Whose Utopia? American Ecofascism Since the 1880s

What do you get when you mix white nationalism, online echo chambers, and global climate crisis? One answer: ecofascism, a political ideology that enables extremists to “concede the reality of looming ecological catastrophe” by proposing what Guardian journalist Jason Wilson calls “frankly genocidal” solutions. In other words, ecofascists advocate for decreasing the world’s population by any means necessary to avoid the pending environmental disaster. In the recent shooting in an El Paso Walmart, the shooter’s manifesto blamed immigrants and “proposed genocide as a pathway to ecological sustainability.” And these ideas are nothing new. These extremists and the terror they generate are only the latest, if perhaps most visible, group attempting to cultivate a supposedly uncontaminated America.

Movements to purify the nation have had fervent followers since the 1870s (and earlier), long before online forums like 8chan gave violent ecofascists a venue to articulate greenwashed racism and xenophobia. In the wake of Charles Darwin’s and Gregor Mendel’s theories of evolution and genetics, people began to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to human society and politics. As the official Reconstruction Era came to a close and the first large wave of Eastern European immigration reached American borders, social Darwinism took root in the United States. It morphed fairly quickly into eugenic policies and legislation—including forced sterilization and immigration reform—meant to remove people considered “unfit” or “undesirable” from the gene pool. As technology enabled groups of people to migrate, mix, and mingle in previously unimagined ways, and city centers swelled and expanded, an emphasis on purity disguised as a return to morality brought an interest in eugenics and a concern with environmental and bodily pollution into conversation with one another, creating the basis for racist and classist policies with longstanding consequences.

The American Eugenics Society educated the public about genetic “fitness” and the dangers of “bad heredity.” This display, which emphasized the overpopulation of “defectives” in the American gene pool, appeared at a Fitter Families contest at a state fair in 1926. Image from the American Philosophical Society.

It is therefore unsurprising that early science fiction narratives imagining other worlds wondered what a society might look like if certain groups of people were absent. Mary E. Bradley Lane’s little-known American text, Mizora: A Prophecy, published serially over the course of 1800–1881 and in full in 1890, ostensibly prophesizes a nonviolent world that can only be made possible if power is given entirely to women, not unlike the plot of the better-known Herland (1915) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In truth, however, Lane’s prophecy is one that foreshadows a 21st century revival of a global clean-up that can, many claim, be cultivated via social, environmental, and bodily purity. In Mizora, a community of women—blonde, thin, white women—have built a peaceful, well-ordered society at the center of the earth. They protect themselves from environmental contamination, rely on carbon-free energy, and distribute “clean,” healthful food to all Mizoran citizens. The only catch? It’s a world whose perfection is built on exclusionary violence, one that highlights the ways in which green philosophies and eugenic policies can make closer bedfellows than one might think.

The narrator is Vera Zarovitch, a woman who hails from Russia but has been ousted for questioning its politics. After Vera is sucked into a vortex in the Arctic Ocean, she finds herself not dead but drifting in “bewildered delight” down “a broad river” into “a land of enchantment.” She is first struck by the near-ethereal beauty of the women who live there, as well as her comparative drabness: “In my own land the voice of flattery had whispered in my ear praises of face and figure, but I felt ill-formed and uncouth beside the perfect symmetry and grace of these lovely beings.” The Mizoran women are not only beautiful but also peaceful, scientifically advanced, and—given the “marked absence of men”—entirely in control of their own social, political, and reproductive lives. Mizorans have discovered a way to reproduce through a process that seems to involve something akin to a kombucha scoby or sourdough starter—“the germ of all Life”—which does not require men at all. Vera soon learns, however, that such perfection is not a natural part of the society. Instead, it has been carefully crafted at great cost. Although Vera initially marvels at the flawlessness of this hidden world, she soon uncovers its sinister past.

Mizora’s history is a tale of social Darwinism and eugenics in which everyone who isn’t an ideal Aryan woman has been rooted out. In her quest to discover where the Mizorans have hidden the men, Vera learns of the society’s systematic and longstanding use of targeted and scientific murder. After many months of sleuthing, Vera finally asks the Preceptress, an elder and keeper of knowledge, about Mizora’s past and is led into a secret gallery housing old portraits of bygone generations. Here, Vera sees portraits of men and discovers their fate: in order to end war and give women equal rights,  “a prominent scientist proposed to let the race [of men] die out.” And so they did.

