“The Marxists used to say “first Brown then Red”, well now it’s ‘first Green then Brown then Red’.”
Timothy Birdnow writes at AmericanThinker.com:
Opponents of the radical environmentalist movement and it’s steadfast promotion of the fundamental restructuring of human civilization have long argued that the reek of National Socialism clings to the modern Green movement.
The very architect of Lebensraum (which literally means Living Space), Karl Haushofer, following the German father of National Geographic (pun) Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), who believed that history was largely a natural evolutionary movement of peoples looking for geographical space (raum), believed in environmental determinism along with some other Nazis. They thus emphasized soil rather than blood. German geopolitics was originally based on this very idea. However, other Nazis like the SS Walther Darre (and even Martin Heidegger) believed that blood or race plays a more independent role in developing a culture within its own space. The two views collided in the 1930’s when the Nazis developed their environmental policies. Walther Darre’s version of blood and soil won out, but there was a compromise between the two groups which both could accept – the green idea of sustainable development. Thus, sustainable development as an applied political policy was first tried in Nazi Germany under the blood and soil slogan. The early German green Riehl of the 1800’s was the father of sustainable development, but the Nazis tried to put into practice under Ratzel’s scientific national geographic ideas – which is precisely what Lebensraum was all about. “Living Space” essentially means living room for sustainable development. After the war, Haushofer tried to distinguish his own version of Lebensraum from Hitler’s, claiming that only Rudolf Hess in the hierarchy of the Nazi Party understood it properly. Haushofer and his wife then committed suicide in 1946.
I suspect the connection is incidental rather than intentional. Environmentalists and other stripes of political activists tend toward credulousness and are thus easily manipulated, making them prime tools for those seeking absolute power. Don’t get me wrong; I acknowledge the connection, I just don’t see anything inherently sinister in it. More like sad and predictable.
Much has been written on the connection of the environmental movement and National Socialism.
A link between National Socialism and Conservation movements is reported by German historian Uekoetter’s The Green and the Brown: a History of Conservatism in Nazi Germany published by Cambridge Press in 2006. A detailed review of this book is written by William Walter Kay . The conservation movement started in Germany in the late nineteenth century and found easy mixing with National Socialism with conservationists having memberships in their local groups and the National Socialist Party. Millions of trees were planted in the name of Adolf Hitler.