Were the Nazis radical environmentalists?

Were the Nazis radical environmentalists?

1) "What we today call "environmentalism" is ... based on a fear of
change," says Frank Furedi. "It's based upon a fear of the outcome of human
action. And therefore it's not surprising that when you look at the more
xenophobic right-wing movements in Europe in the 19th century, including
German fascism, it quite often had a very strong environmentalist dynamic
to it." Fascism, animal rights and human rights The most notorious
environmentalists in history were the German Nazis. The Nazis ordered
soldiers to plant more trees. They were the first Europeans to establish
nature reserves and order the protection of hedgerows and other wildlife
habitats. And they were horrified at the idea of hydroelectric dams on the
Rhine. Adolf Hitler and other leading Nazis were vegetarian and they passed
numerous laws on animal rights.


(The above paragraph is from the transcript of the British channel 4
documentary "Against Nature," whose political direction came from Furedi's
Living Marxism magazine. I extracted this passage from Ron Arnold's
Committee in Defense of Free Enterprise web-page, where the transcript is
featured as a "guest editorial." Arnold is best known as the leader of the
"Wise Use" movement, a right-wing anti-environmentalist group. Arnold
recently contributed an article on the Unabomber to Living Marxism
magazine. The article claimed that the Unabomber was some kind of deep
ecologist rather than a crazed terrorist.)


2) If the forest is a symbol of German nation, then forest die-back is a
threat to national identity. This association played a key role in sparking
the contemporary German green movement but it also posed considerable
difficulty for that movement because it reveals how contemporary ecological
sensibilities have their roots in traditions that also prompted the Nazis
to be the "first radical environmentalists in charge of a state".


(David Harvey, "Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference," p. 171)


The fundamental mistake that the "brown" Marxists Frank Furedi and David
Harvey make is in assuming that the Nazi party introduced nature worship
into German society. Harvey explicitly cites Alice Bramwell's "Ecology in
the 20th century: a history," but there is little doubt that she influenced
Furedi as well. Bramwell devotes considerable effort into making the case
that Hitler was a prototypical green because he cared about the forests.
The political implication is that Adolph Hitler is a forerunner to the late
Judy Bari of Earth First.


This is bonkers. Nature worship in Germany goes back to the origins of
modern romanticism. It was felt almost everywhere, from the writings of
Goethe to the symphonies of Mahler. Students at the University of
Heidelberg had hiking clubs through the entire 19th century. The Social
Democracy had such clubs as well and they were viewed as an integral part
of the character development of young Marxists. A recent biography of
Walter Benjamin points out how important such nature hikes were to him. It
was part of the general German culture, which influenced the both socialist
and ultraright parties, including Hitler's.


It is important to understand that the feeling of loss that the industrial
revolution brought on was very widespread throughout Europe and was not
peculiar to Germany. Thomas Carlyle articulated this feeling of loss and
the pre-Raphaelite school was a movement based on such a desire to return
to pre-industrial roots. Carlye influenced John Ruskin and William Morris,
two important anti-capitalist thinkers. He also strongly influenced
Frederic Engels' "Condition of the Working Class in England" and is cited
frequently.


David Harvey alludes to the apparent ecological concerns of Nazi party
member Martin Heidegger, who did not want to see nature turned into a
"gigantic gasoline station." Harvey claims that the slogans of Earth First
parallel those of Heidegger. Heidegger says nature must be seen as "the
serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water,
rising up into plant and animal." Earth First says, "Set the Rivers Free!"
Ergo, the Nazi functionary and the people who were hounded by the FBI and
right-wing terrorists had common ideological roots.


The problem with taking a history of ideas approach to these fundamentally
political questions is that you end up in a pure Platonic world of
contending Ideas. This is not a sound approach for Marxists, especially
those with sterling reputations like David Harvey. The simple truth is that
nearly every philosophical tendency has something to say about the
environment and how to save it. John Bellamy Foster has pointed this out
and it is worth repeating. Disciples of Adam Smith are using his doctrines
as a way of solving the ecological crisis through free market pricing
mechanisms. They argue that if you adequately price water or soil, then it
will be conserved properly. The Old Testament becomes contested territory
as well. Green-minded Jews have defended their holy scripture from the
charge of being anthropocentric by citing passages which call for
stewardship of the earth, rather than naked exploitation. These
philosophical debates, as is their nature, are incapable of being resolved.
They do serve as grist for academic conferences and journals.


