The Illusion of Green Fascism

In their latest campaign to prove that anyone who cares about the environment is a dangerous, misanthropic radical, Jones & Co. are scraping the barrel in search of extremists. Paul Joseph Watson came up with Charles Manson, and now he's trumpeting the brainfarts of an obscure radical from Finland, Pentti Linkola. Representing the far end of the environmentalist spectrum, Linkola actually does believe in things like human culling, fascism, and eugenics. He's an epic douchebag. And that's why he's not much of a threat to humanity as a whole: He'll never have a large enough following to implement any of his batshit crazy notions of how the world should be run.

The average environmentalist (including the ones that could be considered hardcore) is repelled by guys like Linkola. And the feeling is mutual. A year or two ago I attended a talk by Derrick Jensen, a California environmentalist who subtly promotes the bombing of dams to save the wild salmon. During the Q & A, nearly everyone asked him if it was not better to spread environmental responsibility by example (peaceful activism, recycling, and whatnot). He dismissed these people as "lifestylers" who would never made a real difference, tossing off comments like, "Composting wouldn't have stopped Hitler." Most of the small audience walked out of that room feeling that Jensen was a mentally unbalanced man. They may still read his books, but I don't think they'll be dynamiting a dam anytime soon.

The truth is, your typical environmentalist does not actually want to return to a pre-industrial, agrarian way of living. They want to keep their iPhones and their hybrid cars. The daffy siren call of folks like Linkola might snag their attention momentarily, but in the end they're not going to adopt any ideology that compromises their own comfort and security. They're not into power trips. They just want the world to be safer, healthier, and better.

Every belief system has its extremists. To pick them out of the crowd and hold them up as poster children is not only misleading, it's downright deceptive. You will not be likely to find a Linkola or a Jensen among the hippies at your local farmer's market. Not everyone who talks about conservation, alternative energy, or global warming is a threat to democracy. Jones is doing to environmentalists what he insists the New World Order is always doing to him: Falsely aligning him with violent extremists.