Chapter11 The Earth as a Phobic Object Negative Ecology and the Rise of Eco-Fascism

On Collapsology

Recently translated in English, two books illustrate a new trend of thought called “collapsology”: How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times and Another End of the World Is Possible: Living the Collapse (and Not Merely Surviving It).4 The argument of these two books is the following: because of the global rise of temperature, loss of biodiversity, the infertility of soils, water scarcity, peak oil, and other depletions, the collapse of our civilization is unavoidable and unmanageable. Every possibility that we might conceive as a way to avoid the planetary collapse is delusional. One might contemplate, for example, sources of energy able to replace oil (once oil will be either depleted or too expensive to be exploited) like solar energy or even nuclear plants; but the authors argue that, to develop any alternative energy in a global context, one needs oil (to transport raw materials and workers through the world, for instance). The “thermo-industrial civilization” is a trap: we cannot escape it, and when we try to escape it, we strengthen the causes leading to global collapse. We cannot, à la Hans Jonas or à la Jean-Pierre Dupuy, use the worst-case scenario as an exhortation to act in the present to prevent the worst-case scenario from happening.5 Given the inevitability of global collapse—or more accurately, as they explain, the collapses, always plural—the authors of How Everything Can Collapse and Another End of the World Is Possible consider it necessary to grieve the futures we had dreamt about—futures of progress, easy life, and smart phones—and to modify our representation of human society and of the other-than-humans. Against the individualist and competition-oriented scheme at the core of any survivalist strategy, they insist—leaning on the anarchist thinker Kropotkin—on “mutual aid” and solidarity, that is to say, on the positive aspects of a moral shift that our current civilization makes infeasible: Another End of the World Is Possible explores the passage from denial to mourning and from mourning to resilience and spiritual, existential renewals, hence its last line about a “happy collapse.”

We should not imagine that the authors of these influential books just speak for themselves. The idea that the future is rapidly dissolving into global warming is the reason for which movements like Youth Climate Movement or Extinction Rebellion recently emerged and became very popular.6 These movements are not millenarian. Their members do not use an apocalyptic religious vocabulary; they use the vocabulary of scientists, of the IPCC’s reports, to show that governments do almost nothing to act on the causes of climate change. Thus, if knowledgeable, responsible citizens, pro-Kropotkin thinkers and activists, are able to diagnose the gravity of the global environmental situation, it would be rationally indefensible to argue that CEOs, leaders of world organizations, and heads of state do not know how serious the situation is. Actually, they know; but they have a different idea concerning the “happy collapse,” another plan—a Plan B that is not about changing the political situation but about escaping it. As journalist Evan Osnos explains in a famous 2017 article titled “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,”

Survivalism, the practice of preparing for a crackup of civilization, tends to evoke a certain picture: the woodsman in the tinfoil hat, the hysteric with the hoard of beans, the religious doomsayer. But in recent years survivalism has expanded to more affluent quarters, taking root in Silicon Valley and New York City, among technology executives, hedge-fund managers, and others in their economic cohort.7

Osnos’s article documents how the very wealthy build underground bunkers with air-filtration systems in Kansas or buy houses in New Zealand, which is supposed to be safer than other places in the world: still democratic, self-sufficient in terms of food and energy, and (an interesting feature in an epoch of social distancing) “distant” enough from everything else in the world to be protected from chaos—at least for a while. What Osnos’s article shows is that the financial elite does not think about how to avoid the causes of chaos but about being at least momentarily protected from its consequences. Would it be unreasonable to argue that this nihilistic state of mind is perhaps also at play at the political level?

