How fascist ideas permeate contemporary culture.

Presenting a view of fascism as a complex power network that plays out on scales both large and small, Alexander Menrisky, author of Everyday Ecofascism, shows how extremist sentiments have crept into everyday language, stories, and ideas. He illuminates ecofascism’s narrative patterns and their easy permeation of environmentalist discourses, from back-to-the-land movements to the resurgence of psychedelic drugs, food localism, and pandemic politics. Here, Menrisky is joined in conversation with April Anson and Kyle Boggs. 

Alexander Menrisky is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is author of Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature and Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology.

April Anson is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Anson writes and teaches at the intersection of the environmental humanities, Indigenous and American studies, and political theory. Anson is cofounder of the Anti-Creep Climate Initiative and coauthor of Against the Ecofascist Creep.

Kyle Boggs is associate professor of rhetoric and community engagement in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Boise State University and author of Recreational Colonialism and the Rhetorical Landscapes of the Outdoors.

REFERENCES:
Anti-Creep Climate Initiative

Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy

Tommy Pico

Jeff Mann

Gloria Anzaldua

Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God

Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence

Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog

Theodore Roszak’s From Satori to Silicon Valley

Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia

Ketan Joshi on lazy ecofascism

Mark Rifkin’s Settler Common Sense

Emily Martin’s Flexible Bodies

Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature by Alexander Menrisky is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Episode Transcript

Alexander Menrisky (00:06):
Part of what makes fascism unique as as a
political concept is that it'snot a stable ideology. It's more
like a cultural process orphenomenon.

Kyle Boggs (00:15):
I think you and I both write about the
everydayness of it in a way thatimplicates people who might not
immediately recognize eitherthemselves or their own
political affiliations.

April Anson (00:27):
The discourse has been attentive to the fact that
these claims are emerging fromthe identification of real
problems, but then taking thatlazy shortcut that circumvents
any responsibility or evensystemic critique.

Alexander Menrisky (00:44):
Hello, I'm Alex Menrisky. I'm an assistant
professor in English andaffiliate faculty in American
Studies at the University ofConnecticut. And I'm the author
of Everyday Ecofascism, Crisisand Consumption in American
Literature from the Universityof Minnesota Press. I'm also the
author of American Literatureand the Identity Politics of
Ecology, and I'm currentlyworking on Routledge's

(01:07):
Introduction to AmericanEnvironmental Literature. That
book, Everyday Ecofascism, isthe reason I, we are here today,
but I'm joined by two colleaguesand friends whose work overlaps
with mine in a lot of generativeways.
And I'm hoping that thisconversation ends up being
broader than everyday ecofascismitself to think about those

(01:29):
connections across our work. SoI'm going to hand it over to
both of them to introducethemselves before we get
started.

April Anson (01:36):
Hi, all, and hello to the kitty meowing in the That
was really lovely. My name is,Doctor. April Anson. I am an
assistant professor in thedepartments of English and
social and critical inquiry,specifically American studies
and Native American andindigenous studies at the
University of Connecticut. So Ilive and work on the land of the
Eastern Pequot, Golden HillPagussett, Lenape, Mashantucket

(01:59):
Pequot, Mohegan, Nipmuc, andScattercook peoples who continue
to steward this land, which is aplace known as ground zero for
Indigenous genocide on thiscontinent.
And I am absolutely thrilled tobe here to talk about Alex's
vital book, especially the waysthat that genocidal history of
land remains the subterraneanground out of which ecofascist

(02:20):
ideas germinate. I've beenfortunate to work on and think
about these topics with Alex formany years before coming to work
together at UConn. Our mostformal collaboration to date has
been co founding the Anti CreepClimate Initiative and co
authoring Against the EcofascistCreep with Bruno Seraphin at
University of Connecticut, ShaneHall at Salisbury University,

(02:41):
and Cassie Gallantine atUniversity of Oregon. And the
anti creep crew now includesJane Henderson at Dartmouth. And
I'm also currently finalizing mybook on nineteenth century
history of ecofascism with amore direct focus on literary
genre than Alex's book.
But this is certainly a kind oflong standing conversation that
Alex and I have been having andas well as with Kyle, Boggs. So

(03:05):
I'm really looking forward tothis conversation again and
excited to, talk about theessential questions and topics
everyday eco fascism takes up.

Kyle Boggs (03:14):
And, my name is Kyle Boggs. I'm an associate
professor in Department ofHumanities and Cultural Studies
at Boise State University. MyPhD and my background
academically is in rhetoric andgender studies. My forthcoming
book actually coming out acouple weeks after Alex's is one
I've been working on for adecade, at least. It's called

(03:35):
Recreational Colonialism and theRhetorical Landscapes of the
Outdoors with Ohio StateUniversity Press.
And that book kind of attends tothe ways in which place based
belongings are constituted bywhite settlers through outdoor
recreation. You know, we'll talkabout the overlap, I think,
between eco fascism and settlercolonialism. I think I write

(03:58):
about it actually in a prettysimilar way that Alex does is
thinking about it as a processand a performance and embedded
in a lot of different systems.But other things about me is
that I run the Writing forChange journal at Boise State.
It's a multimodal onlinepublishing space out of Boise,
Idaho.

(04:18):
We publish thematic collectionsfocused on change in different
ways, essays, but also poetryand photography and and and all
kinds of things. I'm a formerjournalist in Northern Arizona,
which is where my book kind ofextends from, extending from an
issue I wrote about extensively,which was the expansion of a ski
resort on the San FranciscoPeaks. The peaks are also sacred

(04:42):
to at least 13 regional tribesof the Southwest. So that
controversy just, it raised alot of questions about belonging
and about some of the ways thatsettler colonialism persists in
ways that we might not alwaysfeel comfortable talking about
and confronting sort of the waysthat it operates kind of in the
background. Alex, I'm gonna jumpinto it with a question for you

(05:04):
on your book.
I just kind of wanted to get ageneral sense of, you know, term
ecofascism is it's not a newterm and you come at it with a
fresh perspective in the sensethat you don't offer a direct
definition of it, but youdescribe it as an ongoing
process wrapped up in differentkinds of performances tied to
land, tied to this idea, thisthis fetishization and purity

(05:29):
and natural order andwillingness to entertain mass
death. But the way that you talkabout it, I think, is gonna be a
little unexpected for readers ina lot of ways. So I wanted to
just give you the opportunityfirst to talk about what you
mean when you talk about ecofascism.

