On 14 May 2022, 18-year-old Payton Gendron drove to a supermarket in Buffalo, upstate New York. His car was loaded with a shotgun, a hunting rifle and a semi-automatic rifle, on which he had scribbled inter alia the N-word, ‘White Lives Matter’, the year ‘2083’ and the name ‘Brenton Tarrant’. Inside the supermarket, he found his targets: Black bodies. He gunned them down one after the other – all filmed and livestreamed from the camera mounted on his military-style helmet. When he happened to aim his rifle at a White body behind a counter, he corrected himself, said ‘Sorry’ and turned elsewhere (Thompson & Balsamo, 2022). He knew what he was there to do. The operation was carefully prepared: Gendron had scouted the area for the densest possible concentration of a Black population. ‘All black people are replacers just by existing in White countries’, so the mission must be to ‘kill as many blacks as possible’, he wrote in his 180-page manifesto that he, true to such form, posted online before his action (Gendron, 2022: 5, 57). The most remarkable aspect of this text, beyond its violent racist message, was precisely its utter unoriginality. Gendron had lifted entire sections verbatim from the manifesto penned by his hero Brenton Tarrant before he murdered 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 15 March 2019. A theme prominent in the plagiarism was ecology.

For Tarrant and his copyist, echoing timeworn racialized Malthusian overpopulation narratives (see for example Erlich, 1968; Hardin, 1974), non-White people are inundating the world with a surfeit of children. If no one stops these brutes, they will replace and potentially extinguish the White race, as well as consume nature to death. In this view, climate breakdown and other aspects of the ecological crisis have the same causal root – too many non-White people. The earth is being overrun by Blacks, Muslims, immigrants and other racial inferiors, who do not know how to appreciate the beauty of nature (see Dyett & Thomas, 2019). As with all other afflictions troubling White people today: Whiteness and nature supposedly share the fate of subjugation at the hands of a racialized, invasive and parasitic enemy. Ten African Americans were killed in the parking lot and inside the Tops supermarket on that day based on this logic. Like Tarrant, Gendron identified himself as an ‘eco-fascist’, a self-proclaimed label that was not lost in media reports of the atrocity (Gendron, 2022, for example pp. 10, 164, 168). With this latest act, the heavily armed eco-fascist was becoming a central figure on the stage of contemporary global political violence (see Milman, 2022; Tigue, 2022; for an analysis of Tarrant's ideas, see Malm and Zetkin Collective, 2021: 150–153; and for him and eco-fascism generally, Moore and Roberts, 2022).

Almost exactly ten months earlier, a very different political phenomenon had leapt onto the scene: American Marxism by Mark R. Levin. This was not a bloody massacre, but an (innocent?) book. Yet it belonged not to a subculture or extremist fringe, but to the mainstream of the American right – which is to say, these days, pretty far out on the right. When figures were tallied at the end of 2021, no other non-fiction book had sold as many copies in the US (Cadden, 2021). If Gendron had dredged up paragraphs for his composition from the darker corners of the far-right web, Levin, having been a former Reagan government advisor, drew his from the echo-chambers of the vast Republican mediasphere. While Gendron radicalized himself on the controversial, male-dominated online forum 4Chan, Levin was a talk-radio host and star of mainstream Fox News, where he had a show of his own. The thesis of his book is that America is in the process of being occupied and destroyed by Marxists in various guises. Two stand out: Marxists dressed up as critical race theorists – aggressive and dangerous supporters of Black people as against White – and as environmentalists. This was not a new dystopia. The trope of the cultural Marxist conspiracy theory, and its ‘long march through the institutions’, had become a cornerstone metatheory of the right since the 2010s – a post-Cold War bogeyman with older antisemitic roots too (see Malm & Zetkin Collective, 2021: 300–313 on the genealogy of the cultural Marxist conspiracy theory). Levin, however, gave this theory new life – and a huge audience – ensuring it would add fuel to the fire of today's culture wars and more.

