"The Tragedy of the Commons": how ecofascism was smuggled into mainstream thought

Grand Hardin's 1968 Science essay "The Tragedy of the Commons" is one of the most widely assigned readings in the past ten years' worth of university syllabi; notionally, it describes how property that is held in common is prone to overuse and exhaustion, while privatization creates an owner who has an incentive to serve as a wise steward over the resource.

Hardin was an ardent nativist and eugenicist, and the "The Tragedy of the Commons" was Hardin's jumping-off point for full-blown ecofascism: a strain of ecological thinking that treats humans as a kind of cancer on the Earth, doomed to grow out of control until they trigger a mass die-off, which ecofascists are committed to shaping such that the people who are exterminated in the collapse are brown and Black "foreigners" and "invaders," while "white people" of European descent are spared, to serve as wise stewards who oversee a new, sustainable era of human relations with the natural world (the Christchurch killer self-identified as an ecofascist and attributed his mass killings of Muslim people to a desire to rid the Earth of nonwhite people in order to avert the climate crisis).

After a generation of climate denial, the US and European right is in the midst of a fast pivot to ecofascism, simultaneously acknowledging the seriousness and imminence of the climate crisis, but planning to address it by exerminating non-white people. Hardin's writings -- both "Tragedy" and his more explicitly eugenic, fascist works -- are gaining a new prominence as central texts of the ecofascist movement. Read the rest