Alexander Menrisky (05:43):
Sure. That's a that's a great question. What
we mean when we talk about ecofascism today. The word has sort
of had sort of bothered me for afew years just because it was
gaining in popularity for Ithink necessary reasons. We saw
a series of kind of high profileacts of white supremacist
violence in The United Statesthat were also in part

(06:04):
environmentally motivated.
I'm thinking of the El Pasoshooter in 2019 and the Buffalo,
New York shooter a few yearslater, both of whom wrote
manifestos in which to varyingdegrees, they argued that their
mass slaughter of Black andBrown bodies was tied to the

(06:25):
need to conserve resources fortrue white Americans. And so the
word was gaining currency inpopular as well as academic
media. Kyle, as you mentioned,it's not necessarily a new term.
It merged out of criticalretrospectives on the
conservationist element in NaziGermany, especially. But also I

(06:46):
think it's important to pointout how that the word has been
in use kind of across thepolitical spectrum over the past
forty or so years.
You know, commentators and rightleaning media in the 1980s and
nineties would use the word ecofascist to describe eco
saboteurs, folks, you know,affiliated with Earth First, for
example. And oftentimes justenvironmentalism more broadly,

(07:09):
suggestion being thatenvironmentalism was about
controlling people's actions,which of course, you know,
environmentalism isfundamentally about, you know,
agreed upon limits to humanbehavior. But on the right, eco
fascism became a kind ofconvenient cudgel. And then more
recently, it sort of emerged todescribe these very high profile
acts of right wing violence andsort of came across media,

Kyle Boggs (07:33):
I'd

Alexander Menrisky (07:33):
say over the past eight years to refer to any
sort of right wing evocation ofenvironmental themes across the
board. And that was sort of whatwas puzzling me about it is that
just the kind of sheer varietyof activity and speech to which
that term was being applied. AndI didn't think enough attention
was, was being given to the termitself. Right? Why is eco

(07:53):
fascism a good word to describethese things?
And is the fascism part evenaccurate? You know, is that an
accurate term? Why not ecoxenophobia? Why not eco racism?
You know, why not ecoconservatism?
There are all sorts of words wecould use. Why is eco fascism
makes sense as a catchall? And Idon't think it does make sense
as a catchall, but for me, partof this project was more

(08:15):
precisely defining what ecofascism is. And that for me is
also sort of an historicalproject, right? Fascism is an
ism like liberalism orconservatism.
It's not like a real tangiblething that exists in the world.
It's a heuristic that helps usdescribe certain patterns in
political behavior. So for me,was about, okay, what is fascism

(08:40):
then? As opposed to somethinglike conservatism, liberalism,
socialism, etcetera. So I reallykind of turned to the work of
comparative fascist studies,thinking historically, you know,
any definition of fascism isnecessarily going to kind of be
a normative definition.
What, you know, what are thepatterns in history that have
made sense to give their ownlabel? And the work of

(09:02):
comparative fascist studies,there is a certain political
tendency that makes sense tolabel fascism. But what was
really, I think, one of the mostimportant findings in
comparative fascist studies isthat fascism, unlike
conservatism or liberalism orsocialism or even anarchism, is
not really a coherent stableideology. It doesn't kind of
have a body of philosophy ortheory. And it wasn't

(09:23):
necessarily the sort oforganized political movement in
the same way that, you know,progressive movements or even
conservative movements have beenin the past.
One really high profile scholarof fascism had kind of described
it as a scavenger, fascism as ascavenger. It kind of cherry
picked from the culture at largethings that worked, things that

(09:44):
were appealing. And part of whatmakes fascism unique as as a
political concept is that it'snot a stable ideology. It's more
like a cultural process orphenomenon, maybe even a kind of
an emergent quality of politicsin general, one in which certain
storytelling patterns identifycertain people as belonging to a
specific community in responseto a period of perceived decline

(10:09):
or crisis. And my kind of likebig argument is sort of that if
we wanna understand eco fascismin a in a precise way or use
that word in a precise way, wehave to understand it similarly.
Right? And that also includesunderstanding that fascism was
not limited to the far righthistorically, because so much of
it was based on storytellingpatterns, cultural storytelling

(10:34):
patterns that circulated widelyand got people on board with the
more kind of concrete materialpolitical aspects of what
fascism was in terms ofsurveillance, repression,
etcetera. And actual, of course,acts of political violence. It's
really important to understandthat people across the political
spectrum flocked to it, left,right, and center, far right and

(10:57):
communist. Folks in NaziGermany, folks in Mussolini's
Italy from across the politicalspectrum found these movements
and regimes attractive.
And that's a really importantthing that I think gets left out
a lot is that, fascismhistorically is not limited to
right wing ideology. It was abroader storytelling pattern

(11:17):
that consolidated, systems ofracial supremacy. And my
contention is essentially thatif we wanna use the term eco
fascism, we have to understandit in the same way, right? That
it's an environmentalistdiscourse that does the same
thing, that appeals to peopleacross the political spectrum,
that's not limited to the farright so that people across the

(11:39):
spectrum can maybe participatein these storytelling patterns
and in turn contribute to, atleast rhetorically, if not
actively, these consolidationsof white supremacist sentiment
in environmentalist contexts.

April Anson (11:54):
In answering Kyle's question of like the big
picture, you turn to El Paso andChristchurch and then Buffalo.
But my sense is because yourcommitments to discovering or
identifying these kind ofunintended iterations of
supremacy, my hunch is that someof the project was seeded
earlier. And so I was wonderingif you could just talk about
like a moment or a kind oforigin point or a moment where

(12:18):
you had that sort ofrecognition.

Alexander Menrisky (12:20):
Yeah, of course. And we'll have to go
back probably. Kyle, you saidyou've been working on your book
for ten years. I mean,realistically, it was it was
about ten years ago that I guesstechnically started the project
because it grew out of anarticle I wrote. In fact, when I
was still a graduate studentworking on it, my dissertation.
And I ended up writing thisarticle that was completely
unrelated because I had read astory in the New Yorker about

(12:41):
Ayahuasca and kind of theresurgence and popularity of
organic hallucinogens, not justAyahuasca, but psilocybin. Sort
of not just why they werebecoming popular again, but also
the way people talked aboutthem. And then the article was
talking about figures likeTerence and Dennis McKenna,
these big psychedelic gurus ofthe eighties and the new age.
And it really stood out to me atthat point in time because, you

(13:02):
know, I was a young scholarworking on my dissertation. I
was really interested in thiskind of appeals to self
dissolution, the idea of theexplosion or expansion of the
self.
And, you know, psychedelicdiscourse has been like right in
there the whole time. I becamereally interested in that and I
started exploring more about therhetoric of psychedelics today
and in the- in the 1960s andreally thinking about how people

(13:25):
talked about them. And I wasalso at the time, I was reading
some fiction that was also kindof playing with these ideas in
relation to other more kind ofovertly political phenomena. And
one thing that I was reallyinterested in was the tendency
for these psychedelic gurus toclaim that by dissolving the
self and sort of accessing thestate of intimacy with the

(13:46):
ecosystem, that they were notjust enlightened, but sort of
like environmentally superior,right? They had figured it out.
They had accessed a state ofnature that escaped the rest of
us. They had created this sortof situation of environmentalist
privilege or at one point ineveryday ecofascism I refer to
this thing as their use ofpsychedelics was for them an

(14:09):
appeal to environmentalistexoneration. Like this idea
being that they were closer tonature and they'd have absolved
themselves of any sort of damagethat humans might do, you know,
any sort of ecologicaldisruption. They were claiming
for themselves this sort ofprivilege. Right?
And especially over the past fewyears, and especially as global
climate changes, themanifestations of global climate

(14:30):
changes intensify, you oftenstumble across just these kinds
of casual psychedelicenthusiasts online kind of
writing about how they're notresponsible for that. And they
deserve to survive thecalamities, you know, at hand
because they've kind of accessedthis, this state of purity. In
one series I was reading at thesame time that I was thinking
about this things was MargaretAtwood's mad at him trilogy. And