The Rise of Eco-Fascism

First, as I have already said, it would be almost impossible to imagine that everyone, from activists to hedge-fund managers, knows, except prime ministers and presidents. It is even not necessary to be a Marxist to know that the political and the economical domains greatly intersect (to use a euphemism). After all, the French president Macron used to be an investment banker. So they know. Even when they seem to deny it, they know—like Trump, calling global warming a “Chinese hoax” and also a “total hoax,” “bullshit” and “pseudoscience” while trying to build seawalls to protect his Ireland golf course from rising sea levels and water erosion. Even when they do not seem to acknowledge the anthropogenic origin of climate change, they know about its catastrophic consequences.8

They know, but they do not act. Or not enough. Or not quickly enough. Just one illustration:

The majority of the carbon emission reduction pledges for 2030 that 184 countries made under the Paris Agreement aren’t nearly enough to keep global warming well below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius). Some countries won’t achieve their pledges, and some of the world’s largest carbon emitters will continue to increase their emissions, according to a panel of world-class climate scientists. Their report, “The Truth Behind the Paris Agreement Climate Pledges,” warns that by 2030, the failure to reduce emissions will cost the world a minimum of $2 billion per day in economic losses from weather events made worse by human-induced climate change. Moreover, weather events and patterns will hurt human health, livelihoods, food, and water, as well as biodiversity.9

Hence what I call the eco-fascism meta-political hypothesis. According to Karl Polanyi, the “fascist solution of the impasse reached by liberal capitalism” in the 1930s “can be described as a reform of market economy achieved at the price of the extirpation of all democratic institutions.” But today the impasse concerns first the ecological situation and only second the market economy as a correlate. By this order of priority (first, the ecological), I do not mean, of course, that what Polanyi calls market economy, or what we can call capitalism or even neoliberalism, is not responsible for the environmental degradation. I mean that the eco-fascist political aim is the following: dealing with the social effects of the environmental collapse while trying to maintain, as much and as far as it is possible, the development of the economy. In 1973, Ivan Illich was already imagining a “managerial fascism,” which can be defined as a “bureaucratic management of human survival”:

People could be so frightened by the increasing evidence of growing population and dwindling resources that they would voluntarily put their destiny into the hands of Big Brothers. Technocratic caretakers could be mandated to set limits on growth in every dimension, and to set them just at the point beyond which further production would mean utter destruction. Such a dystopia could maintain the industrial age at the highest endurable level of output.10

Eco-fascism is an authoritarian way to “manage,” as Illich says, the catastrophic consequences, and not the causes, of the collapse of ecospheres—or, if not their collapse, their blatant and probably irreversible deterioration. Such eco-fascism might be nationalistic, but not necessarily. It is true that the massacres in El Paso, Texas in August 2019 and in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019, demonstrated how anti-immigrant white nationalism can be reinterpreted—by those who declare themselves as “eco-fascists”—in terms of anti-refugee environmentalism, calling for mass murder to save trees. Thus, we can understand how classic forms of nationalism might use so-called “protection of the environment” as a way to “protect” the nation (even when this protection is nonexistent, or hides the mere will to increase the wealth of a class on the backs of the nation).11 But we also need to imagine a new form of nationalism, less based on the affirmation of a conquering national identity and the expansion of its Lebensraum (living space) than on the survival of this identity in a collapsing world, in which water is going to be more and more a rare good as global warming leads to the evaporation of water and consequently makes it unavailable. One illustration of this new kind of nationalism: during the campaign for the 2019 European elections, Marine Le Pen—the leader of the French far-rightist party the Rassemblement National—argued during a political meeting that “The local must be given priority over the global.”12 For Le Pen, the nation is less defined as race than as one implementation of the local, as an “ecosystem” (I still quote Le Pen’s discourse) that must be protected against migrants and refugees seen as “invasive species.” The nation is thus less a substance (Blut und Boden) than a sort of immunological protection able to secure the “local,” that is to say, non-global, identity. Note that for the Rassemblement National ideology, the global is not—not openly, at least—synonymous with cosmopolitanism (as it used to be the case in its ideology of the 1980s) but with what attacks the ecological, biological, and economic conditions of survival of “the local.” Hence an emerging political function of the nation casts the nation not as a substantial centre but as an immunizing periphery. In this developing ideology, nationalism would fulfill an immune function, more reactive than active, using ecological discourse to ensure not the maintenance of an identity but of the material conditions of possibility for this identity to persist. Not a living space, but a surviving space. This developing ideology is also clearly at stake in Duterte’s “green authoritarianism”:

Duterte has channeled collective anxiety and resentment not just into a classist drug war and a nationalist assault on liberalism, but also into a performative green authoritarianism that promises to punish polluters (especially poor “squatters”) for subjecting the nation to environmental risk. Similarly, he has co-opted the rhetoric of the climate-justice movement, as for example when he said during an Al Jazeera interview: “Who’s responsible for the climate? Who’s responsible for Haiyan? Who’s responsible for the monsters of tornado? It’s industrialized countries. We had nothing to do with it.”13

As we saw in this section, eco-fascism is not a kind of politics aiming at acting on the causes of ecological collapse but rather at managing its consequences. This management demands a restructuring of governmentality to preserve the structure of domination. Eco-fascism would then be a form of politics that, in the future—a future that could get closer and closer due to strong pandemic episodes—would be in charge of the strict rationing of food, energy resources, and modalities of access to transport and communication, in a national framework where there would be no counter-power, only the omnipresent figure of a despot. It is unclear that an eco-fascist government would need to be concerned about the population’s health or subsistence: in times of ecological disaster, the survival of the group in power might depend on drones, robots, and artificial intelligence—any biopolitical concern (about health, hygiene, birthrate, and longevity) being a mere waste of time and energy. Eco-fascism would sign biopolitics’ death warrant. Consequently, the most likely kind of eco-fascism would be the one trying to save the ruling class by eliminating or at least immiserating the rest of the population, only preserving the minimum number of people necessary for the technical maintenance of the capitalist technologies still capable of functioning after major ecological disruptions. In this extreme form of eco-fascism that perhaps only cinema has anticipated, even nationalism would be a waste of time.14

Birth of Negative Ecology

The first section seems to offer the following lesson: for the kind of eco-fascist politics I trace here, the main concern is not to preserve the environment but to preserve a group from the environment. For this reason, I propose the concept of negative ecology, which I define first as an attempt to build dams against the environment itself, in order to save the lives of privileged groups to the detriment of others. In this political frame, the Others are those who are intentionally and blatantly exposed to environmental death—hence the necessity for a strong, and maybe renewed, environmental justice movement.15 If, therefore, eco-fascism’s ecology is negative, this is also because it denies others the right to live. Finally, I think we can add a third meaning to the term “negative ecology”: if even national leaders recognize the threat of a civilizational collapse, then the fact that these leaders intentionally burn forests (as in Brazil) and every environmental rule (as in the United States) should be interpreted as a deliberate acceleration of environmental destructions, a way to accelerate the eco-fascist restructuring itself. In this sense, the governments ruled by Bolsonaro in Brazil, Trump in the US, and Duterte in Philippines (amongst others), can be considered as first steps toward the establishment of eco-fascism.

Philosophically, where does this relation with the environment come from? As I argue, eco-fascism’s negative ecology does not deny the environmental situation but recognizes it—thus we need to understand this recognition. The reason for a possible eco-fascist contamination everywhere in the world is that the Earth, understood as Gaia, as the ecosystem of every ecosystem, seems to generate nothing except fear, or “eco-anxiety,” to borrow from Noah Theriault’s already quoted essay on the Philippines:

The Philippines has undergone rapacious deforestation, resource extraction, and ecological degradation over the past century, and this has come at the expense of workers, peasants, and the environments that sustain them. Faced with what seems like a constant string of landslides, floods, typhoons, and other disasters, the Philippines is not just one of the most “disaster-prone” countries in the world, it is also one of the most “vulnerable” to the effects of climate change. Surveys have found that some 72% of Filipinos say they are “very concerned” about climate change, and some 85% report they are feeling its effects.16

This fear is certainly a planetary fear, even though one should not erase huge differences of perception and exposure depending on populations in question—hence environmental racism, that is to say, the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on people of colour (like placement of minority communities in proximity to toxic waste). Yet the fear circulates globally and creates a sort of social parataxis (a juxtaposition of unmediated social realities), with on the one hand overexposure (of minorities, racialized people) and on the Other, overprotection (CEOs building bunkers or Elon Musk dreaming about an escape to Mars). This global fear perhaps explains why a thinker like Bruno Latour completely changed his philosophical perspective: first a lover of technology explaining why we should “love our monsters”—our artificial, “hybridized” creatures—and reject any attempt to criticize technology, he seems now aware of the technological danger and describes Earth as “terrifying,” a source of “horror.” The Earth is more and more seen as a monster, Mother Earth turned into a ghoul—a nightmarish return of a repressed “Nature.” Climate change does not reveal Earth as a beast that we cannot tame but as a Lovecraftian creature that we do not want to face any longer, Medusa longing for our gaze.17 Unable to find a mirrored shield thanks to which we could see the Gorgon, we just prepare for a blind war against the Earth.

