Throughout Western Europe, the Radical Right has put environmental ideas near the center of its political concerns, from the Vlaams Blok in Belgium to the Center Democrats in the Netherlands; to Italy's Northern League to France's National Front.

To be sure, not every radical right-wing party in Europe today puts environmental concerns at the center of its political discourse. Many of the newer populist radical right-wing parties combine a neo-liberal position on the economy with a hostility toward any kind of environmental protection. Such parties as the Automobilist Party in Switzerland, the Progress Party in Denmark and the Progress Party in Norway indeed could be said to represent a materialist and culturally conservative backlash against modern environmentalism.

This anti-environmental agenda is reflected as well in many radical right-wing groups in the United States, where a strong individualistic and anti-government ethos exists. Among many (although not all) radical right-wing groups in the US, environmental protection is viewed as a totalitarian attempt to suppress individual freedom by an illegitimate government in Washington.

Many parties of the Radical Right in Europe today articulate this kind of environmental worldview. Perhaps the clearest example of the harnessing of environmental concerns to radical right-wing politics can be seen in the programs and political activity of Switzerland's far-right Schweizer Demokraten (Swiss Democrats or SD) party.

Founded in 1961 under the name National Action Against the Foreignization of People and Homeland (NA), the party won 3.2 percent of the vote in national elections in 1971. The SD/NA showed some slippage in popularity in the 1970s, but the party bounced back to win 3.3 percent of the vote in national elections in 1991 and 3.1 percent in 1995. The Swiss Democrats now hold only one seat in the National Assembly, but they maintain close ties with other radical right-wing groups, parties, and thinkers in Germany. The anti-immigrant People's Party is now the third largest in Switzerland.

 The Swiss Democrats have always combined nationalist, anti-immigrant politics with ecological and social concerns. According to one 1998 study of the electoral support of the Swiss Democrats, protecting the environment was named as the third leading political issue for party sympathizers, after unemployment and law-and-order. Nearly 23 percent of SD party sympathizers thought that environmental protection should be the party's first priority. Right-wing ecological themes have been reflected in the Swiss Democrats' party programs as well. The SD's first party program in 1963 included passages inveighing against noise, water, and air pollution and decrying growing urban sprawl and development (which the party blamed on the "foreignization" of Switzerland).

Although not significantly different in tone, the current party program has modernized this discourse with more explicitly modern environmental language. Thus, the current party program includes a section on the ecological consequences of immigration, overpopulation, and foreignization, as well as a section linking the protection of the environment to a holistic conception of ecology. The current party program argues against immigration and unchecked economic growth for ecological reasons: "The Swiss Democrats fight for a healthy, stable, and social living-space (Lebensraum) for the people of Switzerland. This goal can only be reached, however, when (1) further economic growth is avoided, immigration kept to a minimum, and environmental damage ... is repaired; (2) the economy is not an end in itself, but rather serves the true needs of the people of Switzerland."

Such ideas have not been limited to Western Europe. In Russia, for example, right-wing ecological ideas have gained greater currency since the fall of Communism and the emergence of a traditionalist-cum-Stalinist Russian nationalism. A nascent environmental movement in Russia was already emerging in the 1970s. Much of its impetus came from naturalist novelists and writers - the so-called "village writers."

By the early 1980s, Pamyat, a right-wing group that developed from the All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments (an organization dedicated to nature protection and historical conservation), also began to involve itself with environmental questions. Like right-wing ecological groups and parties in the West, Pamyat has linked environmental concerns with a strident ultra-nationalism. Thus, while protesting the desertification of the Black Sea, plans to reroute the flow of Siberian rivers, and the systematic poisoning of the atmosphere, forests, rivers, and lakes (including the world's largest freshwater lake, Lake Baikal), Pamyat has blamed these environmental ills on "pernicious Western influences, Jews, and cosmopolitanism."

Although the village writers cannot be said to belong to the Radical Right, some, like Valentin Rasputin, have not only defended Pamyat but also have implied that alien influences are the cause of Russia's political and environmental problems. Some have suggested that solving Russia's environmental problems requires the protection of an ethno-culturally "pure" Russia and the rejection of the universalist ideas of the Enlightenment.

Right-wing Ecology in the US

In the US, right-wing ecological ideas have found expression in the writings of various parties, groups, and thinkers of the Radical Right. This is perhaps not surprising, since the US has had its own tradition of nature-and-nationalism.

For some pioneering American environmentalists of the late-19th century, environmentalist Madison Grant's call for the protection of the white race or the European legacy was synonymous with environmental protection. The preservation of raw nature in this discourse came to symbolize escape from the pollution of fast-growing polycultural urban areas.

Like their German and French counterparts, Radical Right activists in the US today, have modernized this discourse. Tom Metzger's neo-Nazi White Aryan Resistance (WAR) has blamed Jews, Blacks and nonwhite immigrants for the continued destruction of the American environment. In WAR's publications, Metzger has argued that the science of ecology teaches that human beings are not a separate entity from nature.