(14:51):
it was just kind of chance thatled me to be reading that series
at the same time I was thinkingabout psychedelics. There's this
group of people in that trilogythat takes those ideas
seriously.
And I found that reallyfascinating that she was sort of
dramatizing that kind ofargument, but she wasn't just
dramatizing that sort ofargument. And this isn't really
spoiling the trilogy. It kind ofstarts off with readers

(15:11):
understanding that most ofhumanity has been wiped out and
it's been wiped out because ofthis biopolitical project by a
tech bro, basically, you know,this tech bro, Craig. And what
was kind of standing out to meas I was reading this was, you
know, a lot of critics were sortof seeing this group of people,
these psychedelic enthusiasts,and they're a Christian sacked
that preaches likevegetarianism. And a lot of

(15:33):
people were reading these as theanswer to Crake, this more
communalist mutual aid basedalternative to Crake's
biopolitical project.
But when I was reading it, waskind of seeing something quite
different. I was seeing how thisgroup of people, they're called
the Gods Gardeners in the novel,these psychedelic enthusiasts
were actually, for me, Atwoodwas juxtaposing them, lining
them up and asking us to kind ofconsider how the really overt

(15:57):
fascist project, this eugenicproject by the character Craig
was actually being paralleled bythe psychedelic project of these
everyday people and just in thekind of everyday psychedelic use
they were participating in.Because both of these groups,
Crake on the one hand, overtfascist, and the Godsgardners on
the others, they were both kindof making the same argument that

(16:18):
only certain types of peopledeserve to survive the calamity
at hand, which is why whenhumanity kind of goes extinct,
the gardeners aren't necessarilylike upset about it. They're
happy that it's happening. Butthe important part is that they
think they are worthy and no oneelse of surviving.
And a large part of that is thepsychedelic intimacy that
they're kind of cultivating. SoI was writing that years ago,

(16:39):
and then I started a completelyunrelated project that was about
food traditions in Appalachia,specifically among queer writers
in Appalachia. And as I wasworking on that, same sort of
pattern, I started noticing,right? How certain writers were
appealing to the consumption ofcertain rustic foods. And then
I'm using that, you know, heartymountain food, right?
It was all about the way peoplewere talking about it. It wasn't

(17:01):
so much about the actual foodways of people but the way in
which certain writers andactivists were framing those
food ways. So I kept noticingall these everyday contexts in
which people were replicatingthis narrative of privileged
environmental belonging in theface of catastrophe. In many
cases, in situations where theydid not just believe people were

(17:21):
going to die due toenvironmental crises, but
actively wanted it to happen, topurify the earth with the
expectation that they wouldlive. And oftentimes in these
everyday contexts, right, thatseem, you know, they're not like
overt fascism, right?
Or outward juxtaposes thegardeners and the overtly
fascist craic for a reason,because my contention is that

(17:42):
there's sort of asking readersto think about these two things
alongside each other. And Istarted thinking about parallels
like that in other kinds ofcontexts as well, and thinking
about storytelling patterns. Andthen when I started noticing the
word eco fascism and morecurrency and started really
looking into it, I was like, oh,I think this is what's happening
here. It's the kind ofstorytelling pattern and not

(18:03):
just over political movements.Right.
But there are these threadsthroughout American culture in
which people are making theseappeals to kind of a privileged
environmental sensibility andtheir worthiness for survival
when environmental catastrophecomes. Those narratives, even if
they're reiterated by reallywell intentioned people, just

(18:23):
given, you know, the historiesof The US, those narratives
often end up kind of being toldover this scaffolding that the
tellers are not necessarilyacknowledging that's highly
stratified based on race, thelegacies of settler colonialism,
disability, etcetera. So that,and then Kyle, you'd mentioned

(18:44):
the word unintentional, right?When you think about those
narratives and you notice themin the world and you start kind
of thinking about, well, wheredid they come from? Right?
The tellers of these narrativesoften aren't necessarily aware
of that kind of scaffoldingunderneath the logics they're
reiterating.

Kyle Boggs (19:00):
Yeah, I think one of the challenges of writing a book
like this on a topic that's kindof a moving target, especially
over a period of time, is thatthe world is changing, right, as
you're writing the book. I havea question about that. How you
went about organizing the bookas you were writing about it and
why you made the decisions thatyou made. I think that the book
reads very well. I love theorganization of the interludes.

(19:25):
And I just I wondered what itwas like for you writing this
book during the last ten years.

Alexander Menrisky (19:30):
Yeah, of course, the way the book is
organized is the chapters arepretty standard length, you
know, like there's anintroduction, there's chapter
one, and then there's aninterlude, which is just a very
short, it'd be like, I don'tknow, 2,500 word kind of mini
chapter. Then there's two morechapters, another interlude, two
more chapters, and then aconclusion. The interludes were

(19:50):
kind of a late addition. As forhow I chose to organize the
book, you know, most of thechapters are named after
objects. And an object is sortof like it's a reductive word
and I go to great lengths topick that word apart, but but
I'll just say the objects inquestion being land, tools,
food, psychedelics, and evencontagion.
Land and contagion, like a lotof problematic reasons to

(20:13):
describe those two things asobjects, but I promise there's a
a logic behind it. To go back tothe the psychedelics and the
food cultures examples, there'san act that's shared by both of
these, even if the objectsthemselves are different, and
it's consumption. You know,people are consuming
psychedelics, people areconsuming food. One could argue
that the settler colonialhistory of The States is a drama
of the consumption of land as acommodity, even if it was not a

(20:37):
commodity for its originalinhabitants. What I was sort of
like noticing is that in, in alot of these cases where these
stories were being told in whichpeople were positioning
themselves as the privilegedinhabitants of, or inheritors of
a purified earth afterecological catastrophe, the
trope of consumption kept comingup.
They're engaging with some kindof object. And it was that

(20:58):
engagement that granted thesespeakers the sense of kind of
purity that they were arguingfor. Right? Psychedelics, think
is probably the one that makesthe most sense, you know, like
where the idea of consuming apsychedelic, an organic compound
creates this psychologicalsituation in which you are
closer to nature is similar on amore kind of like biophysical

(21:19):
level, thinking about consumingcertain foods as tying one to
the land. I used the wordscaffolding earlier.
These stories are being built ona scaffolding that aren't
acknowledged or understood bythe people doing the talking.
And for me that scaffolding isThe US's settler colonial
history, right? This consumptionof land and the conquering of
land and later the recreationaluse of land. Often these

(21:42):
activities go hand in hand withrepresentations of them that are
suggesting that it's theactivity itself that gives one a
privileged place upon it.Throughout the book, I kind of
trace lines from those originalacts of the consumption of land
to activities like psychedelicuse to particular food cultures
in The US.
And so I kind of start the bookwith that kind of like

(22:05):
historical background, you know,thinking about how settler
colonial activities were oftenaccompanied and still are today
with storytelling that positionsthe act of consumption itself as
the basis for one's privilegedbelonging on land. And then I
look at how that kind ofthroughout history, it gets
attached to other objects forcontextually specific reasons.