It is much more profitable for those of us in the Marxist tradition to
concentrate on historical and social phenomena. In that context, there are
some interesting developments that took place in the first year or so of
Nazi rule that might be interpreted as having a greenish tinge. I speak now
of their call for social transformation through a synthesis of urban and
rural life, which was called "rurban" values by Arthur Schweitzer in his
"Big Business and the Third Reich." The Nazis promoted the view that the
class-struggle in the city could be overcome by returning to the villages
and developing artisan and agricultural economies based on cooperation.
Ayrans needed to get back to the soil and simple life


The core of Nazi rural socialism was the idea that land-use must be
planned. Gottfried Feder was a leading Nazi charged with the duty of
formulating such policy. He made a speech in Berlin in 1934 in which he
stated that the right to build homes or factories or to use land according
to the personal interests of owners was to be abolished. The government
instead would dictate how land was to be used and what would be constructed
on it. Feder next began to build up elaborate administrative machinery to
carry out his plans.


Not surprisingly, Feder earned the wrath of the construction industry. This
segment of heavy industry had no tolerance for any kind of socialism, even
if it was of the fake, nutty Nazi variety. Hitler had promised the captains
of heavy industry that the "rabble-rousers" in his party would be curbed
and Feder certainly fell into that category.


Hjalmar Schacht was a more reliable Nazi functionary who agreed with the
need to curb Feder's excesses. After Hitler named Schacht Minister of
Economics on November 26, 1934, he gave Feder the boot assured the
construction magnates that business would be run as usual.


>From 1934 to 1936, every expression of Nazi radicalism was suppressed.
After the working-class was tamed in 1933, the petty-bourgeois supporters
of a "People's Revolution" were purged from the government one by one. The
real economic program of the big bourgeoisie was rearmament. Any pretense
at "rural socialism" was dispensed with and the Third Reich's real goal
became clear: preparation for a new European war. It needed coal, oil and
other resources from Eastern Europe. It also needed to channel all
investment into the armaments industry, which could act as a steam-engine
for general capitalist recovery. In brief, the economic policy of the Nazi
government started to look not that different from Franklin Roosevelt's. It
was World War Two, after all, that brought the United States out of the
Great Depression, not ineffectual public works programs.


So except for the fitful "rurban" experiments of the first 2 years of Nazi
rule, there was very few actual policies that could be called ecological.
Does this mean that it is legitimate to describe, as Harvey citing Bramwell
does, Nazis as being the "first radical environmentalists in charge of a
state"? This claim turns out to be completely false.


The first radical environmentalists in charge of a state were actually the
Soviet Communists. Douglas R. Weiner's "Models of Nature: Ecology,
Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Union" (Indiana Univ.,
1988) is, as far as I know, the most detailed account of the efforts of the
Russian government to implement a "green" policy.


The Communist Party issued a decree "On Land" in 1918. It declared all
forests, waters, and minerals to be the property of the state, a
prerequisite to rational use. When the journal "Forests of the Republic"
complained that trees were being chopped down wantonly, the Soviet
government issued a stern decree "On Forests" at a meeting chaired by Lenin
in May of 1918. From then on, forests would be divided into an exploitable
sector and a protected one. The purpose of the protected zones would
specifically be to control erosion, protect water basins and the
"preservation of monuments of nature." This last stipulation is very
interesting when you compare it to the damage that is about to take place
in China as a result of the Yangtze dam. The beautiful landscapes which
inspired Chinese artists and poets for millennia is about to disappear, all
in the name of heightened "productiveness."


What's surprising is that the Soviet government was just as protective of
game animals as the forests, this despite the revenue-earning possibilities
of fur. The decree "On Hunting Seasons and the Right to Possess Hunting
Weapons" was approved by Lenin in May 1919. It banned the hunting of moose
and wild goats and brought the open seasons in spring and summer to an end.
These were some of the main demands of the conservationists prior to the
revolution and the Communists satisfied them completely. The rules over
hunting were considered so important to Lenin that he took time out from
deliberations over how to stop the White Armies in order to meet with the
agronomist Podiapolski.


Podialpolski urged the creation of "zapovedniki", roughly translatable as
"nature preserves." Russian conservationists had pressed this long before
the revolution. In such places, there would be no shooting, clearing,
harvesting, mowing, sowing or even the gathering of fruit. The argument was
that nature must be left alone. These were not even intended to be tourist
meccas. They were intended as ecological havens where all species, flora
and fauna would maintain the "natural equilibrium [that] is a crucial
factor in the life of nature."