She sees in these portraits, too, people with dark hair, dark eyes, and a wide variety of nonwhite complexions. She learns that the Mizorans eliminated them, as well, to create their utopia: “The highest excellence of moral and mental character is alone attainable by a fair race. The elements of evil belong to the dark race.” The Mizoran women also outlawed “the perpetuity of diseased offspring.” They decided that “crime in its grossest form is an ineradicable hereditary taint” and “the only remedy was annihilation.” Vera realizes the Mizoran women, under the guise of peacekeeping, killed almost everyone. The Mizoran women show no remorse. In fact, they are proud of what they’ve accomplished. As the Preceptress says to Vera, “What do you do with the useless weeds in your garden?” The entire tale is laced with suggestions for the extermination of unwanted peoples. There is no possibility of any contamination, moral or physical, with population control perfectly enacted.

The American Eugenics Society promoted ideas of genetic “fitness” and “unfitness” in pamphlets, exhibits, and posters at county and state fairs, like this chart from the 1929 Kansas Free Fair. Image from the American Philosophical Society.

Lane’s Mizoran society is not as fantastical as it might first appear. In fact, her fictional land stems directly from fin-de-siècle conversations in which laypeople, researchers, and politicians alike worried about the degeneration of the American (read: white) race. Harvard professor Louis Agassiz’s 1860s research into racial difference, for example, points to a persistent and pervasive desire to differentiate genetically the Black and white races. Agassiz’s research treated African Americans as a culturally and genetically stagnant race, relics of the past and even a distinct species. And African Americans were not the only people pseudo-scientifically designated as a legitimate racial variant, a subspecies of the white human. Native Americans, too, were viewed as an entirely different order of people whose existence was construed as a genetic stepping stone. At the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a fair held to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s American voyage, Native American people were displayed “to signify a past stage in the evolution of mankind, the stage of ‘savagery’ . . . out of place in the modern world.” And these were just some of the early steps taken to ensure that the future of America was a white one.

In 1910, the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) was founded. ERO was a research institute tasked with gathering hereditary, genealogical, and social information about Americans and devoted to educating the public about “genetic fitness.” Harry H. Laughlin acted as Superintendent of ERO from 1910 until its closing in 1939. He lobbied to implement mandatory sterilization laws, which were eventually passed in 27 states and led to the subsequent coerced sterilization of at least 60,000 Americans. Laughlin was also largely responsible for providing data that backed the National Origins Act/Asian Exclusion Act, which set restrictive quotas to limit the number of Southern and Eastern European immigrants and built on the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act to deny Japanese immigrants entirely. In 1924, Laughlin testified to the House Immigration Committee that an American race existed, and that this new race, while “created by ‘a transplanted people,’” was nonetheless “a race of white people” “established by its [white] founders.” These examples only scratch the surface of America’s longstanding efforts to perpetuate classism, racism, and ethnocentrism—all -isms that aim to create a purportedly purer world—often under the guise of scientific inquiry and with legislative backing.

Fears of national impurity and overpopulation have long been racialized, as in this early 20th-century cartoon by Louis Dalrymple. Image from The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, 1903.

The Mizorans, too, claim and use scientific prowess and governmental power to accomplish their goals. While the Mizorans’ eugenicist campaign was not initially tied to resource management, it certainly accomplished what Thomas Malthus in his 1798 “An Essay on the Principle of Population” and the more recent fictional Thanos in Marvel’s 2018 Avengers: Infinity War were hoping to achieve: decrease human numbers so the remaining privileged few can live well. Malthus and Thanos were not cagey in advocating for diminishing the population. Others such as Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor (1851), Charles Booth in Life and Labour of the People of London (1889), and Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives (1890) were less straightforward. Caught up in ostensibly humanitarian endeavors—such as decreasing infant mortality rates and general contagion in crowded city centers—these 19th-century authors and activists nonetheless paint a picture of impoverished urban communities as “a living hell” in voyeuristic stories and reports that could resonate with arguments for culling the population. The Mizorans also claim that their ancestors were working for the good of the masses, but when policies for the good of all result in relocation or deportation, sterilization, or death, one might wonder at what point they lost sight of the morals driving such campaigns (peace, health, social equality, environmental sustainability) and gave into their not-so-latent desire to purify a nation.