(22:25):
And I think I moved from theland to the tools, to the food,
to the drugs, to contagion. Andit moves more or less
chronologically from that firstchapter. It really kind of goes
backward and forward again intime, about like the El Paso and
Buffalo shooters, theirrhetoric, and then kind of like
going way back and showing howit resonates with nineteenth

(22:46):
century, seizures of indigenousland and then the
representations accompanyingthem.
And then then kind of movingback through history to the
present and thinking about howthat logic really kind of
continued and continues, notjust in kind of like right wing
movements, the wise use movementof the nineties, but also in the

(23:08):
kind of rise of modernenvironmentalism in the sixties
and seventies as well, which isoften associated with the left.
So really thinking aboutstorytelling patterns across the
political spectrum, right?Storytelling these patterns that
are particular to an entireculture and not just to a
particular politicalaffiliation. The interludes, as
I said, kind of came to me latebecause as I was writing the

(23:31):
book, it was important to me tospend at least a little bit of
time really thinking aboutresistances to those
storytelling patterns. Whatother kind of storytelling
traditions are there that facethe one I was looking at sort of
head on and offer kind of adifferent sort of narrative in
response.
And the conclusion as well iskind of clapbacks. But I think

(23:54):
clapback is the wrong word. Alot of the sort of patterns that
I'm looking at are arguably insome ways older than the kind of
eco fascist narrative patterns.I look at Tommy Pico, who
Kumeyaay poet, who's reallythinking with indigenous
storytelling traditions. Thesubject of the chapter on food
is actually, I would sayprobably one of the richest
writers to work with for thisproject.

(24:15):
Was really thinking about thegay Appalachian poet, essayist,
and novelist Jeff Mann. Even ashe is sort of doing the thing
I've been talking about whereconsuming food makes one a
privileged inhabitant of land atothers' expense, he's also
really inconsistent and at thesame time is really gesturing
toward and working within otherstorytelling patterns that I

(24:37):
find far more generative in linewith writers like Tommy Pico.
And I also work with GloriaAnzaldua in thinking about these
alternatives. So the secondinterlude is actually about him.
I moved from a chapter where I'mkind of really critical of his
rhetoric and then move into onewhere I'm really celebratory of
other instances in his writing.
He's a great example of howreally kind of genuinely

(24:58):
progressive people, writers,activists, teachers can work
within these storytellingpatterns despite themselves,
right? But also still beproviding us with really
generative work at the sametime. That was the tricky
balancing act of this book isthat because, you know, with
comparative fascist studiesunderstanding of fascism in
large part, not just kind of theconcrete material political

(25:20):
movement and regime, but also somuch about broader cultural
storytelling patterns is that Ifound it really necessary to
approach a lot of the writers Iworked with with a great deal of
generosity, despite thestorytelling patterns I was
seeing here. Because we all areimplicated to varying degrees in
these storytelling patterns, andwe might have ourselves

(25:40):
participated in them in thepast. It's not my goal to
demonize people, right?
But to instead really thinkabout those storytelling
patterns in an effort to thinkabout where they come from and
what their implications are.

April Anson (25:52):
I kind of want to ask you to sit with your method
or elaborate on your methodrather, a bit more in thinking
about political genre, itsrelationship to literary genre
and literary criticism. And thenthis term that I found so,
useful as threshold objects. Andwhat is the relationship do you

(26:13):
see between the three? Why talkabout figures like the patriotic
producer rather than stereotypesor tropes or language more
familiar to literary criticism.So yeah, if you could just talk
about like method and and howyou see political genre relating
to some of your methods orpushing back and then where
threshold objects sits in thatspace.

Alexander Menrisky (26:33):
Yeah, sure. That's a great and such a huge
question. I'll try to do itjustice. So the threshold object
term that you're referring toApril, that's the phrase I use
for the land, the tools, thefood, the drugs, the contagion.
And again, is such a trickyword, and I won't get into it
here.
But for me, the term thresholdobjects, it's not about the
objects themselves. It's notabout land writ large. It's not

(26:55):
about psychedelics writ large.It's about how they're being
represented. Certain qualitiesof certain representations make
objects threshold objects, ifthat makes sense.
And the word threshold was forme, it's just an indicator of
that sort of movement that I'vebeen referring to. You know,
engagement with organichallucinogens enables one to
cross a threshold into a stateof environmental innocence. One

(27:19):
way I put it is think like Eve'sapple in reverse. You know,
that's kind of how it's workingfor these people. It's a
movement into like a spatial andtemporal purity, make
environmentalists great again,right?
And consuming these objectsenables one to cross that
threshold. So that's what I meanby that term. As for what you
said about, what's therelationship between political
genre, these broaderstorytelling patterns that

(27:40):
circulate across conventionalpolitical lines and literature,
right? Representation. And theway I'll put it right now is
just the way I put it.
I teach a big 100 studentlecture in literature and
environment. I tell students Iwant them to think of literary
texts sort of like collapsedaccordions. Literary texts have
the potential to unfold ideas wetake for granted in the world

(28:01):
around us. I normally startsemesters by asking students to
like define environment, whichis a famously impossible word to
define. And then we moveimmediately into kind of
knocking those definitions down.
Literary texts encodestorytelling patterns that
circulate more broadly, butthey're very useful. They put a

(28:21):
microscope on those ideas andhow those storytelling patterns
circulate in our society. Theymight, you know, take those
storytelling patterns veryseriously, but they might also
be kind of teasing them apart.And they might also be thinking
about alternatives and theymight also be thinking about
implications and ramificationsand histories behind those

(28:41):
ideas. And that's what'svaluable to me when teaching
literary studies to students.
It's a language that's beenvaluable to me and something
that students tend to reallygrasp. But even if it's sort of
like a really simple metaphorthat has its own plot holes in
it, so to speak, I think that itcaptures my own approach to
writing about literature prettywell, which is that these
literary texts, a lot of themare working with these

(29:04):
storytelling patterns that youcan also observe in news media,
in manifestos written by massmurderers. You know, they're
working with these storytellingtraditions. Some of them are
working with them quitegenuinely. Others are a little
more critical and kind of cannyabout it.
Louise Erdrich is a greatexample of a novelist who takes
these storytelling patterns andpulls them apart. Future Home of
the Living God is the one Ireally focus on in the book. The

(29:26):
novel that came after that, thesentence about the
COVID-nineteen pandemic, whichwas less speculative, far more
realist, also does a lot of workin this vein. And I think the
fact that it does that work in arealist and not a speculative
mode is, is really important.It's really instructive.
That's a book that is in a lotof ways about settlers
appropriating native identitiesalso as a way to claim

(29:50):
environmental innocence. So the,yeah, the, I mean, the accordion
metaphor is useful withstudents, but in many ways a
little simplistic, I think itgestures to the way I think
about the relationship betweenliterature and broader cultural
narratives and why readingliterature and studying it is
really valuable.

April Anson (30:05):
I would add too that your metaphor makes an
implied argument that addresseswhat Kyle's earlier question
about. How do we talk aboutfascism and eco fascism when we
know it's dynamic and syncreticand unable to be stably defined.
I feel like the metaphor of theaccordion is actually an
argument for why literarymethods are absolutely essential

(30:25):
to tracking. Okay, there's astable logic here, but it's
getting packaged and reframed indifferent ways. Literary
analysis is so equipped to dothat kind of analysis.

Kyle Boggs (30:34):
Yeah. And I think that's really crucial to that
idea that I think you play withthroughout the book, which is
there's a vast differencebetween one's intentions and the
effects of a rhetorical act, aspeech act. We love that in
rhetorical theory because theauthor's intention, you know,
often matters far less than therhetorical effect that it has.