The war against the Earth is not something new and should be understood as the perfect implementation of what Carolyn Merchant called “the death of nature,” which is the military victory of the phallocratic rationalism that modernity has favoured. Since the seventeenth century, the war against the Earth has had a specific goal: submitting the Earth to a will to reprograming. For Descartes, nature is no longer “some deity, or other sort of imaginary power” but “matter itself”—a flexible matter that we allowed ourselves to transform depending on our needs and fantasies. If the “book of nature,” to borrow from Galileo Galilei, is “written in mathematical language,” then the Earth—as the terrestrial embodiment of nature—is a page with letters and figures that we can easily digitalize and reassemble in a new form: an Earth 2.0. Earth 2.0 is Earth mastered by the sons of Descartes: the programmers who conceived Google Earth (a 3D representation of Earth based on satellite imagery), the geo-engineers who nowadays promise to master the climate and kill nature for good. Killing nature and generating its digital resurrection are two sides of the same coin, two sides that we need to consider if we want to understand the other dimension of the war against nature: not only its electronic resurrection, its 3D modelling and reprograming, but also its exploitation, the extractivist economy leading to fracking and fires in the Amazonian rainforest. We might think that nature’s mathematization, thanks to which science and technology can develop, underpins extractivism; but on a psycho-political level, it is more useful to highlight that it is the split between digitalization and extractivism that determines environmental collapse: the more the Earth is subjected to its digital transmigration into a geo-engineered Earth 2.0, the more the real Earth is seen as a remainder that one would like to flush, hoping that such a “magic” act would either reverse global warming or at least protect the class of magicians and their eco-fascist protectors.

But in parallel with the formation of the Capitalocene—or should we call it the Digitalocene?—and its not disinterested attempt to master the forces of nature, an environmental awareness rose up. As historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz demonstrated, sensitivity to the environment did not suddenly appear in the 1960s with the birth of the US environmentalist movement: environmental sensitivity has accompanied, from the beginning, the development of the Capitalocene, the fabrication of Watt’s engine and the spread of the industrial revolution. For example, Bonneuil and Fressoz explain that, at the end of eighteenth century, people were already thinking about the connection between climate change and deforestation—already in fierce opposition to deforestation, already writing petitions and creating associations denouncing industrial pollution and the maladies resulting from it. But what I call negative ecology is the terrible inversion of this awareness: not the mere production of a split between humankind and “nature,” that is to say, the production of an ontological form of exceptionalism withdrawing humankind from the rest of the world, but a “pragmatic,” concrete, cynical way to use environmental awareness as a form of authoritarian governmentality (assuming that a governmentality that does not really care for its population is not a mere flatus vocis). The reason for that form of cynical governmentality is that Earth 2.0 was not able to completely replace the “real” Earth: the digital was not completely able to become an offshore, parallel universe, and cyberspace was not able to completely get rid of the effluvium coming from acidified oceans. The Digitalocene has a leak, which fuels negative ecology.

Does it mean that what I call negative ecology is a planetary destiny, that everybody in the world feels but also fears the environment? This is not the case, as I will explain in the next section. However, to defeat the war against the terrestrial environment, we first need to know what must be confronted.

Terrestrial Alliances and Planetary Technology

Actually, I see two ways to defeat the war against the Earth: a micro-political and a macro-political one. The first one deals with ecopolitical activism; the second deals with the state and technology to be implemented at the national and global level. Both should be connected in the future if we want to prevent the war against the Earth from being the best way to fuel the collapse of the biosphere.