Meztger's group has argued that the defense of native species from foreign intruders within an eco-system also applies to human beings and their ecological niches within an eco-system. Metzger has pleaded for a US-style apartheid as the only solution to the pollution of both the natural and the social environment.

Meanwhile, the Radical Right, anti-immigration American Renaissance [www.amren.com] has reviewed favorably books by authors Peter Brimelow [Alien Nation: Immigration and the American Identity and Importing Revolution] and Garret Hardin [Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos] that argue against nonculturally European immigration into the US. According to American Renaissance, protecting the US environment requires the defense of the European heritage against non-white "hordes" coming from Central America and Africa. The September-October issue of American Renaissance magazine argues that environmental protection requires the separation of distinct cultures: "True diversity requires separation rather than amalgamation."

Rightwing ecological ideas also have found expression in the writings and public statements of former Ku Klux Klan leader and Louisiana gubernatorial candidate David Duke. Along with the expected diatribes against political elites, multiculturalism, and affirmative action, Duke has written that his goal is to "preserve the unique character and beauty of my people the same way that, as an ecology-minded individual, I desire the preservation of the Blue Whale or the great African Elephant." Duke's political program calls specifically for limiting immigration in the name of environmental protection.

In France, right-wing ecology has appeared in surprising places. In the regions of Le Var and Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur, several local leaders of Les Verts, one of France's major green parties, entered into an electoral alliance with the extreme-right National Front in the early 1990s. These leaders saw an alleged common basis for such an alliance in a shared concern to protect French and regional identities from foreign influences. This policy position was spelled-out as early as 1986, in a program paper written for the opening of Les Verts' debate on immigration: "There is some incoherence on the part of ecologists in demanding the safeguarding and promotion of regional cultures, without taking into consideration the strong presence of foreign minorities. It would be frustrating to visit Brittany if, with every step, one had to bump into a Swiss or a Croatian; if one could no longer find, even interspersed among other elements, a people (ein Volk!) in intense symbiosis with the land (ein Land!) it inhabits and to which it is attached, the linguistic, cultural, and architectural heritage ... which it can bring to life."

The leaking of this text to the weekly magazine L'Actuel caused acute embarrassment to Les Verts, and the party later distanced itself from the National Front.

During the last two presidential elections, Les Verts fielded a candidate, Antoine Waechter, whose writings reveal the strong influence of right-wing ecological thinking. Waechter has since left Les Verts and organized his own conservative (right-wing) ecological party.

In his 1990 book, Dessine-moi une Planete (Design Me a Planet), Waechter explains how an environmentally good society must be one in which the values of a rooted culture must be reaffirmed against a dangerous cosmopolitanism. Like the Nazi environment scientist Walter Schoenichen (who, as Chair for the Protection of Nature at the University of Berlin in 1926, warned that "a racial-hygenic collapse threatens our Volk"), Waechter's ecology does not limit itself to the protection of plants and animals, but rather protects human beings in all their different manifestations. Consequently, Waechter argues for a vision of ecology as rootedness. In Waechter's vision of environmentalism, the natural ecosystems of human beings (namely their cultures, regions, and nations) must be protected from alien influences and alien species. Waechter writes: "Civilizations are diverse, in the image of the living territories in which they are rooted. Like biological diversity, cultural diversity is threatened because certain civilizations, convinced of their own superiority, aim to conquer the land and make their values universal ... An attachment to a community, one identified by a way of speaking, a tradition, a certain savoir-faire, a history and, above all, the love of a territory which through its landscapes expresses the soul of this community, is one of our fundamental human dimensions. Being uprooted is a trauma: a source of psychological destabilization and existential trauma. The first fundamental right of an individual is to possess an identity, and this identity is inexorably bound to that of the human group to which he [sic] naturally belongs ..."

Whether consciously or not, some US environmentalists have also expressed right-wing ecological views - specifically the supposed link between multiculturalism, immigration, national identity and environmental destruction.

Environmentalist Garret Hardin, for example, has consistently argued that ethnic diversity and multiculturalism lead to environmental destruction. According to Hardin, immigrant groups have very little interest in protecting the US environment because they are not rooted in the land. In his 1993 book, Living Within Limits, Hardin argued that Japan can serve as a model of a country that has the right recipe for environmental sustainability. This not so much because of Japan's wise use of resources as because of its ethnic homogeneity and its refusal to succumb to multiculturalism.

The purported link between immigration, multiculturalism, and environmental destruction has also surfaced in the pronouncements of anti-immigration groups. According to the American Immigration Control Foundation, current US immigration policy (described as a policy that furthers racism and ethnic cleansing) will lead to the destruction of the environment - both because of the strain on natural resources and because immigrant groups purportedly have a low level of environmental consciousness. Even mainstream environmental groups have debated the link between immigration, multiculturalism, and environmental protection. In 1998, the Sierra Club passionately debated whether to add an anti-immigration plank to the group's policy program. Opponents of this plank point to right-wing ecological ideas that lurk in this kind of proposal.

As Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club has stated, "It is seen by people in the immigrant communities as saying: You are a form of pollution." The proposal was soundly rebuffed by a vote of the Sierra Club membership.