<i>Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature</i> by Alexander Menrisky

Like fascism itself, ecofascism is a term that although widely written about in political theory and history,1 remains fraught and contested, and has thus evaded definitions that could account for the full scope of its production and proliferation across the political and cultural landscape. When historians and political theorists describe ecofascism they often point to extreme examples of those who espouse environmental ideologies predicated on maintaining existing systems of power and inequity and who advocate for mass violence, or at least perceive violence as an inevitability. For example, the gunman in New Zealand who, in 2019, massacred fifty-one people at a mosque in Christchurch, and the gunman in Buffalo, New York, who killed ten Black people at a grocery store in 2022 self-identified as ecofascists. They articulated in different ways a notion of environmental purity under attack by nonwhite immigrants conspiring to displace white Europeans as their primary motivation. In Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature, Alexander Menrisky approaches the term in ways others have not, through literary studies, pursing together social history and a close reading of popular environmental texts, arguing that “literary studies is particularly poised to consider [ecofascism’s] everyday dimensions in the form of speech acts that inconclusively contribute to its momentum” (34). For him, ecofascism is not a “stable ideology” (11), as much as an ideology can ever be stable, but a “phenomenon or process, or even an outcome—a pattern not just of material violence but also of cultural narrative,” and therefore, he argues, ecofascism is instead “a matter of political genre” (5–6). “Genres,” according to Menrisky and in conversation with Lauren Berlant and Kai Bosworth, “are identifiable by their consistency” (6). They are “repeated, detailed, and stretched while retaining [their] intelligibility” (Berlant quoted in Menrisky 6). Bosworth’s work, which Menrisky cites, similarly points out that populism might be more accurately conceived as a political genre rather than an ideology (Menrisky quotes him as such on page 20). There is also an affective characteristic to genre, Menrisky observes, since they promise “that the persons transacting with it will experience the pleasure of what they expected” (Berlant quoted in Menrisky 6). The “affective dimension” of genre, therefore, “condition[s] political struggles (Bosworth quoted in Menrisky 6). Similarly, ecofascism maintains consistent narrative themes across a variety of contexts: “an entitlement to land, a fetish for ‘purity and natural order,’ and a willingness to at least entertain mass death (if not perpetrate it)” (8). The “affective dimension” of genre, in Menrisky’s terms, means that those narrative themes, in turn, produce and sustain ecofascist discourses.As challenges posed by the undeniable reality of climate change intensify, right-wing extremists increasingly reframe white supremacist sentiments in terms of environmental integrity. However, for Menrisky, limiting our interpretation of ecofascism to those on the far right who hold explicit connections to fascist thought that occasionally leads to violent ends—what Bernhard Forchtner and Balša Lubardo refer to as “eco-fascism ‘proper’” (quoted in Menrisky 5)—obscures the myriad ways ecofascist ideas enter the public consciousness through reproductions of commonly held assumptions that constellate around environmental art, writing, and politics and that implicate even the most well-meaning people across the political spectrum. “It is precisely these less zealous circumstances that interest me in this book” (6), Menrisky writes, pointing to the observations of Min Hyoung Song that “the drama of the everyday doesn’t just remain at the level of the everyday.” This is the “everyday” of Menrisky’s Everyday Ecofascism, which does not refer to the methodologies of everyday life studies directly. Rather, for him, by focusing on the everyday as “both a backdrop and buttress to conditions of oppression and overt acts of violence,” he aims to expand our frame of reference, to extend it from literary texts to quotidian utterances and speech acts in which language is deployed so casually, so seemingly apolitically that it often escapes critique. He asks us to consider that which produces ecofascist discourses or, as he puts it, that which “prefigures” the logics of ecofascism. Everyday Ecofascism is therefore not a book about state ideology, nor specifically about those who engage in violence, or even the far right. “It is, rather, about the political genre or narrative patterns that conditions . . . ‘eco-fascism proper’” (5). As Menrisky tells us, ecofascism and the worst of its effects, such as those that bubble up into violent acts, first and foremost “proceed from certain ways of representing the world that encode existing assumptions about race, nation, and environment” (6). Examples of this mode of representation include misguided environmentalist appeals to population control, the stated willingness “to submit to a green dictator if they would address climate change” (4), or online declarations during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic that “Coronavirus is Earth’s vaccine. We are the virus” (189). Menrisky explicates the everydayness of these positions and statements, attempting to find narrative patterns that “prefigure ecofascism” elsewhere, in art and literature. For example, he compares the characters in Adam Johnson’s Parasites Like Us (2003) to