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How ecological do you feel? How much do the rhythms of your life feel in-sync with what feels natural, what feels real? Is there a gnawing sensation within you that something has gone wrong somewhere, that the natural order of things has become unstuck?
Deep ecology grew in the seventies, emerging from the writings of the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss. There are branches and variations, but at its core is the simple premise that non-human life is equal to human life. This is not just about thinking your dog is a good little guy, but thinking why a person is worth more than a tree, why should a new housing development ever take precedence over a river, over the water-cress and trout that make their homes within it. It’s not just focused on the damage caused by pumping out emissions into the atmosphere, it is everything. In that re-balancing of value is a rebuke of every scar we leave on the non-human world and a recognition of where our priorities currently are. It is a seductive line of thinking that feeds on this feeling of misalignment and dissatisfaction in modern life, this feeling of things become unstuck.
But there is a toxicity coursing underneath that appeal. An idea of modernity as corrosive slides so easily into a vision of a more traditional past as some purer time, where there was a clear, natural order to things, where life was simpler, and better. This is the ripe, toxic garbage patch that eco-fascism sprouts from: that the modern world has gone wrong, and that some people are to blame for that. It is a loose but fairly coherent ideological spin-off of white supremacism that believes environmental destruction and multiculturalism go hand in hand. To ecofascists, the multiculturalism that allows people to find and build lives of their choosing is a corrosive freedom that is burning away at the foundations of everything. To them, our problems do not come from how we live, but how there are now so many people (read: non-white people) and how they now move more freely across the world.
Deep ecology and eco-fascism are not the same things, but they draw on many of the same sources of concern. From the start, deep ecology has been focused on overpopulation. Næss wrote about around one billion people being a humane, sustainable level. It is a clean, abstract number that dissolves the people, families, aspirations and pains within it. He wrote that population levels could be kept to this limit by ‘humane means’. A lot of the time these means are left vague. There are suggestions of tax incentives to discourage having children and other proposals of that kind, but these slow-moving, state-led interventions surely wouldn’t be enough.
In 2019, the Christchurch shooter drove to a mosque and started shooting. He got back into his car, drove to another, started shooting again. He killed 51 people, injured 40 and livestreamed some of it. The manifesto he released is an unhinged, toxic thing. It was a direct inspiration for the recent Buffalo shooter, who copied and pasted whole sections of it. Laced among the antisemitism, general xenophobia and the dominating hatred of Muslims is a repeated strain of environmental concern. He writes of how the environment is being damaged by overpopulation, how it is countries in the Global South that are responsible for this overpopulation and how he sees his act of killing, the fear and pain he was trying to create, as being key to helping save the environment. This is where terror at population numbers slides into terrorism, the deep ecologist position of non-human life being worth the same as human life picking up another strain: some human lives are worth less, some are worth sacrificing.
‘For example, we need to ask questions like, why do we think that economic growth and high levels of consumption are so important? The conventional answer would be to point to the economic consequences of not having economic growth. But in deep ecology, we ask whether the present society fulfils basic human needs like love and security and access to nature.’ -Arne Næss
‘I have always felt held, by a family. A real family. […] Dani, do you feel held by him? Does he feel like home to you?’ - Pelle, Midsommar
The underpinning of all of this is a fetishised idea of a pre-industrial age, when some mythic balance existed between people and place. These are the angry daydreams of the Christchurch Shooter’s manifesto, visions of a pastoral Europe grown over the top of broken bodies. It is one of the fundamentals of Industrial Society and Its Future, the manifesto from Ted Kazinsky, the Unabomber, something of a poster boy among eco-fascists:
‘We aren’t the first to mention that the world today seems to be going crazy. This sort of thing is not normal for human societies. There is good reason to believe that primitive man suffered from less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of life than modern man is.’
The idea is that pre-industrial life was calmer, kinder, a societal structure that holds the human condition more smoothly within it.
All three of the films here play with some idea of this. Midsommar, The Wicker Man, Apostle – in each, an outsider is introduced to a community that is a conscious rejection of modern life, which has turned back to a way of living that is closer to the earth. Deep ecology has always looked back to ecocentric religions and pre-industrial societies to see how they can teach you how to live more harmoniously with the non-human. Eco-fascists have done the same thing but, of course, selected the whitest, most culturally fetishised version of these philosophies, Norse mythology. There are forums and chatrooms of angry, fearful white people adopting runes and old gods, a rejection of the state of modernity melding into a movement away from the scientific and the rational, towards something that feels older.
