Illiberal Environmentalism: Far-Right Nature and the Environmental Humanities

Abstract This article examines far-right nature by showing how contemporary movements weave ecological and public-health discourses into forms of political storytelling with broad public appeal. Focusing on cases from Europe and the United States, it traces how Rassemblement National’s eco-populism, the agrarian ultranationalism of Călin Georgescu, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” coalition channels public concern over climate and health crises into exclusionary narratives. The rhetoric of far-right nature can be difficult to identify and critique, in part because its ostensible concern with well-being and the environment often distances it from culturally dominant images of classical fascism. Nevertheless, the article demonstrates resonances between contemporary far-right nature and the biopolitical and organicist imaginaries of interwar fascist movements. Combining approaches from the environmental humanities with scholarship on fascism and the far right, the article argues that a public-facing environmental humanities must attend not only to imagination and storytelling but also to the political work environmental narratives perform within reactionary and exclusionary projects.