While Gendron did not question the science of climate change, Levin's take on ecology was a more familiar right-wing story. In the chapter ‘“Climate Change” Fanaticism’, he rehashed the most hackneyed themes of climate denialism: there is no trend of warming any more than one of cooling; carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but ‘plant food’; the science is fabricated; wind turbines and solar panels spoil landscapes; we cannot live in prosperity without fossil fuels, and they do no harm anyway; if there is any warming at all, it's due to the sun (Levin, 2021: 173; see further examples 139–192, 213–214, 271; on denialism, see McCright & Dunlap, 2011; Lockwood, 2018; Forchtner, 2019; Vowles & Hultman, 2021; Ekberg et al., 2022). As such, he reiterated an anti-environmentalist sentiment that had cemented conservatives of different brands since the 1970s (Boynton, 2015). Now the perpetrators of the climate lie that indirectly wages war against (White) American freedoms should be understood as the same people who condemn Whites in the name of invented grievances (racism) – this time Marxist ideologues. Armed then with the ‘twin subjects of race and climate change’, for Levin it is this enemy that must be stopped in its tracks before America is a dreamland lost. ‘Patriots of America, unite!’, he ends his screed (Levin, 2021: 223, 276). In case the subtext wasn't obvious, by that, of course, he means White Americans, the GOP's core fanbase.

For all their contrasts, then, Gendron and Levin share certain troubling features: a conspicuous identification with the extreme political right as against the left; a flag-waving racialized patriotism; a sense of Whiteness being under siege and losing power; an imaginative association between the problem of ecology and enemies of (a White) nation; a fairly keen interest in environmental politics; and, perhaps most significantly, a knack for repetition and unoriginality. With their overlapping analyses – Gendron: non-Whites cause the ecological crisis; Levin: the Marxists who attack Whites cook it up – they place themselves in currents that have been circulating for decades if not centuries, though alarmingly at higher velocity and with greater traction in the past few years. In short, they regurgitate key themes in the political ecologies of the far right, infiltrating into, indeed at times fronting (as in the case of Levin), the mainstream while doing so. In their disparate ways, they fan the flames of White nationalism and the ecological crisis itself by totally misplacing its roots, a classic case of disavowal at the crucial hour. For one thing should be clear: to deny this crisis or to blame it on non-Whites are two ways of letting it run its destructive course, with some extra gasoline poured onto the bonfire.

So, what happens when the far right keeps fanning such flames in a rapidly warming world? Not one thing, but many; of this we can be sure. The far right is a distinctly multi-faceted and contradictory force in politics. It is capable of doing one thing and the opposite and creating plenty of havoc in the process. Crucial to watch is particularly how its apparent ‘far-ness’ may increasingly become a cover for its actual near-ness – its proximity, its growing normalization as it co-opts the centre, and the minds and mythologies of current and no doubt future generations. How will we stay vigilant and alert, recognize and continue to name this phenomenon for what it is? As for global heating itself, it is having, and will continue to have, unforeseeable and potentially numberless impacts on social life, and then it is but one facet of the ecological crisis unfolding around us. How these two variables – the far right and ecology – intersect, indeed feed into and off one another, is the theme of this book. Throwing them into collision with each other, or, rather, recognizing they are inalienably two sides of the same coin, the product of real confluences in the late capitalism of the twenty-first century and its ecological unravelling, is to set the stage for all sorts of flying objects and ricochet effects (Darian-Smith, 2022). What this volume does is to report from the frontline on some of these under-reported encounters, or entanglements in recent times, with an eye towards a future where they horrifically might well become more frequent and explosive. Through 12 chapters and an afterword it highlights the ever-shifting complexities of the political ecologies of the far right in terms of form (from eco-fascism to fossil fascism, and everything in between), geography (spanning four continents), content (from denialism and conspiracy theory, relations to its liberal ideology and masculinity – and much more), and research methodology too (from case studies and ethnographies to visual content analysis and document analysis). This is not simply to document, though that too of course, but to lay bare the inner mechanisms of a dark vein running through our world and how we might continue to do that much-needed ongoing work of recognizing, naming, researching and pushing back against this trend. In doing so we join, and urge, a growing number of scholars turning weary and wary attention to this moment since the mid-2010s.

