The modern environmentalist movement is often compared to a pantheistic religion. It certainly contains a vision of sin and repentance – damnation and salvation.

At the Copenhagen climate change summit in December 2009, then Prince Charles, now King Charles III, warned that the survival of mankind itself was in peril and a mere seven years remained ‘before we lose the levers of control’ over the climate.

We should always take care of the environment, be responsible with its protection, and, at the same time, help the poor. And yet if the demands of radical environmentalists were to be met, they would have a deleterious effect on world standards of living, particularly among poorer nations.

For example, efforts to convince world governments to cut carbon emissions has made energy less affordable and accessible, which drives up the costs of consumer products, stifles economic growth, and imposes especially harmful effects on the poor. Arguably, ‘allocating monetary resources to help build sewage treatment plants, enhance sanitation, and provide clean water for poor people would have a greater immediate impact on their plight than would the battle over global warming’. (D. James Kennedy PhD and Jerry Newcombe, How Would Jesus Vote? A Christian Perspective on the Issues (WaterBrook Press, 2008) 144.)

We are constantly told that the temperature is increasing, the seas are rising, the ice is shrinking, and the polar bears are vanishing. These claims are not supported by conclusive evidence; indeed the opposite appears to be the case considering predictions always fail. However, the belief that carbon dioxide emissions are heating up the Earth’s atmosphere to a catastrophic degree has been afforded the status of incontestable faith. Australia has even created a government Minister for ‘Climate Change’, suggesting absurdly that politicians can influence the weather! It should come as no surprise that the Australian government has embraced the idea that global warming is happening, humans are to blame, and that doing something drastic about it is in Australia’s best interest.

Global warming theory rests on the belief that rising CO2 levels drive up the temperature of the atmosphere. Despite this degree of terrifying environmental alarmism and crippling government spending to curb ‘carbon emissions’, historically, temperature increases have often preceded high CO2 levels, destroying this theory of cause and effect. Our world has always warmed and cooled. The theory of anthropomorphic global warming contradicts what we know historically to be the case.

‘The public shaming and bullying of any scientist who differs from climate change orthodoxy is eerily reminiscent of a latter-day Salem Witch-trial or Spanish Inquisition, with public floggings meted out – metaphorically speaking – for their thought crimes. Indeed, “dissenters”, as they have also been labelled, suffer ritual humiliation at the hands of their colleagues and the media, with their every motivation questioned and views pilloried.’ (James Paterson, ‘Tim Flannery: Climate Prophet’, IPA Review, June 2011, 9.)

Curiously, just as cancel culture and historical revisionism has roots in Maoism, elements of modern environmentalism are beginning to bear more resemblance to a certain totalitarian movement than a scientific community.

During the interwar period, there was particular association between environmentalists and German nationalists, among whom a number subsequently became Nazis. ‘Environmentalists and conservationists in Germany welcomed the rise of the Nazi regime with open arms and hoped that it would bring about legal and institutional changes.’ According to Kaitlin Smith, a Boston-based scholar and naturalist educator:

‘Nazi leadership ardently championed renewable energy and institutionalised organic farming and land use planning on a level unmatched by any nation past or present. These environmental policies might seem like a welcome departure from the rest of Nazi propaganda, but their environmentalism was actually grounded in the same racist worldview that shaped the Holocaust.’

Historians generally agree that Alfred Seifert ‘spoke the language of the emerging ecological movement’. He was a ‘charismatic leader of a coterie of like-minded people’ who has been characterised as ‘the most prominent environmentalist in the Third Reich’. Seifert went on to become ‘a key figure in the postwar environmental movement in Germany’. From 1934 onward, he headed a group of Nazi officials whose role was to oversee the ecological impact of public works projects sponsored by Hitler’s regime. His positions became official in 1935 and continued to be so in the war years, emphasizing that ‘previous generations had disrupted the “balance” of the natural world and failed to take a “holistic view” of the environment’. But this destructive approach, which was ‘alien to nature’, Seifert believed that it finally ‘had been overcome thanks to the leadership of the Third Reich’.

