Opponents of the radical environmentalist movement and it's steadfast promotion of the fundamental restructuring of human civilization have long argued that the reek of National Socialism clings to the modern Green movement. Mark Musser made that very case here at American Thinker.

As Mark points out;

"From his memoirs, Albert Speer recalled that many of his German compatriots sought what he described "a close contact with nature."  He went on to say that their love affair with the great outdoors "was not merely a romantic protest against the narrowness of middle-class life. We were also escaping from the demands of a world growing increasingly complicated."  It was in fact a world which they largely disdained, full of varied responsibilities and demands of them which they would rather not do.   In their mind, such an 'artificial' world could be overcome through mountain climbing, "often, from the mountain tops, we looked down upon a gray layer of cloud over the distant plain. Down there lived what to our minds were wretched people; we thought we stood high above them in every sense."

(See Musser's book Nazi Oaks for an in-depth study of Nazi environmentalism.)

Ideas do not go away, they are either fully discredited over time or undergo a metamorphosis'. In the case of Fascist/Nazi thinking the case can be made that it - along with it's poison-kissing cousin Marxism - has gone into the Green movement. The Marxists used to say "first Brown then Red", well now it's "first Green then Brown then Red". Certainly the goal of the Gang Green is to redistribute wealth, to establish crony capitalism (the economics of Fascism) and empower world government. While Fascism did not go in for Internationalism, it was quite gung-ho on crony capitalism, regulation, and redistribution of wealth.

Perhaps the most evil idea to take root under National Socialism was the concept of "Blood and Soil", an idea stemming from Darwinian Natural Selection. "Blood and Soil" was the romantic notion that a People were evolved by the climate, landscape, and general environment to be what they are, and in the case of Germany many believed the deep, dark forests, the oaks and pines, the mountains and streams, had shaped the German People in character and indeed even in racial aspects. Blood and Soil meant that the People and the land were one. Part of the hatred of the Jews (and Gypsies, and other "outsiders") was that they were invasive species, rather like Kudzu or Zebra Mussels, imported from abroad. The Jews were seen as not just invasive rivals but particularly artificial, having inhabited close-knit communities usually in cities in Europe. The Nazis saw them as having been molded and shaped by a pathological and artificial environment, and believed they were soiling the pure Germanic blood.

In Missouri the Department of Conservation encourages fishermen to catch as many Kentucky Bass as possible, and if they aren't going to keep them to toss them on the banks; they are an aggressive feeding species that crowds out the Large and Small Mouthed cousins. "Blood and Soil" sought to do likewise, exterminating the human "weeds".

Well...

"Blood and Soil" is making it's grand return! It's called Climate Reductionism. and it is nothing but a new spin on an old, terrible idea.

In a research paper by Mike Hulme, courtesy of Judith Curry:

"This paper traces how climate has moved from playing a deterministic to a reductionist role in discourses about environment, society and the future. Climate determinism previously offered an explanation, and hence a justification, for the superiority of certain imperial races and cultures. The argument put forward here is that the new climate reductionism is driven by the hegemony exercised by the predictive natural sciences over contingent, imaginative and humanistic accounts of social life and visions of the future. It is a hegemony which lends disproportionate power in political and social discourse to model-based descriptions of putative future climates. Some possible reasons for this climate reductionism, as well as some of the limitations and dangers of this position for human relationships with the future, are suggested."

So "Blood and Soil" are making a comeback! It would seem Green is the new Brown!

(Hat tip; Tom Nelson.)


Timothy Birdnow is a St. Louis based writer. His website is www.tbirdnow.mee.nu