Podiapolski recalls the outcome of the meeting with Lenin:


"Having asked me some questions about the military and political situation
in the Astrakhan' region, Vladimir Ilich expressed his approval for all of
our initiatives and in particular the one concerning the project for the
zapovednik. He stated that the cause of conservation was important not only
for the Astrakhan krai [does anybody know what this means?], but for the
whole republic as well."


Podiapolski sat down and drafted a resolution that eventually was approved
by the Soviet government in September 1921 with the title "On the
Protection of Nature, Gardens, and Parks." A commission was established to
oversee implementation of the new laws. It included a
geographer-anthropologist, a mineralogist, two zoologists, an ecologist.
Heading it was Vagran Ter-Oganesov, a Bolshevik astronomer who enjoyed
great prestige.


The commission first established a forest zapovednik in Astrakhan,
according to Podiapolski's desires Next it created the Ilmenski zapovednik,
a region which included precious minerals. Despite this, the Soviet
government thought that Miass deposits located there were much more
valuable for what they could teach scientists about geological processes.
Scientific understanding took priority over the accumulation of capital.
The proposal was endorsed by Lenin himself who thought that pure scientific
research had to be encouraged. And this was at a time when the Soviet Union
was desperate for foreign currency.


Under Lenin, the USSR stood for the most audacious approach to nature
conservancy in the 20th century. Soviet agencies set aside vast portions of
the country where commercial development, including tourism, would be
banned. These "zapovedniki", or natural preserves, were intended for
nothing but ecological study. Scientists sought to understand natural
biological processes better through these living laboratories. This would
serve pure science and it would also have some ultimate value for Soviet
society's ability to interact with nature in a rational manner. For
example, natural pest elimination processes could be adapted to agriculture.


After Lenin's death, there were all sorts of pressures on the Soviet Union
to adapt to the norms of the capitalist system that surrounded and hounded
it and produce for profit rather than human need. This would have included
measures to remove the protected status of the zapovedniki. Surprisingly,
the Soviet agencies responsible for them withstood such pressures and even
extended their acreage through the 1920s.


One of the crown jewels was the Askania-Nova zapovednik in the Ukranian
steppes. The scientists in charge successfully resisted repeated bids by
local commissars to extend agriculture into the area through the end of the
1920s. Scientists still enjoyed a lot of prestige in the Soviet republic,
despite a growing move to make science cost-justify itself. Although pure
science would eventually be considered "bourgeois", the way it was in the
Chinese Cultural Revolution, it could stand on its own for the time being.


The head administrator of Askania-Nova was Vladimir Stanchinksi, a
biologist who sought to make the study of ecology an exact science through
the use of quantitative methods, including mathematics and statistics. He
identified with scientists in the West who had been studying predator-prey
and parasite-host relationships with laws drawn from physics and chemistry.
(In this he was actually displaying an affinity with Karl Marx, who also
devoted a number of years to the study of agriculture using the latest
theoretical breakthroughs in the physical sciences and agronomy. Marx's
study led him to believe that capitalist agriculture is detrimental to
sound agricultural practices.)


Stanchinski adopted a novel approach to ecology. He thought that "the
quantity of living matter in the biosphere is directly dependent on the
amount of solar energy that is transformed by autotrophic plants." Such
plants were the "economic base of the living world." He invoked the Second
Law of Thermodynamics to explain the variations in mass between flora and
fauna at the top, middle and bottom of the biosphere. Energy was lost as
each rung in the ladder was scaled, since more and more work was necessary
to procure food.


This interesting slice of Soviet history is completely ignored in David
Harvey's book, as is history in general. This is unfortunate. The only way
to make sense of the environmental movements of the 20th century is within
the context of the class struggle and not within the history of ideas. I am
not sure why Harvey elected to take this approach, but it tends to
decontextualize everything.


There is a strong case for the intrinsic ties between Marxian socialism and
the ecology movement, but that is a subject for other articles and books.
Harvey's attempt to drive a wedge between the greens and Marxism is tied to
a workerish impulse that has marked the extreme left over the past 25
years. Whether it comes from Living Marxism or the Spartacist League, it is
grounded in a dogmatic understanding of Marxism. It is disconcerting to see
one of our premier Marxist thinkers echoing these sorts of "brownish"
sentiments, but we can understand their origin. We are living in a deeply
disorienting period as global capital seems unconquerable. Therefore, any
evidence of capitalist engagement with a democratic demand such as
affirmative action or clean air and water can tend to make us suspicious of
the demand itself. This is not Marxism. It is sectarianism and must be fought.

Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
http://csf.colorado.edu/ecol-econ/may98/0034.html