Seifert promoted an environmentalist worldview that shared fundamental points of contact with the ‘blood and soil’ principles of National Socialism. In October 1934, he was portrayed as the paragon of a ‘truly National Socialist’ approach to environmental issues. Seifert, in turn, published a vast number of articles in Nazi periodicals ‘outlining his amalgam of environmentalism and National Socialism’. After repeated requests from environmentalist advocates who expressed confidence in his work and its importance to Germany’s future, Seifert was promoted to the civilian equivalent of general in 1944. He was a frequent visitor to the Dachau extermination camp, and ‘cooperated closely with its head gardener, SS officer Franz Lippert, who was responsible for maintaining biodynamic standards’. Active in the Nazi regime during the second world war, ‘Seifert’s collaboration on the Dachau project continued until shortly before the liberation of the camp in 1945’.

Above all, many Nazi leaders embraced a naturalist worldview and animal welfare was a significant issue in the Nazi regime. Hermann Göring, one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi dictatorship, was a professed animal lover who, on instructions of Hitler, committed those who violated Nazi animal welfare laws to concentration camps. Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), was a vegetarian and certified animal rights activist who aggressively promoted the idea of ‘natural healing’ who, As Anna Bramwell observes, ‘SS training included respect for animal life of near Buddhist proportions’.

The Nazis did not show such a respect, of course, for human beings. In hindsight, it may not be difficult to reconcile such Nazi views with an environment orientation. In the eyes of Nazi environmentalists, ‘the privations of war encouraged a renewed emphasis on self-sufficiency and sustainability, allowing Germans to find their way back to the soil and its living forces’.

‘For some green-leaning Nazis … the war and destruction were necessary evils since they would bring about a new order that would finally allow the establishment of a better and greener Germany.’ (Marc Cioc Franz-Josef Brueggemeier and Thoams Zeller, How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation ain the Third Reich (Ohio University Press, 2005) 14.)

Hitler himself was a vegetarian who wanted to turn the entire nation vegetarian. In his diaries, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels reports numerous private conversations with Hitler, including a December 19, 1939, talk in which the Nazi leader contends that humans ‘are not removed from other animals’. After trying to convince Goebbels on the virtues of vegetarianism, he argued that the human species had evolved from reptiles through mammals, and that he did ‘not think much of Homo Sapiens’. Peter Staudenmaier, a history professor at Marquette University, comments:

‘Hitler and Himmler were both strict vegetarians and animal lovers, attracted to nature mysticism and homeopathic cures, and staunchly opposed to vivisection and cruelty to animals. Himmler even established experimental organic farms to grow herbs for SS medicinal purposes. And Hitler, at times, could sound like a veritable Green Utopian, discussing authoritatively and in details various renewable sources (including environmentally appropriate hydropower and producing natural gas from sludge) as alternatives to coal, and declaring “water, winds and tides” the energy path of the future.’

In his youth, Hitler studied yoga, astrology, and various forms of Eastern occultism. The Nazi leader believed that, in the long run, Nazism and Christianity would ‘no longer be able to exist together’. For him, once the Nazis finally prevailed in the war, Germany would be able to restore ‘their paganism of antiquity’ and the Germans embrace a new form of ‘Mother-Earth’ worship as a substitute for the ‘Jewish bondage of law’. According to Nazi philosopher Ernst Bergmann of Leipzig University, the Germans needed to embrace a new spirituality whereby everyone should live in complete harmony with nature. Influenced by ‘forces of nature’, Bermann stated, the Germans would be ‘re-born in the womb of Mother Earth’ and rediscover ‘the God that is in us’.

