Fighting Fire and Fascism in the American West
“Last October, a right-wing sheriff in Oregon arrested a U.S. Forest Service “burn boss” whose prescribed fire treatment had charred a rancher’s fence—an incident that signals a simmering conflict between authoritarian localism and federal authority. Similarly, a giant New Mexico fire that was touched off by a controlled burn gone bad last summer will be used as evidence that the federal government is either incompetent or actively hostile to the rural West and that communities must “take back control” and seal themselves off from outsiders. As the effects, if not the causes, of climate change become of greater concern on the right, it becomes more likely that we’ll see the weaponization of emergency. And if reactionary figures are in control of local and federal government, we could easily see anti-government militia members turning into paramilitary foot soldiers [politicalresearch.org] to enforce emergency measures against the villains du jour.”
“The current liberal alternative to the far right—a “Big Green” NGO approach to forest management carried out through public-private partnerships and carbon offsetting—simply isn’t up to the task, especially given the current low-road trajectory of much forestry work: most jobs are poorly paid, seasonal, contingent, and high risk. Even more troubling is the fact that, as researcher Alex Amend puts it [politicalresearch.org], “mainstream environmentalism has shown itself to be vulnerable to ‘fascist creep’”: far-right approaches to ecological crisis have been adopted by otherwise left-leaning environmentalists, along with concepts that echo the racist, xenophobic roots of the original conservation movement.”