(30:56):
And so I wanted to talk aboutthat just a little bit and a
little bit about settlercolonial theory and its
relationship to eco fascism andin the way that I think you and
I both write about it as thesort of everydayness of it in a
way that implicates people whomight not immediately recognize
either themselves or their ownpolitical affiliations
alongside. So it's easy, Ithink, for a lot of people to,

(31:18):
and rightly so, condemn massviolence and the El Paso shooter
and and and all of that, and allof these really overt
expressions of eco fascism,conscious commitments to the
projects of fascism.
And I think the same is true forfor settler colonialism. When
European settlers first arrivedon this continent, they brought
more than just themselves. Theybrought entire ways of

(31:40):
understanding and being in theworld. They brought Eurocentric
meaning making systems,philosophies, religions,
codified today through legal,educational, economic
institutions. It comes out inland use policy.
It comes out in propertyownership, everyday things like
family and marriage, and it'scertainly wrapped up in
supremacist systems based onideas of race. When I talk about

(32:01):
settler colonialism, I talkabout it in terms of the way
that everyday folks sustain thesystems upon which settler
colonialism depends in everydaykind of practices. So we're not
just talking about settlercolonialism, we're talking about
capitalism, heteropatriarchy andwhite supremacy that operate in
ways that are like oftenunintentional. These are often
well meaning folks. It's alittle easier, I think, when

(32:24):
we're talking about settlercolonialism.
There's like a language for itthat's wrapped in identity that
people can kind of seethemselves in and understand
their history. My ancestors areEuropean settlers who came here
and then how is my kind ofidentity wrapped up in that
legacy? And I feel like it's alittle bit trickier with eco
fascism because people are notgoing to readily try to identify

(32:45):
with their inner fascists,right? I wonder if you can kind
of go through some examplesthroughout the book that I think
some people might findsurprising but illuminating in
the sense that like when you'retalking about eco fascism,
you're not just talking aboutthe stuff that will make the
newspaper, right? But you'retalking about these simple like
quotidian expressions thatconstellate within the orbit of

(33:05):
eco fascism.

Alexander Menrisky (33:07):
Yeah, sure. That's such a great question. I
also think this is a greatquestion for all of us. Think, I
mean, depending on the personyou're talking to, is a
language, there's a vocabularyfor folks to at the very least
try to come to terms. And bywhich I mean white Euro American
settlers, To confront thehistories that put them here and
their role in sustaining it.

(33:28):
Eco fascism is a little trickierbecause that word fascism is
just such a There's an interviewrecently with Robert O. Paxton,
kind of one of the giants ofcomparative fascist studies
about how useful the wordfascism is to describe the
political phenomena of today.And he was very kind of blunt
saying like, oh yeah, I thinkit's fascism. Like it checks all

(33:49):
of the boxes. If we think aboutfascism, again, not as a stable
ideology, but as a phenomenon,as a process, he's like, it's
very historically resonant.
Does that mean it's useful touse the word right in this
context? Has the rhetoricalcontext changed? Has the
rhetorical situation changed?And he thinks, it has. And I
think that's one of the trickythings about what you're talking

(34:09):
about is that fascism is such aloaded term and people have such
a visceral reaction to thatterm.
Is it historically the case thatpeople left, right, and center
supported and like fullyenthusiastically supported
fascist regimes in the 1930s?Yes, a 100%, not just in
Germany, but in The UnitedStates. People in The United
States thought it was like itlooked great until Hitler

(34:31):
started invading other countriesand after effects were made
clear. But people were on boardwith it. Even in The U S people
were on board with it worldwide.
It was attractive to people fora variety of reasons, not least
because of the kind ofstorytelling patterns. And there
were explicitly fascistmovements here in The U. S. That
were building on that. Andthat's just to kind of reiterate

(34:52):
that that is what fascism is,right?
That it is a left, right andcenter thing, but the
storytelling patterns are left,right and center. And that's
what makes it so tricky. Butbecause it sort of has that
people have that visceralreaction because of what such an
important world historical eventas World War II kind of lent to
it is that it's really kind ofhard to have that conversation

(35:12):
with people today where you saythis storytelling pattern can be
accurately described as fascist,like let's talk about it, right?
And that's a really tricky thingto do.

Kyle Boggs (35:20):
Yeah, people used to actually in rhetoric, it was
kind of a running joke that ifyou're in a debate with someone
like the first person to utterHitler loses. Exactly. And this
is another thing that's reallyimportant

Alexander Menrisky (35:31):
to kind of say, right? Is that since so
much of what can be described asfascism is about cultural
storytelling, we can point atsomething and say, that's
fascism. I know it by itseffects. I know it by the
political violence it's givingrise to or the rhetoric it's
giving rise to. But the road bywhich a given culture takes to
get there is necessarily goingto be different because every

(35:52):
culture has its own particularhistorical conditions and
storytelling patterns.
And that's why Paxton'sabsolutely right. Does it make
sense to draw comparisons toHitler? Not necessarily because
this is not 1930s Germany,right? It's a complete we're in
a completely different context.Like naming the process as
fascism can be meaningful, butsaying fascism, yes.

(36:13):
Nazism, no. That's a great wayto put it, right? Is that we can
describe the phenomenon asfascism, but can we describe it
as Nazism? No, because Nazismwas a very particular thing. I
use this phrase in the book.
April used it in her question,political genre, right? The word
political genre is useful,right? We might observe a
political genre called fascismin numerous contexts worldwide.

(36:34):
The genre is the same, but thecast of characters and the
setting changes, right? So wecan recognize the genre as being
constant, but the cast ofcharacters will change.

April Anson (36:43):
Yeah, I'm wondering since settler logics play such a
foundational role in youranalysis of ecofascism, I'm
wondering in the context of acurrent moment where we see
those logics travel, we'll say,how you're thinking about eco
fascism's relationship tofascism, but also liberalism.
Thinking about the settlerproject is so wedded to

(37:04):
liberalist explanations andjustifications for its violence.
I know comparative fasciststudies has a lot to say about
the relationship betweenliberalism and fascism, but I'm
wondering if you can locate ecofascism kind of in that matrix.

Alexander Menrisky (37:16):
Yeah, that is such a big question. Thinking
about, I had referenced a fewtimes this chapter on tools,
which is probably the least selfexplanatory of all of the kind
of titles. And that's really areference to a particular use of
that word or a particular kindof resonance with that word in
the late sixties and in theseventies through the eighties.
And I'm thinking of the WholeEarth Catalog and I'm thinking
of the tagline on the WholeEarth Catalog, Access to Tools.