In particular, this volume is a product of the inaugural Political Ecologies of the Far Right (PEFR) conference that was held at Lund University, Sweden, in November 2019, attracting some 400 scholars and activists, just before the world slid into the pandemic. It was organized by the Human Ecology Division of that university, in collaboration with the Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denial (CEFORCED) at Chalmers University, the research project ‘White Skin, Black Fuel’ at Uppsala University, the scholar-activist network the Zetkin Collective and the activist group AG Hedvig. The scientific rationale for the conference was the observation that the growing intersection of far-right and anti-environmentalist politics around the world – which had seemingly burst forth out of nowhere in the era of Trump – had been massively understudied (see also Lockwood, 2018). In their review of the field, Lubarda and Forchtner (2022) note that indeed early scholarship in this vein was highly focused on the history of environmental thought within the Nazi party in Germany, and maintained a distinct interest in Europe alone (and often Western Europe at that). Since the late 2010s, or the second half of Trump's reign, perhaps unsurprisingly, in a case of academia catching up with the world, broader studies focused on the contemporary moment have since proliferated. The increased interest in the intersection of far-right actors and the environment was shown especially by the exploration of climate denial and far-right thought (see Forchtner, 2019). From Cara Daggett's work on American petro-masculinity (2018), Irma Kinga Allen's research on Polish coal-based industrial populism (2021), and especially with the publication of White Skin, Black Fuel by Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective in 2021, the dangers of ‘fossil fascism’, or the high-risk conflation of fossil fuels and far-right thought and activity, became more prominent within a now burgeoning field of research.

Yet, as the PEFR conference itself attempted to highlight, broader ecological issues beyond climate and energy were largely conspicuous by their absence. Likewise, geographically the focus still often remained on the Global North. This volume, while keeping an eye solidly on the irrefutable centrality of climate politics, thus also places reports on a wider range of environmental topics (veganism, land degradation, biodiversity loss) from the capitalist core next to ones from those regions where the political ecologies of the far right have so far received less attention. In doing so, it joins calls for a transnational, postcolonial understanding of the far-right phenomenon (Masood & Nisar, 2020; Zhang, 2020; Pinheiro-Machado & Vargas-Maia, 2023), here with an explicit ecological focus. Featuring some of the outstanding contributions from the PEFR conference, forming just a subset of much larger material that cannot be reproduced outside of an event of that kind, it marks the entrance of far-right ecologies, or varying shades of eco-fascism, as a now global force calling for serious and urgent scholarly attention on the political ecological world stage. With chapters on Brazil, New Zealand, Canada, Nigeria and South Africa, this volume seeks to throw a diverse set of lights on how the far right operates within and through the ecological crisis – which is nothing if not global. Through this, it highlights how planetary ecology is indeed increasingly the irrefutable stage set, rather than mere backdrop, for the spreading wildfire that is the contemporary far-right presence.

The expansion in scale, of course, raises questions on the universality of a concept such as ‘the far right’. What do we mean by the term? Especially as the signified object is, as already argued, anything but clear-cut and monolithic. In the following pages, it will be represented by parties, astroturfs, armed outfits, individuals and even robots, which adds to the almost bewildering multifariousness of ‘the’ far right. If there is any final impression we wish to leave the reader with, it is of the complexity and contradictoriness of the subject at hand, rather than its uniformity, however monotonous it might appear in its nastiness. Thus, rather than getting bogged down in potentially interminable discussions of where the category of the far right begins and ends in definitive terms, a debate which has, so far, unhelpfully led to the orientalist exclusion of Global South actors due to a Western-centric reading of the term (see Masood & Nisar, 2020), we have allowed it to be used in somewhat differing senses – but generally as an umbrella term. A term encompassing a kind of right-wing politics that elevates specific values such as authoritarianism, ethno-nationalism, traditional norms, homogeneity, anti-intellectualism and physical violence, usually overlapping with misogyny and the acceptance and aggressive promotion of racialized, gendered (status quo) hierarchies, belying a steadfast resistance to any ideals of human equality. These values, crucially to this volume, tend to be couched in, justified by and mobilized through ideas of nature and the environment. In these ideas lie the assortment of matches it uses to set an overheated world ablaze.

Not all of them at once, however, must feature to be recognized as being part of the far-right family – not even, we argue, the concept of the nation, whose restoration is typically considered a central tenet of especially fascist thought. This volume, in the interests of retaining vigilance of its future iterations, in fact highlights how far-right forces can also fire imaginations and actions on both smaller and bigger political scales. Boko Haram, for instance, is certainly not animated by nationalist commitment to Nigeria or any other worldly nation-state; it primarily propagates a religious ideology, but it shares other recognizable features of the far-right family – notably extreme authoritarianism, misogyny, intolerance and fetishization of violence.

