept that the theory-wonker Thomas Hobbes once made up to co-opt, suppress and make away with the greatest revolutionary farmer movement that the British Isles and people know. The farmer movement of the true levellers.

Already in 1649, one of their leaders Gerrard Winstanley put the simple and still decisive question forward:

“Was the earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease; or was it made to preserve all her children?”

In a free world there ain’t no sovereign! There is us cooperating with nature and with each other – in interdependence and mutual aid.

The meaning of radical (etym. from the root) regeneration

“Conversely, it becomes very difficult to understand human social institutions without referring to the prevailing agricultural practices of a historical period and, ultimately, to the soil situation to which they apply. Hyams’s description of every human community as a ‘soil community’ is unerring; historically, soil types and agrarian technological changes played a major, often decisive, role in determining whether the land would be worked cooperatively or individualistically – whether in a conciliatory manner or an exploitative one – and this, in turn, profoundly affected the prevailing system of social relations,” Murray Bookchin.

And so, we learn that in a historical context the soil regenerators have the obligation to be the wider community regenerators as well. It is they who have the highest potential to be our communities’ inverse leaders.

We know from our natural principles, in which even a 200-year-old mahogany tree will let go of its legitimate authoritative climax position when the community of plants grows so, that no authority is legitimate unless it continuously proves itself to be legitimate. That is to say, authority is legitimate only when in optimal support of the successionally growing health of the greater communal whole it is part of.

Hence, the way to differentiate a true regenerator from a sick-rooted one is simple. By means of asking simple questions. Do you believe in the inherently legitimate authority of:

Men over women?
Old over young?
One race or religious group over others?
State over people?
Property owner over dispossessed wage seeker?

No. No. No. No. No. Because no authority is legitimate unless it continuously proves itself to be legitimate. Rather than legitimacy, the figurative old-white-male-property-owner whose selfish interest is institutionalised in the nation state should face default resistance, not obedience. Because the patterns of his story aka history aka the story of the heroes of violence teach us that they strategically lead against the health of the greater communal whole they are a part of.

As a movement we must advance the social regeneration of our inner development just as much as we must advance the soil’s regeneration of our outer development. We must learn about protozoa just as much as we must learn our true (his)story from below – about the true levellers, the Makhnovshchina, Sankara, Ho Chi Minh, and the countless women of agrarian and popular revolutions that the patriarchic (his)stories did not record.

Still, we must not refrain from interacting with patriarchs, gerontocrats, racists, imperial nation state governments or all-owning technofeudalists. We inoculate and co-opt them with all cards we can play, continuously adapting, continuously on the offensive, with all tactics and strategies in our arsenal.

Only when we engage, we must be certain of our strong and healing rootings. We can be calm in the storm and enjoy the game as long as we rest on the, by covered, regenerating soils empowered, roots of the coherent and indissonant praxis of regeneration.

We must be unwavering in our commitment to the least of these – the young, the women, the minorities, the old, the revolting and the dispossessed. Unwavering in our deep-rooted critique of illegitimate authority. Unwavering in our consciousness that the most beautiful order grows from below and is not imposed from above. Unwavering in the commitment to our social-ecological principles of bio-cultural unity in diversity, cooperation and syntropy. Unwavering in our efforts to regrow, organise, build and steward from below. Unwavering we know: From soil to heart: The means are the ends!

It is us – the global movement of regenerating agricultures – that coherently and confidently can be fully conservative in the sense of returning as far as possible to the Indigenous roots that once cultivated the land we now steward. All the while being fully progressive as place-based innovation, technology and diversity (obviously including race and gender diversity) don’t scare us but are our tools and compass towards ever higher potential for productive cooperation, for ever more beautiful harmonies and syntropy.

We thereby close the circle going forward in s-curved spirals. Closing the circle of diverse individuals, those tripping (often even without capital but with Stockholm syndrome) on the right and those going left, in unified and locally rooted communities, organised in local councils, federalising without beginning and without end, connecting those around, those below and those reaching down from above.

A preliminary conclusion

“I think it is clear to every person that is to live under a government ought first by her or his own consent to put her- or himself under that government,” Gerrard Winstanley.

In Chinese tradition the same patterns evolved and demand redemption: healing the Yang (masculine) and rebalancing the Yin (feminine) with the Yang. In the patterns and words of Hindu tradition we finally advance and return to a meaningful, holistically regenerating Yuga.

If we allow ourselves to be infused by the magic of our biosphere, if we steward to the optimum of our potential, we very well accelerate the spiralling s-curves of biophysical regeneration by integrating and cooperating so well, that the curves do not flatten. In fact, it is now an imperative to the survival of our children that we do not allow the biophysical curves of regeneration to flatten once we get them off the ground.

We have to achieve our planet’s phytomass and net primary productivity doubling within the course of a generation. The earth can do it – with us as her humble and kind regenerator keystone species. Inversely leading our destiny is the communal and pro-social regeneration movement’s obligation to life.

“Healing our soils means healing our history, our present and our future,” Akejandra Aguilar Hernández, Co-Founder Suumil Móokt‘áan Collective, Mayan farmer and beekeeper

May we cooperate for universal regeneration!
Thank you!

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