those of Margaret Atwood’s Gardeners in The Year of the Flood (2009), whom he reads “not as fascists or even supremacists, but as . . . people who nonetheless advance narratives that promote their own survival at the expense of others’ in times of crisis” (203). Menrisky’s approach therefore also aligns with comparative fascism studies that view fascism as a cultural process, something much more complex than an ideology held by those with a conscious commitment to fascism. He echoes scholars who argue that fascistic impulses emerge universally through storytelling rather than partisan politics, and that what matters in the production of ecofascism are the narratives that respond to crisis by mobilizing belonging and purity.Menrisky’s description of ecofascism as a process conjures a kind of spectrum that begins with narrative patterns that respond to a perceived crisis—utterances that may at first seem devoid of ideas that are markedly fascist, but somewhere a threshold is passed where ecofascist persuasions begin to take root. Thus, he organizes his book around several “threshold objects,” with chapters dedicated to Land, Tools, Food, Drugs, and Contagion, which “rhetorically return the subject to a state of ecological innocence and absolve one of complicity in that crisis” (33). For him, the simple and complex ways in which individuals and groups move through these thresholds to achieve a sense of purity and innocence constitute a kind of consumption, a description that is occasionally meant to be literal and other times metaphorical, yet he is mindful of the ways he is asking readers to stretch their understanding of its meaning. For example, in the first chapter, consumption relates to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in order to sustain settlers’ entitlement to and ideas about land as open and pristine. This application, marked by consumption of land to sustain settler imaginaries at the expense of Indigenous communities is more intuitive than, for example consumption as “identity building self-incorporation” (85), which he describes in chapter 2, “Tools,” and chapter 5 focusing on “Contagion.” In those examples, consumption is closer to acts of “assimilation—that is, interaction with and/or representation of an object in such a way that rhetorically establishes or enhances a form of identification with or through it” (31). Ultimately, Menrisky calls on us to think of consumption “as a metaphor for accessing an exclusive state of purity and safety in times of ecological crisis” (228).Because it is critical to his analysis, however, consumption is worth lingering on because the term is quite useful for describing its relationship to crisis. He uses the term “in a dual sense to refer to both the circulation of objects and their incorporation into the self, by a variety of means, as a matter of identity” (32). The ecological crisis has prompted some to believe answers lie in the consumption of psychedelic drugs and fungi to obtain a deeper connection to the environment, as discussed in chapter 4, “Drugs.” For others, the answers might lie in the health crisis of the pandemic and a “kind of immune machismo” (196) through which some believed they could develop biological advantages through training their immune system by eating unclean food or consuming unfiltered water from natural sources as framed in chapter 5, “Contagion.” In each case, consumption bridges the gap between feelings of crisis and feelings of purity, and as poet Tommy Pico observes, purity “is so fascist” (quoted in Menrisky 233).While the book’s thematic focus—land, tools, foods, drugs, and contagion—moves chronologically across the late twentieth century to the present, initially the themes themselves appear to be somewhat arbitrary. However, this appearance is deceptive because Menrisky’s chapters clearly build and expand on each other with careful intention. For example, the first chapter, “Land,” uses the principle of enclosure—the idea that, broadly speaking, once land is defined, measured, and fenced in, it is owned—and appeals to “natural law” to extend the discussion in the introduction, by going deeper into the historical, political, and intellectual precursors that inform both far-right movements and early environmentalist thinking in the United States. Likewise, the narratives of settler entitlement to land that animate the first chapter resurface in the second, strengthening Menrisky’s critique of the appeals to crisis in Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975). In this novel, a nation formed in Northern California, Oregon, and Washington secedes from the United States and is organized around ecological principles, sustainability, and communal living. Menrisky analyzes the novel in ways that exemplify his observation of a narrative pattern in which ecological crisis may be used to sustain notions of purity and belonging. The third chapter focuses on the work of poet Jeff Mann, which is then carried over to the last two chapters in which Menrisky discusses both Mann and Callenbach as writers who “habitually prioritize strength (often in ableist and hypermasculine terms) as a prerequisite for environmental belonging” (38). While themes and literary critique continue from one chapter to another, giving the book a solid sense of chronology as well as thematic progression, it is not meant to be exhaustive or definitive. Indeed, one of the accomplishments of this project is how it maps out narrative logics—patterns that reoccur with troubling implications and occasionally disturbing outcomes—such that we may recognize them elsewhere.This book was not