American Ecofascism: A Conversation with Alexander Menrisky

Earlier this fall, I had the pleasure of speaking with Alexander Menrisky about his new book, Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2025).

The book is a deep study into how different products we consume—what he calls “threshold objects”—offer lenses into how ecofascist ideas underpin everyday life. His argument is that ecofascism isn’t an obscure, fringe thing. Rather, our very systems of consumption, including the ways we cope with social conflict, are built on socially harmful responses to White anxieties about land, resources, and nature. In other words, ecofascism isn’t just about spectacular events of violence against Brown bodies (such as the El Paso mass shooting). As Menrisky discusses in his book and as we discuss in this episode, ecofascism shapes American society in far more insidious and less visible, “everyday” ways.

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Interview Highlights

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Ray: Let’s start with what your book is about. What did you hope you’d achieve by writing it?

Alexander Menrisky: In the book, I’m drawing on work in comparative fascist studies, which is an interdisciplinary collection of scholarship, mostly in history and political science. I was struck by the fact that there are two big themes that emerge across that field.

The first is that there’s a tension between defining what fascism ultimately looks like, and then thinking about how it comes about as a sociopolitical phenomenon rather than a coherent political theory or ideology. Unlike liberalism, conservatism, socialism or anarchism, fascism doesn’t have a body of thought, or literature. It’s not a political movement that that comes out of a long, intellectual tradition. The late scholar George Moss described it as a “scavenger.” It’s something that takes shape organically, based on what appeals to people. It kind of gets cobbled together. And so, what does it ultimately look like? What’s the manifestation of that process? It’s a political violence.

The second thing that emerges is how that violence comes about, specifically the cultural work: narratives, storytelling traditions, and myths that are really deeply rooted in nonpartisan ways in a given environment and that make political violence appear attractive or necessary. These help explain classical fascism in Italy, Germany and other places. There was mass appeal across what we think of as conventional political lines today: People from the left, right, and center were on board.

This isn’t a book that’s necessarily about the far right. It’s not a book about military or paramilitary violence. We don’t have anything like an ecofascist state in the U.S. (I’m an Americanist, so this book is concerned with the U.S.) But we do have moments of overtly ecofascist violence. We have mass shooters, like the El Paso and Buffalo shooters, referring to themselves as ecofascists in manifestos. We also have these deep-seated, nonpartisan, cultural narratives that get remixed in ways that make that violence appear attractive and necessary. This book is more so about that side of things.

Stories about national identity can reflect attachment to environment or engagement with environment, and they get remixed in ways that observe the narrative template that animated classical fascism. Where are these stories in the U.S.? Where do they come from? How do they pop up in ways that enable us to meaningfully draw connections between activity on the left and activity on the right? To help us understand that fascism, historically and in the present, is not a far-right ideology, per se, but more of a process or phenomenon about storytelling?

SR: One of the things I find when I teach is that many, many students resonate with ecofascist messages. Their response is, “Oh, I’ve had all of those thoughts.” Even people on the left whose intentions, they feel, are morally sound, could fall prey to some of the same kinds of thinking they would otherwise critique on the far right. So, I love that you emphasize the everyday, nonpartisan nature and the slow violence of this.

AM: Yes. And that ended up being something I wanted to achieve: thinking about why the word “fascist” is useful. Is it useful at all?

There’s been a lot of really smart writing recently about the utility of the word “fascism” because of the extent to which people just use it as a bludgeon without thinking about what it means or should mean. It’s not a tangible object that exists in the world; it’s a heuristic. It helps us make sense of patterns. I think it’s a valuable term, even if it’s oversaturated in our culture at the moment.

But if we’re talking about ecofascism, what are we talking about? Is it the same thing as far-right environmentalism across the board? I don’t think so. It really is about the storytelling pattern.

What I find most helpful is that fascism looks like far-right identitarian violence, but it isn’t necessarily. It’s broader than the far right. We have to account for those storytelling traditions because that’s what makes the concept unique.

Because, yeah, I have the same experience when I work with students on this: that feeling of guilt, or almost like they’ve been hoodwinked (but by whom, it’s not entirely clear). And you can’t call these students with good intentions “ecofascists.” I think you need to reserve that word for people who intentionally embrace environmental and ethno-national purity at the same time.

So, what can that word meaningfully name for us? It can meaningfully name this genre, these storytelling elements. Despite their intentions, some of our students participate in broader storytelling patterns that they might not fully grasp the origins, effects, or implications of.

A great example is the father of deep ecology, Arne Næss. He was staunchly anti-fascist in his time. But deep ecology as a loose body of thought has been taken up by people like the El Paso and Buffalo shooters. But, we can’t point at Arne and say, “You’re an ecofascist.” He understood himself to be the exact opposite.

SR: You organize your chapters by what you call threshold objects: land, tools, food, drugs, then contagion. Why did you do that? And what is the thread that holds all of these together?

AM: I was thinking a lot about how this trope of consumption lies at the root of so many of these expressions of a period of decline followed by rebirth through violence. In U.S. environmentalist contexts, this trope comes up all the time. I was thinking about why that would be and why it’s important.

You mentioned that the first chapter is “Land.” That’s the first threshold object. But in the U.S., entitlement to land and human relationships to land are mediated through tightly interwoven discourses of labor and race, especially in the settler colonial context.

Land is the first commodity. There’s the primitive accumulation of land. There’s the seizure and consumption of land, largely in economic terms. But then, over the course of the nineteenth century, it stops being economic, and there’s this environmentalist approach to it. You yourself, of course, have written a lot about the consumption of wilderness as a product. That’s really what I’m talking about: consuming land, not just in economic terms, but consumption as an identity project deeply tied to ideas about national character.

SR: Your book gave me so much perspective on a reality I’m living in. There’s this huge movement to have #LandBack in far Northern California, where I am, and this is also close to ground zero of the Back to the Land Movement. Does your book have anything to offer about this current moment, especially thinking about #LandBack?

AM: When you say “Land Back,” you’re talking in terms of Indigenous sovereignty movements. It’s not something I wrote a lot about in the book. But, there is a really important question that does comes up, a question a lot of scholars and other thinkers are grappling with right now. It is the extent to which the far right appropriates rhetoric and arguments from not only the left, but also movements that are distinct from Western political categories, like Indigenous sovereignty movements. The right is very much trying to seize on and appropriate language, and it’s a thorny conversation.

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Featured Image: American flag behind barbed wire. Photo by Pixabay, 2016.

Alexander Menrisky is Associate Professor of English and affiliate faculty in American Studies at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology (Cambridge University Press, 2021), the forthcoming Routledge Introduction to American Environmental Literature (Routledge, 2026), and, as part of the Anti-Creep Climate Initiative, the web zine and teaching resource Against the Ecofascist Creep (2022). Contact.

Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray is chair of environmental studies at California Polytechnic State University, Humboldt and host of a podcast about the emotional life of climate politics, “Climate Magic.” She works at the intersection of social justice and climate emotions. Sarah received a Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences, Studies and Policy from University of Oregon. She is the author of The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture (University of Arizona Press, 2013), and A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet (University of California Press, 2020), as well as co-editor of four volumes on environmental justice. Website. Instagram. LinkedIn. Contact.