Far-right localism as an environmental strategy in France

Abstract

This paper discusses the promotion of localism as an environmental strategy by actors on the French far right. Far-right localism constitutes an example of mutating far-right ecological discourses on the denialism-ecofascism spectrum that further promotes far-right ideology under a ‘green’ banner. In this commentary I use empirical examples from the far right in France to show how this localism, which advocates a nativist rootedness in an exclusionary local, is upheld as a prerequisite for effective environmentalism. Such a strategy mobilises a reactionary conceptualisation of place that defends an exclusionary attachment to the local environment. Far-right localism feeds and revolves around an identitarian, naturalist and organicist conception of ecology typical of far-right ecologies, as well as the wish to supplant the left/right divide with a global/local one. This paper brings into conversation the fields of human geography and the political ecologies of the far right to contribute to a better understanding of constructed meanings of place by far-right actors in the context of climate change and ecological degradation. It furthermore encourages scholars across fields to keep investigating and disentangling complex affinities between ideologies of nature, identity (re-)production, belonging and resistance in conceptualisations and meanings of place.