The micro-political solution takes place when some people decide to defend their land, their forest, or their lake against geo-capitalist predation, against the building of a dam, an airport, a pipeline (like in North Dakota recently), or an entertainment park. What happens during these political struggles might be termed “terrestrial alliances.”18 A terrestrial alliance is not a fusion of humans and non-humans or the ontological affirmation that everything is One, but a form of political correspondence between different entities. When in France, at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, activists against the building of an airport used to say: “We don’t defend nature, we’re nature defending itself (nous ne défendons pas la nature, nous sommes la nature qui se défend),” note that in the second part of the sentence, two subjects are at play, nous (we) and la nature (nature): these two subjects are allied in a struggle, thanks to the struggle, but they do not constitute one merged natural subject. However, I do not mean to suggest that no identification is possible between humans and non-humans (human subjects and a forest, for instance), but I argue that such an identification is what Rancière called an “impossible identification”: an identification precisely happening when one cannot put oneself in the Other’s place, because the Otherness of the Other ultimately also prevents me from identifying with myself. The French activists who cast themselves as the forest under attack are not engaged in a Deleuzian becoming-forest during which the forest and the human subject lose their boundaries: to the contrary, their rallying cry signals the immediate and absolute appearance of a common being in which nature’s Otherness is expressed as Other thanks to a human mediation.

In a situation of terrestrial alliance, we are not so far away from Aldo Leopold’s “thinking like a mountain” recommendation: What is at stake is not to become the mountain but to make the mountain appear as the lasting space-time. It is thanks to such a shift in thinking that the hunter and the wolf can identify with that which cannot be reduced to what they are. This sort of impossible identification is a good way to escape negative ecology’s trap: instead of seeing the Earth—as such, or metonymically present in a specific forest or a lake—as a mere external object to be mastered or to be feared, we can see the Earth as a dimension of alterity that constitutes our political relation to the world. In a terrestrial alliance, Earth’s Otherness is neither seen as purely external nor dissolved in any oneness. In this sense, a terrestrial alliance is a situation in which fear can be replaced by care or included in care—in care, we fear for the Other because we do not want the Other to die, not because the Other is perceived as a monster to be neutralized. However, how might we use the lessons of these micro-political alliances to imagine a possible change in the technological-economic structure of the state? Is there a macro-political way to prevent governments and heads of state from developing “green authoritarianism” and “managerial fascism”?

Philosopher Walter Benjamin can help us to sketch out a macro-political perspective. Benjamin wrote several texts dealing with fascism, and he always connected fascism with a certain conception of technology and nature. Benjamin’s thesis is the following: in fascism, war is thought of as an expression of an idealized, mysticized nature, an idealization that is also at stake in the fascist representation of the nation, which is seen as natural and pure; that is to say, completely mythical. In “Theories of German Fascism” (1930), speaking of the “landscape of the front” during World War I, Benjamin wrote: “Etching the landscape with flaming banners and trenches, technology wanted to recreate the heroic features of German Idealism.” But what really happened is that technology

gave shape to the apocalyptic face of nature and reduced nature to silence—even though this technology had the power to give nature its voice. War, in the metaphysical abstraction in which the new nationalism believes, is nothing other than the attempt to redeem, mystically and without mediation, the secret of nature, understood idealistically, through technology. This secret, however, can also be used and illuminated via a technology mediated by the human scheme of things.19

Against the idealization of nature, which could be also identified as another root of what I have called the Digitalocene and its will to a total virtualization of the Earth, Benjamin imagines another use of technology: a technology that would neither “silence” nature nor give her an “apocalyptic face.” This opposition between two sorts of technology is also at stake in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1935–1939). In this text, Benjamin famously opposes the “aestheticizing of politics” that fascism practices. “All efforts to aestheticize politics,” he writes, “culminate in one point. That one point is war.”20 As he observes in the last line of his text, communism replies to fascism’s aestheticizing of politics “by politicizing art,” which is the very thing that Benjamin advocates.21 What Benjamin calls the aestheticizing (of politics) is clearly linked to the idealization (of nature and the nation) that he was criticizing in his essay on German fascism. In the aestheticizing of politics, technology is used to master nature, a mastery revealing its success in war, which sets “a goal for mass movements on the grandest scale” and mobilizes “all of today’s technological resources.” But through the politicizing of art, another function would be given to technology: “The destruction caused by war furnishes proof that society was not mature enough to make technology its organ, that technology was not sufficiently developed to master the elemental forces of society.”22

