Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Frank Furedi:
"What we today call 'environmentalism' is ... based on a fear of change. It's
based upon a fear of the outcome of human action. And therefore it's not
surprising that when you look at the more xenophobic right-wing
movements in Europe in the 19th century, including German fascism, it
quite often had a very strong environmentalist dynamic to it. The most
notorious environmentalists in history were the German Nazis. The Nazis
ordered soldiers to plant more trees. They were the first Europeans to
establish nature reserves and order the protection of hedgerows and other
wildlife habitats. And they were horrified at the idea of hydroelectric dams
on the Rhine. Adolf Hitler and other leading Nazis were vegetarian and they
passed numerous laws on animal rights."
(The above paragraph is from the transcript of the British channel 4
documentary "Against Nature," whose political direction came from Furedi's
libertarian magazine, now out of business. I extracted this passage from Ron
Arnold's Committee in Defense of Free Enterprise web-page, where the
transcript is featured as a "guest editorial." Arnold is best known as the
leader of the "Wise Use" movement, a right-wing anti-environmentalist
group.)
The fundamental mistake that capitalist apologist Frank Furedi makes is to
assume that the Nazi party introduced nature worship into German society.
Nature worship in Germany goes back to the origins of modern
romanticism. It was felt almost everywhere, from the writings of Goethe to
the symphonies of Mahler. Students at the University of Heidelberg had
hiking clubs through the entire 19th century. The Social Democracy had
such clubs as well and they were viewed as an integral part of the character
development of young Marxists. A recent biography of Walter Benjamin
points out how important such nature hikes were to him. It was part of the
general German culture, which influenced the both socialist and ultraright
parties, including Hitler's.
It is important to understand that the feeling of loss that the industrial
revolution brought on was very widespread throughout Europe and was not
peculiar to Germany. Thomas Carlyle articulated this feeling of loss and the
pre-Raphaelite school was a movement based on such a desire to return to
pre-industrial roots. Carlyle influenced John Ruskin and William Morris,
two important anti-capitalist thinkers. He also strongly influenced Frederic
Engels' "Condition of the Working Class in England" and is cited frequently.
Under Lenin, the USSR stood for the most audacious approach to nature
conservancy in the 20th century. Soviet agencies set aside vast portions of
the country where commercial development, including tourism, would be
banned. These "zapovedniki", or natural preserves, were intended for
nothing but ecological study. Scientists sought to understand natural
biological processes better through these living laboratories. This would
serve pure science and it would also have some ultimate value for Soviet
society's ability to interact with nature in a rational manner. For example,
natural pest elimination processes could be adapted to agriculture.
After Lenin's death, there were all sorts of pressures on the Soviet Union to
adapt to the norms of the capitalist system that surrounded and hounded it
and produce for profit rather than human need. This would have included
measures to remove the protected status of the zapovedniki. Surprisingly, the
Soviet agencies responsible for them withstood such pressures and even
extended their acreage through the 1920s.
One of the crown jewels was the Askania-Nova zapovednik in the Ukranian
steppes. The scientists in charge successfully resisted repeated bids by local
commissars to extend agriculture into the area through the end of the 1920s.
Scientists still enjoyed a lot of prestige in the Soviet republic, despite a
growing move to make science cost-justify itself. Although pure science
would eventually be considered "bourgeois", the way it was in the Chinese
Cultural Revolution, it could stand on its own for the time being.
The head administrator of Askania-Nova was Vladimir Stanchinksi, a
biologist who sought to make the study of ecology an exact science through
the use of quantitative methods, including mathematics and statistics. He
identified with scientists in the West who had been studying predator-prey
and parasite-host relationships with laws drawn from physics and chemistry.
(In this he was actually displaying an affinity with Karl Marx, who also
devoted a number of years to the study of agriculture using the latest
theoretical breakthroughs in the physical sciences and agronomy. Marx's
study led him to believe that capitalist agriculture is detrimental to sound
agricultural practices.)
Stanchinski adopted a novel approach to ecology. He thought that "the
quantity of living matter in the biosphere is directly dependent on the
amount of solar energy that is transformed by autotrophic plants." Such
plants were the "economic base of the living world." He invoked the Second
Law of Thermodynamics to explain the variations in mass between flora and
fauna at the top, middle and bottom of the biosphere. Energy was lost as
each rung in the ladder was scaled, since more and more work was
necessary to procure food.