(37:39):
Whole Earth Catalog was thisproject of this guy Stuart Brand
who was really frustrated withmany currents in
environmentalism as modernenvironmentalism was kind of
taking shape in the 70s.
He was frustrated with how itwas turning towards a more
managerial, you know, likeenvironmental policy happens
through courts. And then it's atop down imposition of
regulations. He was reallydissatisfied with that. People

(38:02):
look back just thecounterculture writ large, which
is itself more of an obfuscatingterm than anything else. They
think leftism.
They think hippies. But thecounterculture was quite
politically muddled. Right? Andwe can trace a lot of threads
from there to right wingmovements today as well. And the
counterculture was exactly whatthe word says.
It was countercultural,countercultural and that doesn't
mean left or right. And StuartBrand was this big figurehead of

(38:25):
the counterculture. He reallyidentified with this arm of it
that was very like free markets,free minds and free markets. You
know, the guy who popularizedthe term counterculture,
Theodore Rozak, has this reallylittle known other book he
wrote, From Satori to SiliconValley. I think he published it
in the '80s.
And it's him tracing how manyelements of the counterculture
were the seeds that gave rise tothe Silicon Valley that was

(38:48):
taking shape in the eighties andnineties, but also his
observations really hold uptoday. He was really thinking
about how the free markets partfor many sectors of the
counterculture was really tiedto the kind of like free minds
part and other movements likefree speech, sexual liberation,
etcetera, and anti war movement,right? All of these things were
kind of bound up together. Therewas this big financial
conservatism strain in manysectors of the counterculture

(39:11):
and Stuart Brand was that. Andhe was really interested in
creating this resource, thewhole earth catalog that was
about individual choice andindividual lifestyle and having
access to certain tools throughthis sort of marketplace, you
know, in order to kind ofestablish oneself as an
environmentalist subject.
In some cases, not Sue Brandhimself, but others who are

(39:31):
working within this similarlogic. In some cases, they bring
it to that place I've beentalking about where it's not
just access to tools to beenvironmentally self sufficient,
it's access to tools so that youare environmentally innocent and
in effect superior in ways thatreally kind of most obviously
referred back to the rhetoric ofland entitlement, settler
colonial land entitlement, lotsof references to Jefferson, but

(39:55):
specifically those elements ofJefferson that were really
interested in the idea of takingand working on land in
particular ways to render onethe appropriate subject, not
just of that land, but of TheUnited States as a nation.
Right? And this kind of likeelement of the birthplace of
American liberalism, right? Andthat really kind of comes
through in Brand's project.

(40:16):
And it really kind of extendsinto this work by other writers.
One of my big touches on thisErnest Kallenbach in his novel
Ecotopia, really taking thatidea a step further to not only
living self sufficiently on theland, but specifically being a
privileged subject of the landand the earth as a whole,
because one has done the properconsuming of the proper tools in

(40:36):
the proper marketplace,according to this tradition of
American liberalism.

April Anson (40:42):
Yeah, I think that's really helpful. And your
reading of Ecotopia, I felt veryalive, the specter of Michael
Schellenberger. Thinking aboutPaul Ehrlich driving out into
the Redwoods and beginningpopulation bomb with this
speculative future he'simagining, right, where he can't
even get out there because it'stoo crowded. And of course,
Weston in Ecotopia. And then wehave the very real figure of

(41:03):
Michael Schellenberger, who cameto prominence as a supposed
environmental activist and nowis a fear mongering right wing
figure for the homelessnessproblem.
And all that to say is I thinkthat your reading of Ecotopia,
really does allow us to kind ofanticipate rather than be
shocked by a figure likeSchellenberger because he is
really right in line with thiskind of storytelling pattern
that you're following.

Kyle Boggs (41:24):
I think also, I mean, the chapter on Contagion,
and you you talk about when youreference it in the beginning in
the introduction. I feel likewhen reflecting on COVID, you
know, for example, like, thatfeels really recent for a lot of
readers. And I know, April,you've written about that too,
about quotes during that timeof, like, humans are the virus
and the world would be better,you know, without humans. You

(41:46):
know, you recall Ken Josie'stalking about it as a lazy, lazy
ecofascism. I think that'sreally poignant because it's
like a rhetorical trick that'sdone unintentionally there when
the like a human, right, is kindof stand in for the systems that
produce the inequality.
It's lazy because, you know,humans in this context refers to

(42:06):
capitalism or other supremacistsystems that wreak havoc on the
planet. And it's lazy because,you know, this analysis
naturalizes those systems as agiven. They're sort of
naturalized in that framework. Ijust think the contagion example
is really useful. That idea ofthe contagion, the contaminant,
it comes out throughout the bookin various ways through like

(42:29):
invasive sort of population, andyou bring it up in the land
chapter.
The land is sort of preserved ina in a kind of pristine way. It
speaks to that idea of thefetishization of purity and this
association with whiteness asnatural and everything else is
not how you weave all of thosetogether. It's really well done.

Alexander Menrisky (42:51):
I appreciate that, Kyle. And I do think I am
gonna bounce the question toApril at first, because so much
of that chapter I built on a lotof April's observations. And I
took it in the direction of kindof anti vaccination rhetoric.
And I'd like to talk about that,but I actually wonder if April
can talk first a little bitabout the COVID-nineteen
pandemic, because I think thatreally sets the stage for a lot
of it.

April Anson (43:12):
Oh, gosh. Well, thank you both. I kind of had
this similar moment ofrecognition, maybe that as to
what you describe, Alex, in yourearly grad student paper, is
that when COVID had first hit,or at least hit on a global
scale, and we were seeing allthese memes, it may be a product

(43:32):
of growing up in Eugene, Oregon,or Kalapuya Land, that my social
media feeds were filled withpeople sharing these memes. And
then, you know, tuning intopodcasts, and I hear people like
Donna Haraway saying climatechange is Earth's revenge. And I
just it triggered such a deeprage, if I'm being really

(43:52):
honest.

Kyle Boggs (43:53):
The memes you're talking about, like dolphins in
Venice Venice canals and stufflike those kind of produced
images.

April Anson (43:59):
Yes. Thank you. Yes. Air air pollution. Nature
is healing.

Kyle Boggs (44:05):
Clear up.

Alexander Menrisky (44:05):
Yeah. Humans are the virus. Yeah.

April Anson (44:07):
Yes. We're the virus. Thank you for asking for
clarification on that. Yeah. Andthey, you know, there were all
different iterations of it, butthey really cohered around this
exactly as you explain, Alex,this obfuscation, acquittal,
absolution.
It felt like such a, yeah, toreturn to Kit and Joshi's term,
like a lazy way to describe whatwe were all experiencing. And a

(44:31):
way that felt like just a, itwas a disconnector, right? In
this moment where we all were,what I was feeling like this
collective desire and real needfor connection. To have all
these people in my social mediafeeds and philosophers that I
had up until that point reallyadmired share this, it was
circulating in a way that mademe feel like it was making just

(44:54):
a it was triggering a sort ofcommon sense for audiences. It
just felt like such a preciseexample of this overlap that I
have been really dedicated tostudying for a very long time
of, you know, this is not aright wing phenomenon.
This is not a left wingphenomenon. Why is it meeting in
the center where I have my likelibertarian or even like far

(45:15):
right Christian folks in mysocial media feeds and my far
left radical deep ecologistssharing the same sentiment just
was so clearly an example ofwhat Mark Rifkin calls settler
common sense. It felt like thescaffolding in your language,
Alex, has been laid since, youknow, before the beginning of
what's currently called America.In this idea that certain people

(45:36):
are entitled to land, certainpeople are entitled to a kind of
purification through land, thatclaim doing not only all the
work of, a kind of speculativefiction of like claiming it as a
future fact and then citing thatfuture fact as justification for
violence in the present, butalso a way of completely

(45:57):
obscuring the operations of thatclaim. It's a win win for
settlers like me who want todisavow my responsibility, but
also claim that I have a kind ofhigher order knowledge that you,
I think, really beautifullyexplain, Alex.
So that's sort of the backgroundfor the the COVID nineteen stuff
that I have written. I foundyour chapter, Alex, so, so

(46:18):
deeply satisfying because, ofcourse, we're in this moment of
make America healthy again andanti vax sentiment, all of which
I think the discourse has beenfairly attentive to the fact
that these claims are emergingfrom the identification of real
problems with big pharma, withglobal health, etc. But then

(46:40):
taking that lazy shortcut thatcircumvents any responsibility
or even systemic critique andblaming, you know, the people
who are going to and have beensuffering first and foremost. So
yeah, thank you, Alex, for thatthat chapter and for obviously
for your whole book, but thatone was really that was a deep,
deeply cathartic read for me.