This passage is so important that we find almost exactly the same sentences in the first page of “Theories of German Fascism.” And in “One-Way Street,” published in 1928, Benjamin argues that technology should not be the mastery of nature but “of the relation between nature and man.”23 Mastering the relation between nature and human beings, instead of mastering nature, neither requires the extractivist nor the digital annihilation of the Earth that we studied in the previous section but a redirecting of society’s “elemental forces.” Amongst these forces, one might identify the destruction that Freud named “death drive”: Is it not also the death drive that is aestheticized in war, be it a war between nations or a war against the environment? Redirecting our death drive but also our capacity to take care of others and to defend what we love (our life drive) will be only possible thanks to education, which Benjamin associates with technology, understood as a mediation between nature and humankind, and not as a tool for power. In this new aesthetic education of humankind, we could imagine a new Great Narrative (new representations, new values) that society would generate and promote apropos the Earth and its place in the cosmos: let us imagine a technology whose goal would not be to violently ex-tract energy from the Earth, but to in-sert the Earth into the cosmos; let us imagine a technology that would help us to perceive the correspondences—not the fusion—between human beings and animals, plants, and stones but also super-novae, with whom we share some components. After all, to think like a mountain is to remember that technology shares with mountains a material ground: its geological components. Understood as related to the Earth, technology could be used to shape terrestrial alliances instead of building dams against the environment.

But alas, at the macro-level like at the micro-level, terrestrial alliances cannot happen in a peaceful way. Benjamin knew very well that fascism would not be defeated only with good intentions. This is why, in “Theories of German Fascism,” he both condemns the “mysticism of war” and “pacifism’s cliched ideal of peace.”24 Benjamin knew that what he called the politicizing of aesthetics, or communism, would imply resolutely stopping fascism and anything else that destroys the conditions of possibility for justice and happiness. For Benjamin, as for us, the problem is the same: changing the function of technology will not happen without political struggles that modify the economic structure of society. This is why Benjamin wrote that war sets “a goal for mass movements on the grandest scale while preserving traditional property relations”; he also wrote that war mobilizes “all of today’s technological resources while maintaining property relations” (my emphasis in both).25 In other words, redirecting society’s death drive away from war and away from any sort of xenophobia or persecution of minorities will not be possible without something able to function as a class struggle aimed at changing the economic structure of property and society. Maybe “class struggle” is not the right term; sometimes I prefer to speak about a stratum struggle, that is to say, a form of political affirmation based on our geological awareness—our ability to “think like a mountain”—and the ways through which we could neutralize the eco-fascist geo-power.26 Planetary peace will not happen without tectonic shifts.

Conclusion: Viral Fear or Planetary Alliances?

Will we be able to stop the development and the spreading of the negative ecology underpinning the eco-fascist future? Are we sure that even the social-democrat regimes will not develop their own forms of eco-fascism, using police and the army to reject environmental refugees while building consent about eco-biopolitical rules on the national frame? My fear is that eco-fascism could spread everywhere, in blatant nationalist regimes but also in authoritarian neoliberal democracies.

The pandemic situation in which we were immersed did not seem to trigger a counter-movement able to defeat eco-fascism. In a way, things worsened. Governments did not privilege democratic solutions to deal with COVID-19. In France, for instance, the government decreed an “état d’urgence sanitaire” (health state of emergency) that was extended in 2022, suspending freedoms and giving all the power to the executive branch. Concerning our terrestrial reality, it is worth noting that what one calls “social distancing” is first a physical distancing; nobody prevents you from experiencing social proximity via Skype or Zoom, for it is the body of the Other—as environmental index—that has become a phobic object, the possible carrier of your own death. One question seems, alas, to eclipse all others: What is the technology that will be able to neutralize human bodies (“sheltering” them, that is, severing them from each other) while enabling the unrestrained development of the economy?

