ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Bernhard Forchtner and Özgür Özvatan explore the case of far-right environmental communication in Germany, a context in which such communication has been present since the nineteenth century and in which comparatively substantive amounts of research on the phenomenon exist. Following an introduction, the authors explore historical articulations of ‘the environment’ from the Romantic period to the 2010s, offering both insights into prominent themes, their proliferation and connectedness, as well as existing research on them. Using a discourse-analytic approach, the authors subsequently analyse a range of far-right sources, from anti-liberal democratic, radical-right ones to anti-democratic, extreme-right ones, focusing on, first, the amount and distribution of environmental topics in the investigated corpus and, second, the topoi actors utilised when articulating and justifying claims. This results in a comprehensive overview of far-right environmental communication in Germany. The authors conclude that many far-right actors perpetuate a holistic interpretation of (wo)men in nature, that is, of (wo)men being rooted in ‘their land’. This amplifies a specific type of environmental concern different from mainstream and left-wing environmentalism – but also results in particular non-environmentalist stances, such as a sceptical stance towards global climate change which facilitates populist opposition to ‘globalism’ and ‘liberal elites’.
