The Nature of Men: Ecomasculinism as Reactionary Environmentalism

This article examines how men engage ideas of nature to sustain, repair, or reassert masculine identities within contemporary practices of self-improvement and preparedness. Drawing on ethnographic research among lifestyle coaches in France and survivalist communities in the United States, we analyse how concerns with purity, pollution, vulnerability, and protection shape everyday practices and moral reasoning. Although these settings differ in their social worlds and political orientations, they reveal similar ways of imagining nature as both threatened and capable of restoring personal order and authority. Rather than treating the two cases as a comparison, we use them to illuminate shared questions around responsibility, repair, and the stabilisation of gendered hierarchies in times of ecological and social uncertainty. We propose the notion of eco-masculinism to describe how ecological imaginaries become resources for grounding gendered claims to care, discipline, and control.