This form of proactive neutralization of human bodies had been anticipated by Ivan Illich, in a paragraph that just follows the above quoted line about the “dystopia” that “could maintain the industrial age at the highest endurable level of output”:

Man would live in a plastic bubble that would protect his survival and make it increasingly worthless. Since man’s tolerance would become the most serious limitation to growth, the alchemist’s endeavour would be renewed in the attempt to produce a monstrous type of man fit to live among reason’s dreams. A major function of engineering would become the psychogenetic tooling of man himself as a condition for further growth. People would be confined from birth to death in a world-wide schoolhouse, treated in a world-wide hospital, surrounded by television screens, and the man-made environment would be distinguishable in name only from a world-wide prison.27

This nightmarish vision might not have been produced in 1973, but today. Or tomorrow: COVID-19 enabled some virtual economic-technological plans to become real, like remote learning replacing in-class teaching, the development of “telehealth,” of so-called “smart cities” conjuring up artificial bubbles severed from the dangerous, grey reality of the green world, with almost everything being able to be home delivered (for well-off people, at least). As Anuja Sonalker, the CEO of Steer Tech, a Maryland-based company selling self-parking technology, said in a perfect eco-phobic moment: “Humans are biohazards, machines are not.”28 COVID-19 fuels contemporary eco-phobia and the war against terrestrial reality, and artificial intelligence might be thought as the best way to implement the negative ecology driving eco-fascism.

In a way, we should not be so surprised that a coronavirus strengthens eco-phobia: deforestation drives wild animals out of their natural habitat and puts them in contact with domestic farms close to peri-urban areas, a godsend for viruses that can then spread from wild animals to humans. The more biodiversity disappears, the more viral the globe becomes: as ecologist Philippe Grandcolas notes,

This is mainly a problem of simplifying ecosystems, of fragmenting natural habitats where diversity declines. The capacity of infectious agents to be transmitted from one person to another is reinforced, their prevalence increases, their enemies can disappear. . . . In France, we kill hundreds of thousands of foxes every year. However, they are predators of rodents carrying mites and can transmit Lyme disease through their bites. There are no angels or demons in nature, the species can be both at the same time. The bat is not only a reservoir of viruses, it is also a predator of insects as well as a pollinator of certain plants.29

As described by Grandcolas, bats perfectly illustrate Otherness, understood as what we cannot define a priori, at the risk of stifling it. Consequently, if we want to defeat COVID-19 and the next virus that will unavoidably come (from a forest or from permafrost thawing), we need to deeply question its condition of possibility: the Capitalocene and its eco-phobia, its rejection of Otherness as a biohazard. To do that, we will need to form planetary alliances: by this, I mean terrestrial alliances able to exceed their local radiance and their national configuration, thanks to a technology commensurate to the planet—a geo-technology, or even a cosmo-technology—put in service of the flourishing of human and other-than-human forms of life. Without these audacious coalitions, I fear that peace will only look like a form of life in digital parameters, for the wealthy ones, at least; for the poor, war will be a daily-life attempt to survive in a collapsed environment, overheated and beset by viruses.

Notes

1. 1 See my article “Feu à volonté: nécro-police, nationalisme réactif, éco-fascisme,” lundimatin#206, September 9, 2019, https://lundi.am/Feu-a-volonte-Frederic-Neyrat.

2. 2 As I make the final corrections to this chapter, my pessimistic views unfortunately seem to be corroborated by the ongoing war in Ukraine.

3. 3 In 2018, the World Bank Group reported that “by 2050, without concrete climate and development action, just over 143 million people—or around 3 percent of the population across Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and South Asia—could be forced to move within their own countries to escape the slow-onset impacts of climate change”: World Bank Group, “Internal Climate Migration in Latin America,” Groundswell: Preparing for Internal Climate Migration, Policy Note #3, 2018, https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/983921522304806221/pdf/124724-BRI-PUBLIC-NEWSERIES-Groundswell-note-PN3.pdf, 1. For a specific, concrete example, see “Central American Farmers Head to the U.S., Fleeing Climate Change,” New York Times, April 13, 2019.

4. 4 Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020); Raphaël Stevens, Gauthier Chapelle, and Pablo Servigne, Another End of the World Is Possible: Living the Collapse (and Not Merely Surviving It), trans. Geoffrey Samuel (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2021).

5. 5 On this sort of rational catastrophism, see my essay “The Biopolitics of Catastrophe, or How to Avert the Past and Regulate the Future,” South Atlantic Quarterly 115, no. 2 (April 2016): 247–65.