The Hårga community in Ari Aster’s 2019 Midsommar pattern their lives organically. Living in a commune in deep, sun-drenched Sweden, they view life as ‘a circle, a cycle’ and structure it in four stages of 18 years, designed to mimic the seasons. They grow, travel, return to their home and help raise the next crop of young ones and then, at the tender age of 72, sacrifice themselves. Early on in the film there is some cliché one-ness talk - “Can you feel that? The energy, coming up from the earth […] Look, the trees too, they’re breathing. Nature just knows instinctually how to stay in harmony, everything just mechanically doing its part.” Everything here is seen to be in its right place, all part of a cohesive and natural order. Everything is part of one cycle of growth and decay, one community dwelling with the earth and with each other. They are close to the dream community of both the eco-fascist and the deep ecologist. The two ideas are not interchangeable, but the Hårga sit in the bitter spot of that overlap: a small, sustainable community utterly rooted in their landscape, emphatically pagan, genetically and ecologically unified.
There was a summer a couple of years back when the awareness of climate breakdown really started to get to me. I was working in an ice-cream van at the time, a great summer gig of full sun days, open skies and the stretching blue-grey of the North Sea. And I would be there, doling out scoops of mint choc chip, just filled with this deadening sense of grief and terror. The summer was boiling and the heat beating down felt as toxic as the cheap tobacco I would sneak off to smoke. It is dislocating to feel something as seemingly benign as a warm day with the sea in the air and to feel this growing threat behind it, to have your insides hollowed out by the scale of the problem and the knowledge of how little we are doing to fix it. There is a harsh, ragged edge of panic to all of this, something raw in how massive and insurmountable the scale of everything is, and how helpless you feel in the face of it.
In the Unabomber’s manifesto, he writes of how the contemporary individual struggles to deal with contemporary problems because they are not self-inflicted but imposed upon them by other people and systems that they can’t control. This is, he says, what breeds the frustration and the despondency that characterise modernity, this feeling of being drowned by these problems that you cannot solve and that will not go away. And so, the appeals of the easy answers of cultish extremism and the perverse comfort of absolutism grow.
In Midsommar, the protagonist, Dani, is traumatised, disconnected from the modern world, and joins with the Hårga. She severs ties with what she left and burns her boyfriend alive, letting him die so that she can grow. Where she has felt completely alone, like the world has no way to support her, she falls into this community that hold her, that let her feel like she is a cohesive part of something, that let her belong. The Hårga are absolutely cohesive, tied together by a monitored breeding/eugenics programme. As they pick flowers together, farm together, join in moments of season-based ritual, they fuse and blur, social links cemented by their relationship to the landscape they share. The problems of the rest of the world are left behind, dissolved somewhere among the rhythms of this natural way of life Dani has turned to.
Aster’s film seems in part a musing on what you turn to when what is being asked of you is too much, where you go if you feel like the scale of the world and its problems are drowning you and you are so small, so alone. It toys with the comfort and solidity of living in this natural way and shows the danger of those who offer answers to the fear, warnings of the sacrifice and the terror that come with this return to a mythic, ‘natural’ order.
‘Closer to midnight we approached the hallowed ground on which the ceremony would be held. We killed and skinned the sheep in what I did and still do consider to be a respectful manner,” he writes, “[then] drank a sip of his blood from a cup around the dim glow of our torches as a ritual bringing us closer together as brothers. Some of us also took LSD to celebrate the holiday and the event which had taken place.’ - Member of Neo-Nazi group ‘The Base’
‘Animals are fine, but their acceptability is limited. A small child is even better, but not nearly as effective as the right kind of adult’ - Lord Summerisle, The Wicker Man.
Folk horror of the kind looked at here lives in this edge-space, where the standard, business-as-usual world is insufficient, where there is a precarity beneath it, a feeling that it cannot supply everything that you need. The original The Wicker Man (not the fantastic Nic Cage one) is one of the classics of this genre, and its marks are etched everywhere over the other two films. Here, the crops have failed on an island off the British mainland, ruled over by Lord Summerisle. Until now, pioneering agricultural methods managed to glean harvest after harvest from the thin soil. There are pink petal blossoms, rows of neat green crops and the angular outlines of palm trees against soft blue skies. The community is similar to the Hårga, a people unified in a holistic way of living, a place acting as the cohesive gel to a community. But now the agricultural science is faltering, the crops are failing, and they move deeper into myth. They turn to sacrifice, to giving up a body for the sake of the harvest. A police officer, Christian and virgin, is invited from the mainland. All rigidity and tradition, he will burn on the cliffs, and his death will rejuvenate the earth.
