There is a snake in our Eden. Or rather, our Eden is the snake – subtle, tempting, full of false promises, beckoning us on to ruin. The land in which we live is no longer a green and pleasant one, but as we fumble for a way back into paradise we risk opening a door on to dystopia. The landscape of modern writing on nature is haunted by the ghosts of fascism.
In her hugely influential H is for Hawk (2014), Helen Macdonald describes watching a herd of deer on chalk-land near her mother's home. A middle-aged man, passing by, remarks: “Doesn't it give you hope?”
“Hope?”
“Yes,” he says. “Isn't it a relief that there're still things like that, a real bit of Old England still left, despite all these immigrants coming in?”
Old England: a green land, but also, of course, a white one.
White nationalists feel their “land” is under threat. Brenton Tarrant, the 28-year-old Australian who killed 50 people in the Christchurch mosque shootings on 15 March, is one of them. In a manifesto of more than 70 pages, he described himself as an “eco-fascist”, referencing a movement that marries environmentalism with white supremacy.
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