Abstract
At first glance, it is surprising that contemporary racist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan advertise a pro‐environmental stance. This fact, however, might be expected by Luc Ferry, who argues for a connection between the racism and nature protection laws of the Third Reich. Ferry argues that a non‐anthropocentric approach to nature makes it easier to dehumanize humans so that a non‐anthropocentric environmental ethic can transform into racist environmentalism. Does this contemporary case vindicate Ferry? We argue that it does not. When the underlying theoretical foundations and historical conditions that gave rise to the racist environmentalist movements and the contemporary non‐anthropocentric environmental left are analyzed, quite different pictures emerge: one type of non‐anthropocentric environmentalism is racist, one type of anthropocentric environmentalism is racist, and one type of non‐anthropocentric environmentalism is not racist, meaning that any relation between a non‐anthropocentric approach to nature and dehumanizing the Other is more complex and historically contextual than Ferry allows.
Notes
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Ferry, The New Ecological Order, 91.
Ferry, The New Ecological Order, 92.
Ferry, The New Ecological Order, 92.
Ferry, The New Ecological Order, 93.
Ferry, The New Ecological Order, 98.
Ferry, The New Ecological Order, 101.
Ferry, The New Ecological Order, 102–03.
Ferry, The New Ecological Order, 92.
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Ron Arnold and Alan Gottlieb, Trashing the Economy: How Runaway Environmentalism Is Wrecking America (Bellevue: Free Enterprise Press, 1993).
Susan Power Bratton, “Luc Ferry's Critique of Deep Ecology, Nazi Nature Laws, and Environmental Anti‐Semitism,” Ethics and the Environment, 4, no. 1 (1999): 3–22.
Ferry, The New Ecological Order, 91.
Stephen Mason, A History of the Sciences (New York: Dover, 1953), 355.
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See David Harvey, “The Nature of the Environment: The Dialectics of Social and Environmental Change,” in Socialist Register 1993: Real Problems, False Solutions, eds R. Miliband and L. Panitch (London: Merlin Press, 1993), 1–51.