MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

“Eco-fascism” or fundamentalist environmentalism joins political jargon

The several years long conflict against the Uruguayan pulp mill by Argentine environmentalists allegedly fits the description

Campaigns in extreme defence of Nature and the environment can turn into a sort of “eco-fascism” unable to solve the home problems for millions or modify the consumerism paradigm of modern societies, warns a new academia discussion publication in Argentina.

“Traps of Nature” written by Maria Carman critically argues that “currently it is seen as progressive and as a sign of political correctness to be committed to the preservation of the environment and cultural heritage (Nature and Culture)” to such a point that it turns into a trap for people in government.

“Such is the recent case with the conflict led by the environmentalists’ assembly from Gualeguaychú against the Botnia pulp mill constructed in Uruguay”, points out Ms Carman.

Environmentalists from Gualeguaychú blocked for years an international bridge linking Gualeguaychú in Argentina with Fray Bentos in Uruguay, next to the pulp mill, and “from an extreme and refractive position rejected during that time all possible options and alternatives, including the shared (bi-national) control of the plant in Uruguayan territory”.

Maria Carman is an anthropologist from the University of Buenos Aires and in her article discusses the essence of “Ecology”, a work from the Austrian philosopher and journalist André Gorz who argues that following on the questioning of capitalism, “inevitably you reach the political ecology question which, with its indispensable criticism of necessities leads at the same time to a deeper and more radical critique of capitalism”.

Carman as a social anthropologist is critical of recent arguments from Buenos Aires City officials that have justified the eviction of ‘popular segments of the population’ from emblematic open spaces of the city, emphasizing on the nature and culture advantages to be obtained from the recovery of those spaces for Argentina’s capital.

The controversy is not new: German Nobel Literature Laureate Günter Grass recently referred to the issue which he described as an “eco-dictatorship” in a recent interview with the German press on the Japanese nuclear disaster.

“What happened at the Fukushima nuclear plant is not the only problem: they are also the exhaustion of resources, the end of growth, globalization, water scarcity ... and all that is just as important,“ said the writer 83-year newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt.

”My worst fear is that we end up setting up an eco-dictatorship. We would then have to live with a state of emergency regulations,” said the author of The Tin Drum.