Alexander Menrisky (47:00):
Thank you. I love the way you just put that
at the end, right? About thelazy shortcut to systemic
critique. There's one way tokind of sum up the critical
consensus in comparative fasciststudies on the classical fascist
regimes. That's kind of it.
It's sort of like fascism, itmight just be a word for this
kind of lazy scapegoatingshortcut to paper over real kind

(47:23):
of systemic social issues ratherthan actually addressing them. I
see that in so much of antivaxxer rhetoric. The one thing
that I was really interested inin the anti vaxxer rhetoric is
that anti vaxxers aren't reallynormally against inoculation
itself. It's just they preferwhat's called variolation, which
is just exposure to a disease orto a virus or bacteria such that

(47:45):
one contracts a disease and runsthrough it. And that's quote
unquote natural immunity, right?
That's like a bodilypurification thing and it's an
avoidance of what one activistcalled toxic shots. And one
thing that's kind of worthpointing out, right, is how much
the anti vaxxer movementappropriates rhetoric from the
environmental justice movementabout industrial contamination.

(48:06):
And that comes from very realpointed necessary critique. But
that sort of appropriation oftenkind of really bastardizes it.
And it covers up kind of theactual real environmental
justice concerns from whichthey're taking the rhetoric,
right?
Because so much of thelifestyles of folks who are
statistically more likely to beanti vaxxers is based on the

(48:26):
very sort of contamination ofcommunities of color, working
class communities, and nativecommunities. So much of those
lifestyles are based on thosesorts of contaminations that
kind of produced thatenvironmental justice critique
whose rhetoric anti vaxxers aresort of just bumming off of in
ways that cover up theirorigins. Right? And you see it

(48:49):
also on a more superficiallevel, like in interviews with
anti vaxxers or in their socialmedia posts, quite boldly kind
of saying vaccines aren't forme. They're for quite literally
they'll say things like they'refor the more impure like blood
of like other sorts of people.
Vaccines would only ruin myperfect body. There's a pretty
prominent activist at the heightof the AIDS epidemic, Emily

(49:13):
Martin, this anthropologist whostudies the way cultures
approach disease or talk aboutdisease. In the 90s when she was
writing one book about the AIDSepidemic, she was really
noticing what was calling likekind of like a new social
Darwinism that was just based onthis not just assumption that
certain bodies were kind of likecleaner and stronger than others

(49:33):
and able to withstand disease,but also this idea that was kind
of emerging in the eighties oflike training one's body to be
resilient in the face of diseaseby like purposefully eating raw
meat or contaminated foods ordrinking from dirty streams.
Like people were actually likesuggesting this stuff and people
suggest it today, right? As away of training the body's

(49:55):
immunity.
And so there's this kind ofemphasis on consumption again,
where people are consumingcertain things in an effort to
demonstrate their purityenvironmentally. That kind of
logic is what you see runningthrough the anti vaxxer
movement. April and I talk aboutit all the time. I think a
journalist coined the phrase thewellness to fascism pipeline,

(50:16):
the ease with which people seemto be able to shuttle from like
new age mysticism to that ideathat their bodies are pure and
worthy of survival at theexpense of others. It's just
such a clean motion.
And I guess not for nothing am Ireally interested in a lot of
new age writers in the chapterson psychedelics and Contagion.

April Anson (50:37):
And those New Age writers to all three of our
attention to issues of settlercolonialism. Once you see it,
you can't unsee it with the NewAge writers like Starhawk, etc.
Or Gary Snyder even for thatmatter. The claims to
indigeneity that are sort of thenecessary preconditions or
access to indigeneity that arenecessary preconditions for them
to make those claims of puritypertain throughout the century.

Alexander Menrisky (51:01):
It starts as like an identification of a real
problem, right? You know, ananti vaccination movement is
another thing that crossesconventional political borders,
right? A lot of it stems fromlike noticing very real issues
that deserve being untangled,like the pharmaceutical
industry's control over a lot ofthis stuff, right? That's a very
real kind of critique that'semerging from both the left and

(51:23):
the right. What we're noticinghere is the response ends up
being this hyper individualisticclaim to one's own bodily purity
rather than an actual addressingof the social systemic issue of
access, of oversight, oftransparency, of input, and all
the sort of things that like theenvironmental justice movement

(51:44):
has been agitating for for goingon fifty years.
But then you have this sort oflazy alternative, right? Where
it just ends up being about thisparticipating in this rhetorical
project of shoring up one's ownbodily purity.

Kyle Boggs (51:58):
Yeah, that's a crucial point. Because I mean,
we're all living in the sameworld, like we're all affected
by the negative effects ofcapitalism, by the negative
effects of our failing healthand insurance and pharmaceutical
company environment. And the waythat we, in our own social and
cultural bubbles, interpret thatphenomenon and rationalize

(52:19):
different kinds of solutionsthat are often easy or lazy,
that's right and left for sure.

Alexander Menrisky (52:25):
But it's also like a weird little, those
kinds of moments do offer uslittle beacons of kind of hope
despite apparently intractablepolitical divisions of our time.
Over and over again, you seethese places where people are
identifying the same problems,like across the spectrum. And
that's heartening, right?Because it means that there can
be more generative ways ofaddressing them because at the

(52:48):
very least, more people than Ithink we realize recognize where
there are issues. It's just thesolutions that people are
running with.
That's where these divergencesare kind of happening.

April Anson (52:58):
Yeah, and I think that we all wanted to discuss
the contemporary politicalmoment, which we have been
getting at. But I think thatwhat you're saying is really
important for so many of us toengage in some critical self
reflection about the ways thatI'll just I'll just speak for
myself. How about that? The waysthat I interact or even respond

(53:19):
to everyday eco fascistexpressions. I'm very compelled
and I think I do agree with thesentiment of like white folks
get your people, right?
That it's all three of our jobsto be doing some of that
translation and outreach andengagement, and also recognizing
that there's a real highemotional toll to that work as
well. One of the many thingsthat you offer us is a way to

(53:40):
think about this as kind ofantipurity work, right? We are
all differently implicated andresponsible for these messy
systems that we're in, and weare not going to get anywhere if
we just channel our rage at thesystems towards people who are
maybe seeing themselves as morefrictionless with those systems.
But ultimately, they're going betargets of those systems also.

(54:01):
It's one emotional gift of yourbook is just to remind us that
the purity fetish, like theprimitivist fetish, etc, are all
tools of disciplining us intothese frictionless roles with
violent systems.

Alexander Menrisky (54:17):
Yeah, thank you for that. I think that's
yeah, no purity politics. Thatwould be like the brand of all
of my work is this writingagainst purity politics. Because
purity politics requires puritytests, where are those lines
being drawn, who gets to drawthem and to whose benefit and to
what end. And this is why kindof environmentalism writ large
has been particularlysusceptible to these sorts of

(54:37):
narrative patterns is because socentral to environmentalism writ
large in The United States forthe past one hundred and fifty
years has been ideas of naturewith a capital N, this idea of
purity.
And that's sort of what rendersit especially vulnerable to
particular storytellingpatterns.