Arguably, the idea of cooperation with the natural world appears to be incompatible with the genocidal policies of the Nazi dictatorship. ‘How could people who spoused ‘a new appreciation for the environment’ and ‘ecological balance’ and ‘the harmony with nature’ have anything to do with Hitler’s war of conquest, racial resettlement, and concentration camps?’ asks Staudenmaier rhetorically. According to him:

‘The seemingly uncanny convergence between blood and soil ideology and modern ecological concepts makes more historical sense when seen in the context of early environmental talk. In the first decades of the twentieth century, in Germany as elsewhere, racial beliefs and environmental sentiments often went hand in hand. A stance that combined landscape aesthetics, ecological concern, and racial pride was not an anomaly, but shared by most conservationists.’

The legacy of Nazi environmentalism poses a dilemma for modern environmentalists. If modern environmentalism was to take off, it has to shed its unhappy links with fascism, anti-humanism, and authoritarian-style implementation. As Professor Staudenmaier points out:

‘The necessary project of creating emancipatory ecological politics demands an acute awareness and understanding of the legacy of classical ecofascism and its conceptual continuities with present-day environmental discourse … the record of fascist ecology shows that under the right conditions such an orientation can quickly lead to barbarism.’

Some of the Nazis’ essentially irrationalist anti-humanism remains intrinsic to environmentalist thinking. Accordingly, modern environmentalism generally demonstrates the same disregard regard for the human life. Within the modern environmentalist movement, there are those that continue to refer to human beings as an invasive virus, a plague, and a problem that the world would be better without.

A growing number of environmentalists have succumbed to the highly dangerous notion that there is nothing special about human life.

It is hard to imagine anything more terrifying than living in a culture where human life is made relative to lesser values. Instead of seeing humans as precious creatures conceived in the image of God, many environmentalists presently see their fellow humans as the cause of all the earth’s problems, especially global warming.

We have come to the point that even new human life is seen as a threat to the environment, where some argue that they represent a source of green house gases and a consumer of natural resources. This thinking is leading conversations about the West adopting population control measures similar to the Communist China one-child policy.

Tragically, not only are the younger generations being convinced not to have children due to fear of endangering the planet, they are also terminating their healthy pregnancy with some going so far as to openly claim that it was done in service of climate goals. Children, in this context, are increasingly seen as being a selfish act.

It is deeply disturbing to see a woman describe motherhood as something entirely negative, and to believe that having children is morally wrong. Forgoing children is being promoted as environmentally friendly while childless women are doing their bit to reduce the carbon footprint of civilisation.

Unfortunately, much of today’s environmental movement contains an anti-humanism that promotes the elimination of people. It is built on the alarmist narrative that if nothing is done, human life will bring the destruction of the global ecosystem therefore the active decline of society, even at the expense of children, is a worthy cause.

This sort of attitude betrays a desire to bring death and destruction at a large scale. Although such sentiments are deeply disturbing, what links this to some other environmentalists is their shared desire to exterminate a great proportion of the world’s population in search of some Utopian small number of sustainable survivors.

The point is that evil can be and often is perpetrated under the guise of doing good and the fanatical environmentalists err morally by believing that their vision of ‘saving the planet’ should be imposed regardless of the present human cost. Accordingly, contemporary environmentalist ideas that were central to fascist movements – about the organic harmony of the earth, the elevation of animal rights, and the denigration of human as enemies of nature – are today vividly presented as the acme of environmentalist thinking. As such, of course, environmentalism’s fundamental opposition to progress and modernity propels it straight into the arms of neofascism.

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Augusto Zimmermann is professor and Head of Law at Sheridan Institute of Higher Education, in Perth, Western Australia. He is a former Director of Postgraduate Research (2011-2012 and 2015-2017) and Associate Dean, Research (2010-2012) at Murdoch University. During his time at Murdoch, Dr Zimmermann was awarded the University’s Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research in 2012. He is also a former Commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia (2012-2017), and President of the Western Australian Legal Theory Association (WALTA). Dr Zimmermann is the author of numerous academic articles and books, including ‘Foundations of the Australian Legal System: History, Theory and Practice’ (LexisNexis, 2023, forthcoming).

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