6. 6 See the website of XR (Extinction Rebellion): https://rebellion.earth/.

7. 7 Evan Osnos, “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” The New Yorker, January 23, 2017.

8. 8 Even Putin has ended up acknowledging—in 2019—climate change, even though he continues to deny its anthropogenic origin. See “‘Nobody Knows Why Climate Changes,’ Says Putin,” Brussels Times, December 19, 2019; and “Russia Announces Plan to ‘Use the Advantages’ of Climate Change,” The Guardian, January 5, 2020.

9. 9 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 245. On freedom, see pp. 266–67.

10. 10 Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, [1973] 1975), 115–16.

11. 11 We should never forget that Nazis were not real environmentalists: protecting nature was a way to justify racial crimes and the doctrine of Lebensraum. See Johann Chapoutot, The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi, trans. Miranda Richmond Mouillot (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 23–63, esp. 31–32.

12. 12 Lucie Delaporte, “Le ‘localisme’ signe la victoire des identitaires au RN,” Mediapart, April 16, 2019; and Lucie Soullier and Nabil Wakim, “Le virage écolo-identitaire de Marine Le Pen,” Le Monde, April 15, 2019. See also Kate Aranoff, “The European Far Right’s Environmental Turn,” Dissent, May 19, 2019, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-european-far-rights-environmental-turn.

13. 13 Noah Theriault, “Euphemisms We Die By: On Eco-Anxiety, Necropolitics, and Green Authoritarianism in the Philippines,” in Beyond Populism: Angry Politicsand the Twilight of Neoliberalism, ed. Jeff Maskovsky and Sophie Bjork-James (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019), 182–205, at 195. This essay describes very well the “greenwashing of authoritarianism” in the Philippines and how “Duterte’s engagements in ecopolitics” help to “coordinate collective anxiety about environmental and climatic disruption in service to a broader authoritarian agenda,” how “environmental protection and disaster management have become two of the most important ways in which Duterte performs his commitment to impose public order and discipline” (183).

14. 14 Consider Richard Fleischer’s film Soylent Green (1973), for instance, which I analyze, among other films, in “Le cinéma éco-apocalyptique. Anthropocène, Cosmophagie, Anthropophagie,” in “Vivre la catastrophe,” edited by Yoann Moreau, special issue, Communications 96 (2015): 67–79.

15. 15 On environmental justice, see Gordon Walker, Environmental Justice: Concepts, Evidence and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).

16. 16 Theriault, “Euphemisms We Die By,” 195.

17. 17 On the metaphor of the beast, see Clive Hamilton, Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 100.

18. 18 Concerning the concept of alliance and terrestrial alliance, I lean here on the groundbreaking article by Léna Balaud and Antoine Chopot, “Suivre la forêt: une entente terrestre de l’action politique,” Terrestres, November 18, 2018, https://www.terrestres.org/2018/11/15/suivre-la-foret-une-entente-terrestre-de-laction-politique/, as well as on their book Nous ne sommes pas seuls: Politiques des soulèvements terrestres (Paris: Seuil, 2021). On the idea of “interspecies resistance,” see Katarzyna Olga Beilin and Suryanarayanan Sainath, “The War Between Amaranth and Soy: Interspecies Resistance to Transgenic Soy Agriculture in Argentina,” Environmental Humanities 9, no. 2 (2017): 204–29.

19. 19 Walter Benjamin, “Theories of German Fascism,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, pt. 1, 1927–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 319.

20. 20 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Selected Writings, vol.4, 1938–1940, 269.

21. 21 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 270.

22. 22 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 270.

23. 23 Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, 487.

24. 24 Benjamin, “Theories of German Fascism,” 313.

25. 25 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 269.

26. 26 On the idea of stratum struggle, see my article “Marx with the Stars: Notes for an Escape Plan from the Current Era,” Electra 1 (Spring 2018): 100–11.

27. 27 Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 116.

28. 28 Quoted in Naomi Klein, “Screen New Deal,” The Intercept, May 8, 2020.

29. 29 Philippe Grandcolas, “Coronavirus: ‘L’origine de l’épidémie de Covid-19 est liée aux bouleversements que nous imposons à la biodiversité,’” Le Monde, April 4, 2020.