Having chosen from the masses a population supposedly of the highest moral fiber and intellectual capability, the Mizorans turned their attention to environmentally-responsible resource management and clean (non-polluted and non-polluting) eating to sustain the world for the chosen who remain. Lane writes of a land where hydrogen, not coal, provides energy. Crops aren’t grown in the ground, and animals aren’t raised for milk or meat. Mizorans eat fruits and vegetables grown in pristine greenhouses with purified water piped into the center of the earth from the ocean, their bread is made from limestone so that they won’t be tainted even by grains, and they have perfectly efficient kitchens.

Meat and dairy products are created by scientists, so citizens won’t be sullied with “deleterious earthy matter” and their production processes won’t squander Mizora’s natural resources. As if predicting a current argument against industrial-scale animal agriculture, they tell Vera that her own nation’s habit of raising livestock wastes both land and food that could be put to better use: “Fully four-fifths that you raise on your farms is required to feed your domestic animals.” The Mizoran diet is not, however, a product of their commitment to animal rights. Mizoran women display no particular fondness for nonhuman critters; in fact, there is no nonhuman life at all in Mizora. Vera upon her arrival first notices that “no animals were visible, nor sound of any,” and later learns the animals were “pulled” from the world like men and non-white, non-blonde “weeds” once their products could be imitated. Due to an abundance of clean food for each and every citizen, the Mizorans live extraordinarily long lives, experience no disease, and make advanced scientific discoveries. Each human life is of extreme value, as indeed each human life should be—but only as long as those lives check each eugenic box.

Lane’s emphasis on the links among eco-friendly food production, clean eating, and eugenics are, again, not purely fiction. As many a 19th-century researcher was trying to prove the inferiority of non-white races, simultaneous conversations concerning nutrition, morality, and bodily integrity in America and Britain were taking place before and after the publication of Lane’s story. The popular health reform movement of the 1830s and 40s, which was launched by Sylvester Graham (of the graham cracker), “took a vegetable diet as its cardinal principle” and endeavored to link vegetarianism to cultivating a purity of spirit and intention: “It was from food that the body’s very substance was derived; construct a body from inferior components, and all the exercise, pure air, and sexual restraint in the world would be of no avail.” Later, in the 1890s, John Harvey Kellogg of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes cereal took up a similar line of thinking. For Kellogg, who also owned the Battle Creek Sanitarium, the desire for bodily purity intersected easily with a commitment to eugenics in which the “American race” would be as free from “inferior components” as the (white) American body.

Concerns about environmental pollution and health do exist outside the roles they play in the eugenics movement and the unsettling resurgence of eugenic rhetoric of “superiority” and “purity” in 21st-century ecofascism. In the United States, as in Mizora, there continue to be very real worries about the food we put in our bodies and the effects of our diets on the more-than-human communities we inhabit. It’s no secret that industrial animal agriculture has produced a slew of environmental problems, from emissions that exacerbate climate change to pollutants that endanger the health of water, soil, and human bodies. Mizorans, then, while cultivating animal-less and eventually earth-less products, are on to something when it comes to eating clean. The problem is not with their desire to consume non-poisonous food or their hope that a diet might contribute to a less environmentally destructive way of living. The problem is that they do so to sustain a eugenicist dream.

Mizora’s utopia reminds readers that white American fantasies of purity so often focus on the privileged few, keeping (and, as we’ve seen, sometimes forcing) the most vulnerable communities out of the frame. When environmentalism is wielded to justify extraordinary violence, it is necessary to face up to how the desire to fix a damaged world has long been motivated by the fantasy of tidying it up for only the most privileged among us to enjoy—whatever the cost.

Featured image: Detail of the cover image for an Italian translation of Miroza: A Prophecy, translated by Aldo Tanchis and illustrated by B. Jacob, A. Scandella, A. Coen, A. Ficarra, S. Fabbri, A. Citelli, M. Peluffo.

Jessica Krzeminski is a Ph.D. candidate in English and a 2019–2020 Professors for the Future Fellow at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests include ecocriticism, queer temporality studies, and critical race studies. She focuses on nineteenth-century geological theories and transatlantic adventure and “lost world” stories that play with modes of time, timescales, and the life-death continuum to consider how alternate histories come to light when bodies coded female and bodies of color refuse to be silenced, and the “dangers” that emerge from excavating those bodies and histories. Her work is also forthcoming in The Henry James Review. Contact. Twitter.