April Anson (54:54):
And then of course, the irony that much of what
settlers encountered on thiscontinent was able to be
understood as Eden and all thesethings because of the ongoing
caretaking of indigenous peopleson this continent. It is just
this delusion. But I think thatthat is the reason or a reason
why literary analysis is soimportant is because the ways
that the narrative precedes thekind of observation or over

(55:18):
determines the observation.

Kyle Boggs (55:20):
Yeah, in my book, I kind of use the term curate.
Like all of the forces,philosophy, literature, art have
percolated in our sort ofcollective imagination over
generations. When we look at thequote unquote wilderness, we are
seeing something that has sortof been produced. We're seeing
something that's been curatedfor us in our minds that's very
specific to American culture andthe West in general through all

(55:44):
of those associations. It'suseful to be mindful of that.
And this book definitely helpsarticulate those ideas as well.

Alexander Menrisky (55:53):
So as we're winding down, I want to hear
more about your two projects,Kyle, your forthcoming book in
April, your manuscripts, and notnecessarily just in terms of how
they overlap with what we'vebeen talking about. Although, of
course, I think you're both herebecause they do, but I wanna
hear more in general about whatyou've been working on.

Kyle Boggs (56:12):
Yeah, so my book, Recreational Colonialism and the
Rhetorical Landscapes of theOutdoors, I was a journalist in
Northern Arizona. I coveredextensively this issue involving
a ski resort, Arizona Snowbowl.They wanted to use reclaimed
wastewater to make artificialsnow on the peaks, San Francisco

(56:33):
Peaks. And that move was justcompletely unacceptable to the
tribes who hold the peaks sacredin different ways. And I covered
a lot of direct actions.
I covered a lot of protests andvigils and had conversations
with folks, city councilmeetings and kitchen table
conversations on the Navajo andHopi reservation and just tried

(56:54):
to really learn a lot about itand cover it because the local
paper there, Arizona Daily Sun,was they would cover it, but
they would only sort of writearticles based on press releases
and such. And there was anindigenous voice that was really
missing from the topic. And Iwrote about it for like a
decade. There were three courtcases and a lot of stuff,
arrests and tree sits and hungerstrikes and all kinds of stuff.

(57:17):
For me, was like easy to becritical of the ski resort
because I was a non skier.
The history of skiing in thiscountry is, you know, it's very
elite, it's expensive, it'sinaccessible for a lot of folks.
And so it's kind of an easy forme, it's an easy sort of
punching bag. Ethel Ham, amountain biker, a trail runner,
and I just started to see alarger story unfolding about how

(57:40):
settler colonial tropes come outin discourses of outdoor
recreation. The book uses thepeaks as a primary animating
example, but I have a chapter onultra running, chapter on rock
climbing, a chapter on bikepacking. Outdoor recreation is
just kind of seen as this sortof apolitical thing when it's
anything but when you when youdig into it.

April Anson (58:02):
Well, I just am putting the final touches on the
first draft of the manuscripttentatively titled Ecofascism
Literary Genre and NativeAmerican Environmental Justice.
Alex and I joke often that mybook is the part one of Alex's
part two. So I look atnineteenth century texts and

(58:23):
nineteenth century Americanenvironmental history to argue
much like Alex's book thatecofascism is not far, it's not
right, there's nothing new. Thatthis kind of rise of ecofascism
or climate fascism today buildson and relies on a very old and
very American tradition wherewhite violence is rendered
natural, even necessary to asocial order. I look at some

(58:44):
really iconic figures inAmerican environmental thought
like Emerson, Ralph WaldoEmerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
and then later in the century,Frederick Jackson Turner.
Some of those figures, Emersonand Turner explicitly had a very
profound influence on what isoften stated as the origins of
eco fascism in Nazi Germany. Butwe can see a kind of American

(59:05):
version of I think of ecofascism through their writings.
At the same time as thosewriters, I also trace, an
archive of nineteenth centurynative authors who are writing
in the very same times, verysame places, and with, the same
literary genre. So kind ofbuilding on your work, Alex,
attention to political genre,I'm really looking at the

(59:26):
confines of literary genre as atool in your terms to rectify
the dissonances of a particularpolitical moment. So Frederick
Jackson Turner famouslydelivered his 1893 frontier
thesis declaring that thefrontier closed, even though at
the time more land was settledafter he wrote that and
delivered it than before.

(59:46):
And yet he figured as a kind ofturning point of American
environmental history well upuntil the 1990s in America, high
school English historycurriculum were following
Turner's frontier thesis. I'm atonce investigating the kind of
stickiness or persistence ofthese notions of nature in the
nineteenth century American kindof tradition and at the same

(01:00:08):
time looking at Native writerswho were writing at the same
time. So like Turner's frontierthesis, Simon Pokhagen wrote Red
Man's Rebuke at the very sametime. Actually, he wrote it
before Turner's thesis and thendelivered it at the Chicago
World's Fair after Turner'sthesis. Looking at how these
writers are writing at the samemoment and the way that they're

(01:00:29):
using literary genre orenvironmental storytelling
really explodes the essentialismnecessary to eco fascist ideas.
They're not only, anticipatingwhat the twenty twenty two IPCC
report just told us thatcolonialism is the primary and
ongoing driver of climatechange. They, I think, very
acutely anticipate that frommore than a century and a half

(01:00:50):
before. But they're also, Ithink, modeling versions of
literary genres like apocalypse,the gothic, and allegory that
can really inform our climatestorytelling today. So as to
avoid this kind of puritypolitics, the speculative
fiction that projects settlerstructures into the future, We
have lots of political modelsand storytelling models to draw

(01:01:11):
on. So ultimately, goal is toargue that the rise of climate
fascism today is not only notnew, but it's not inevitable.
It's an ongoing project that hasbeen and this can be
interrupted.

Alexander Menrisky (01:01:23):
Yeah, it sounds like we all need to get
together again once they're allout in the world. Also seems
April like yours is more forwardfacing than mine, which is
something I admittedly alwaysstruggle with in my writing. So
I really appreciate that. You'resort of leapfrogging my period,
right?

April Anson (01:01:38):
Yes. I start where you start, but move backward and
then come forward to climate.Yeah. Yeah. It's very good very
sequel.
Yeah. But I love the idea of acontinued conversation with you
three.

Kyle Boggs (01:01:51):
Y'all are some of my favorites for sure in academia.
It's rough out there, but Iappreciate the camaraderie and
friendship. Likewise.

April Anson (01:01:59):
Same. Same.

Alexander Menrisky (01:02:01):
Thank you both for being here today and
being willing to talk to meabout everyday ecofascism and
allowing me to ask you too aboutyour projects will keep this
conversation going in thefuture.

April Anson (01:02:12):
Thank you Alex and thank you Kyle.

Kyle Boggs (01:02:14):
Yeah, thank you all.

Narrator (01:02:16):
This has been a University of Minnesota Press
production. The book Crisis andConsumption in American
Literature by Alexander Menryskiis available from University of
Minnesota Press. Thank you forlistening.