Chloe Ahmann is an environmental anthropologist at Cornell studying the long afterlife of American industry. Professor Ahmann’s forthcoming book, “Futures After Progress,” is based in Baltimore, where she follows industrialism’s enduring traces in toxified landscapes, patchy regulation, quotidian expressions of white supremacy, and particular orientations toward time. She is especially interested in the kinds of environmental futures that take form amid these legacies. This interest carries into Professor Ahmann’s newer work on ecofascism in the Pacific Northwest, where she considers the dark utopic visions that sustain far-right environmental groups.
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Ecofascist Anxieties
White Space-Making in the Age of Climate Change
Thursday, February 23, 2023, 3pm
EST
Event Overview
Ecofascists, like other far-right extremists, rail against multiculturalism, interracial reproduction, feminism, and — most of all — immigrants whose very presence is perceived to threaten the (white) Euro-American landscape and cultural ecologies. The most identifiable aspect is an obsessive preoccupation with “overpopulation”; this is used to justify calls to secure borders and deport — or, at its most extreme, to kill — what they call polluting “invaders.”
The “Great Replacement” (GR) conspiracy theory is a cornerstone of ecofascist ideology that fuels domestic demographic anxieties. GR ideas connect to century-old eugenic policies and the notions of “carrying capacity,” “population bomb” (Paul Ehrlich), and “tragedy of the commons” (Garret Hardin) from the late 1960s. These ideas re-manifested in John Tanton’s network of organizations founded in the 1980s and 1990s such as Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and Population-Environment Balance.
Join us for this four-part series hosted by the Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences and moderated by Chloe Ahmann, assistant professor of Anthropology. The virtual discussion will feature Rajani Bhatia, Director of Graduate Studies in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, who argues that in the context of intensifying climate-change impacts, populationist thinking and agendas tempt broad audiences by providing an easy scapegoat.
The “Great Replacement” (GR) conspiracy theory is a cornerstone of ecofascist ideology that fuels domestic demographic anxieties. GR ideas connect to century-old eugenic policies and the notions of “carrying capacity,” “population bomb” (Paul Ehrlich), and “tragedy of the commons” (Garret Hardin) from the late 1960s. These ideas re-manifested in John Tanton’s network of organizations founded in the 1980s and 1990s such as Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and Population-Environment Balance.
Join us for this four-part series hosted by the Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences and moderated by Chloe Ahmann, assistant professor of Anthropology. The virtual discussion will feature Rajani Bhatia, Director of Graduate Studies in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, who argues that in the context of intensifying climate-change impacts, populationist thinking and agendas tempt broad audiences by providing an easy scapegoat.
What You'll Learn
- A look at the American legacies of ecofascism and nativism
- The current mainstreaming of ecofascist ideas and “replacement” conspiracies
- Efforts to resist ecofascism grounded in environmental and reproductive justice
Speakers
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and affiliate faculty in American Studies, Cornell University
Rajani Bhatia
Associate Professor
State University of New York at Albany
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, University at Albany
Rajani Bhatia (she/her/hers) is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the State University of New York at Albany. Her research interests lie in developing new approaches to feminist theorizations of reproduction and feminist science and technology studies. Topically, she has focused on issues that lie at the intersection of reproductive technologies, health, bioethics, and biomedicine. Through engagement as a scholar-activist within the women’s health and reproductive justice movements, Professor Bhatia has contributed to feminist analysis of global population control and right-wing environmentalism, as well as coercive practices and unethical testing related to contraceptive and sterilization technologies.
Professor Bhatia is the author of “Gender before Birth: Sex Selection in a Transnational Context” (University of Washington Press, 2018), and her work has appeared in Science, Technology, & Human Values; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; and “Women, Science, and Technology: A Reader in Feminist Science Studies.”
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