Call of the Whites

The skeleton in environmentalism's closet is nature.

Charles Paul Freund from the April 1997 issue

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This brand of nature mysticism was an international phenomenon, mirrored in the German Wandervoegel movement and wherever industrialism developed or threatened. Slavophilism, part of Russia's great, three-way 19th-century debate (with revolution and classical liberalism) features it as a central line of thought. Dostoyevsky's meditations on Russian peasantry as the world's salvation praises them for their simple Orthodoxy; they are people close to the earth, unspoiled by vulgar trade. He too lashes out at alien merchant races, meaning Jews. Indeed, however tangled these intellectual paths through the woods became, many of them arrived at the same xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Marx may have equated rural life with idiocy, but he also equated trade with Judaism, and condemned the whole religion as embodying "actual contempt for and practical degradation of nature." (Norway's Hamsun hated the British; the worst insult he thought to hurl at them was that they were "Protestant Jews.")

Nature, whether in Jack London's Klondike, Germany's Black Forest, or Russia's steppes, can be a source of beauty and renewal. Reasonable persons can take part in quotidian environmentalism, which is about recycling, pollution, and spotted owls, and not about racism or revolution. Why, then, have so many attuned themselves to murmuring pines and hemlocks, only to hear lessons in race hatred and blood letting?

The answer lies in finding not merely beauty in nature, but absolutes. What nature-utopians of the left and right share is the belief that, whether in the peaceful rhythms of its seasons, in the unspoiled ruggedness of its landscapes, or in the tooth-and-claw struggle for survival, nature is a source both of wisdom and morality. From aesthetic to absolute is a short bridge to cross -- some would argue it is an inevitable one -- and even so moderate a figure as Muir went over it, ultimately preaching that the forests were God's true and sacrosanct cathedral. That's Dostoyevsky's neck of the woods.

But spiritual cathedral or racial redoubt, once one perceives nature as good in the absolute, the alternatives to its purity become not just mistaken, but immoral. Thus commerce and machinery are not just distractions; because they alienate us from nature, they are evil, as are their users, defenders, and beneficiaries.

Concepts of evil derived from the absolutist contemplation of nature flourished earlier in this century; scholar Anna Bramwell traces that remarkable history in Ecology in the 20th Century (1989). Environmentalism's rise has, by the logic of ideas, buoyed many such notions back into view: from the mystical antipathy to machinery to goddess worship; from Unabomber terrorism to the Gaia thesis of a sentient Earth. Left-wing activist and journalist Michael Novick has written of the xenophobes who have attached themselves to environmentalism under the guise of population control, and reports a number of small- time revivals of racist blood-and-soil movements in Europe. American racist Tom Metzger has attempted to combine the Aryan movement here with ecologism; the fascist gathering in the Northwest is an attempt to realize Nordland, their racist nature utopia.

That German nature-mysticism got wrapped up in National Socialism does not mean that such ideas have an inevitable trajectory. But as it happens, London himself imaginatively preceded the Nazis along their racist path all the way to genocide. In his awful story, "The Unparalleled Invasion," the world's white nations unite to wage germ warfare against the Chinese, killing them all, and inaugurating a golden age.

Whitehorse cancelled its Jack London Road. But in a sense there is one anyway, and it is worth pondering where it leads, and where, at any given time, we might be along it.