This idea of sacrifice, of giving people up for the betterment of life overall, is more explicit in the darker wings of deep ecology. It is most famous and most stark in the words of the Finnish eco-fascist Pentti Linkola: ‘When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.’ It is genocide dressed up as morality, an idea that for life to flourish, lives have to end, the unspoken part of ‘humane means’.
These films aren’t about mass genocide, but this dynamic of ending life to give life is crucial to all of them. The willing self-sacrifice at the age of 72 is core to the beliefs of the Hårga. In The Wicker Man, the island dwellers believe that when you die you return to the ‘life forces’, the trees, the soil, you do not end but are re-born and re-formed. When the police officer is sacrificed it is to give life back to the earth, to let the crops grow, to give everybody else that lives there a chance. You can feel the community’s desperation in the final scene, the raw precarity underneath the charm and strangeness.
This idea is more gruesome in Apostle, a freaky, visceral film with some very cool camera work from cinematographer Matt Flannery. Here, people congregate on another British island to hide from the state. They have found a kind of Eden, an enclosed space animated by a pre-Christian nature god, who has seemingly always been there. They learn that if they feed her blood, things will grow. The cult members slice their arms open on a night and collect the blood in jars, ready for her to be fed. We see hands bleeding and dripping blood into her gasping mouth. But now the crops are failing, and lambs are being born maimed and there is the same precarity and desperation to the group. A strong-man fascistic element in the cult take control and things get gruesome. People are ‘purified’, a skull drilled into. It is declared that they have to kill the outsider who is there to destroy their way of life. For the good of the community, for the necessities of growth, bodies are fed to her, sacrifice leading to sacrifice. Why not? Why is the stranger more important than our crops? Why is the body more important than the island? This is all part of the inversion that happens in each film, where the human becomes the resource, rather than the non-human. Where the earth consumes us, rather than the other way round.
The ground here feeds on the body, and the bodies are fed to it again and again. In Midsommar, when Dani’s group are individually picked off in the usual way, the bodies are used as forms of feed or fertiliser. One is left with flowers for eyes, blood-eagled with chickens feeding on their back. Another’s leg is planted in a garden patch. Their bodies become resources, broken up and then re-introduced to the lifecycle. In the re-balancing of importance between the human and the non-human, people become a kind of fuel, a resource that allows you to continue your way of living. Beneath all of the mythology and the mystery, the bodies are offered up as a resource site, the humanity stripped away until you are asset or risk on the ecological balance sheet.
And in this view of human vs non-human as resources, of course things do not fall evenly. In Midsommar, the people of colour die early in the bleach-white-skinned, eugenicist community. In The Wicker Man and Apostle, while not as clearly about race, it is the outsider who is sacrificed. The white supremacist shout of blood and soil is at its full conclusion, communities absolutely rooted in their place, joining with it through the sacrifice of blood, an absolute intertwining of place and genetics that either absorbs or murders those who are different. This will be one of the great traumas of climate breakdown, how it will exacerbate every other social division, the racism, the xenophobia, all the waves of social extremism rising with the tides.
This is all part of the arpeggio scale of violence that follow these ideas of the deep ecologist and ecofascist, panic inspiring panic, violence inspiring violence, a sliding scale away from reason. In that re-scaling of the problem from the true complexity of environmental damage down to the simplicity of ‘there are too many people, and those people are not like me’, you see the positioning of groups to prey on the dissatisfaction and the terror, all of it coming from the too-often winning combination of fear and bad science. Population growth is not the problem, consumption is, and these ideas of limits and controls will never lead to anything other than pain and a tightening authoritarianism. The climate is not breaking down because of growing populations across countries in the Global South, it is because of these companies, because of an oil-addicted market, because of the steaks and the flights and the SUV’s and the litany of overconsumption that the richest of the world make the rest pick up the bill for. And communities of colour and people across the Global South are suffering a form of sacrifice now. Look at the bodies unable to handle the heat across India and Pakistan, the islands and homes of Kiribati being swallowed by the encroaching sea, their deaths and suffering willingly accepted by people across the world as the price to pay to keep the factories going and the markets moving.
And so, swelling with all of the desperation and the precarity is the Siren song of the simplicity of these ideas of a pre-industrial life, of some kind of natural order, this fantasy time when people and nature were perfectly in balance. These films move like the dark fever dreams of this kind of thinking, exaggerated and unclear, but sucking on these ideas of dissatisfaction, extremism and a bleeding desperation to re-connect with the earth. They ask what do people reach for to fill the gap between what they see and what they think things should be. How will people fill this dissociative abyss that environmental damage is widening. The fear, the sense of loss, the sense of decay. Leave the science, leave the complexity. Sink back into belief. Sink back into myth.