meant to be the final word on ecofascism, its narrative patterns, or the ways those patterns might be recognized across the cultural landscape. The way these patterns are expressed are always in flux, occasionally coalescing, but oftentimes branching off into new territories. According to Menrisky, before ecofascist ideologies manifest in the form of violence, let alone take shape as state ideology, they have their roots in everyday utterances and unchecked assumptions that can be detected in the stories we tell about ourselves. He shows that recognizing such patterns requires a sharp literary-critical lens. The book will easily be at home in environmental humanities courses and environmental literature courses and will be of great interest for those who teach and research in these areas. It should be required reading for scholars invested in environmental ethics and the changing landscape of climate discourses. For those involved in the multidisciplinary field of fascism studies—but specifically political and cultural theorists and historians—this book will be valued for its contributions in ongoing discussions on the cultural production of fascism, recalling the work of Roger Griffin, the author of several cultural studies on fascism, among others. As a scholar of rhetoric, with a deep interest in the affective relationship between discourse and physical reality, I would certainly teach from this book in courses that deal with rhetoric, culture, and the environment.Scholars of rhetoric would also readily embrace Menrisky’s attention to the intention of authors as something wholly different, and ultimately less significant, than the effect of their rhetoric on audiences—rhetoric, in this case, as always in relation to the determinant social formations that produce it. While this emphasis appears throughout his book, it is most powerfully expressed in his analysis of writers read as gospel in environmental circles, from Henry David Thoreau to John Muir to Edward Abbey. The often unacknowledged and unexamined racial biases of these celebrated writers were allowed to percolate alongside the misplaced hysteria around population control discourses that precipitated in the 1970s following Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), leading to problematic eugenic undertones within the deep ecology movement through the 1990s. While individual writers, thinkers, and even movements may not promote overtly ecofascist positions, readers of these works interpret and internalize environmental politics within a larger cultural context, where long-standing structures like settler colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy foreground basic assumptions about everyday life.Everyday Ecofascism ends with a call to reject the concept of purity and learn to favor creation over consumption, turning to queer Indigenous poet Tommy Pico for guidance, alongside figures such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Louise Erdrich. Menrisky emphasizes creative acts that rupture ecofascist genres, including writing poetry that provokes ways of being based on multiplicity, relationality, and survival without purity. Concluding this book in conversation with Pico signifies a broader need for justice-rooted storytelling that narrates alternatives to belonging that embrace complexity in our personal and political lives.Ecofascism is perhaps best caricatured by the villain Thanos from Marvel Studio’s popular Avengers films, which Menrisky references a few times throughout the book, and specifically compares to the titular character, Crake, from Margaret Atwood’s 2003 novel, Oryx and Crake. While Crake “chemically culls the population to preempt further anthropogenic damage to the planet” (154), Thanos obtains the power to wipe out half the people in the universe to conserve resources so that the other half may thrive, thus restoring his idea of ecological balance. As I finished the book, I thought of Thanos’s logic, and returned to a quote Menrisky used in his introduction from journalist Ketan Joshi. Considering the sheer number of social media users at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic who expressed in various ways that the world would be better off without humans in it, Joshi lamented what he referred to as “lazy ecofascism” (7). It’s lazy because it’s easier to vaguely blame “humans” for the larger systemic and structural causes of the social and environmental crisis in which we find ourselves. Rather than forging necessary critiques of capitalism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy that Menrisky and others would call for, Min Hyoung Song observes that positing that the world would be better off without humans “leaves open the possibility that it would be ethically permissible to allow many humans to die, as their absence would enable greater human flourishing—a suggestion that . . . allows eugenic thinking to come into play, as some groups of humans might seem more disposable than others” (quoted in Menrisky 7). After amassing the power he needed to kill half the people in the universe, Thanos could have snapped his fingers and achieved anything he wanted: created more resources, maybe made the world’s nuclear arsenals disappear, or otherwise used his power to create something new. But ultimately his laziness, which illustrates a lack of creativity, led to the demise of millions, leaving the systems that led to the unsustainability of our world in place. Certainly, with a little vigilance foregrounded by dignity and respect for all people in our sustained critique of the stories we tell about ourselves, we can do better.