Challenging also the misperception that the far right operates at some extreme opposite and distant end to everyday realities, represented only by the likes of Gendron and his ilk, we also wish to illuminate how some aspects of far-right thought and practice find banal resonance among a wider population (see also Allen, 2021), filtering also into, and shaping, the mainstream, as with Levin's example.

In that sense, the ‘far’ right is always very near – often as near as family, the familiar, the metaphor of family resemblance is also symbolically apt – and might, as ecological events continue to unfold in iteration with other crises, attract surprise followers through providing novel answers through spectacle, a sense of seductive belonging (via exclusion), and through overt action and reaction, as shown in various contributions to this book. By remaining open to the novel forms and places through which the far right might appear, the book aims to take the ethos and practices of those we disagree with seriously in an effort to understand the political Other at face value, as a highly malleable and insidious force to be reckoned with. Through the various chapters we hope to convey not only an exposure of a politics we must fight but also to understand and explain what makes this politics attractive for some, and how is that achieved? As such, we are perhaps most interested in not what the far right is as such, but what it does – sow hatred, anger, exclusion, Othering, suspicion, violence mixed with ecological havoc, too. Only with an attentiveness to this series of swirling features and how they continue to morph and merge can we keep track of the developments with that vigilance which they deserve.

This book focuses on the far right's ecology – or indeed ecologies. While similar terminological debates as with the ‘far right’ could be had about the concept of ‘political ecology’ and its definition, its immediate amenability to the intentionally plural form highlights the direction in which we travel. We seek to pay close attention to how material environments, environmental issues and ideas are expressed and mobilized in multiple guises for political ends, through, for example, propaganda, conspiracy, history, technology, movements and lived experience. As such, Lubarda's notion of ‘far-right ecologisms’, rather than, again, eco-fascism as a singular set of ideas, is closer to the mark in how we approach this terrain (Lubarda, 2020). Since much research on far-right politics and the environment so far has been focused on the realm of ideas alone, by emphasizing political ecology we also want to stress material aspects of both how the far right are ultimately (anti)ecological in their politics, and how environments are necessarily both a precondition and an outcome of them. Ecology, as we hope the reader will have begun to glean, should not be seen as a factor extraneous to the far right, something that smashes into it from the outside or vice versa. Rather, the far right is – much as any other force in politics – always already ecological, just as it has irreducible gender and class dimensions. Indeed, because the far right has been present in Western politics since the French Revolution – its very positionality defined by extreme hostility to its universalist ideals – it must be contextualized as having had a key historical hand in the creation, and perpetuation, of the present climate crisis (though of course it is not itself responsible alone, that would let far too many mainstream actors off the hook).

Most crucially, the far right has typically been the most fanatical friend of fossil-fuelled technologies. The Italian and German fascists gave the development of automobiles and airplanes critical momentum. Long before their years in power, steamboats and railroads had spanned the globe through routes and tracks laid down in the belief that White people were superior human beings; long after, non-fascist elements of the far right have continued to champion oil, gas, coal and their derivatives with reference to one or other cherished notion of supremacy (for this history, see Malm & Zetkin Collective 2021; for a history of coloniality and climate change, see Ghosh, 2021). In the present volume, to take but one example, Robert B. Horwitz shows how, in the key case of the US, the Republican right has mixed an increasingly far-out religious ideology with the promotion of petroleum into what he calls ‘fossil fuel authoritarianism’.

Based on this genealogical relation, much of far-right posturing at the present conjuncture should thus be viewed as anti-ecological or, perhaps better, anti-environmentalist, in the sense that it, as we saw earlier, opposes measures for addressing the crisis (proposed by those pesky Marxist green fanatics), while retaining its own peculiar form of ecological relation. A primary way this attitude is manifested is, as with Levin, in the denial of the existence of anthropogenic climate change. The far right has long engaged in the most blatant denial of climate science – and, we should add, ditto suffering – and this is probably also the most researched aspect of its political ecologies (see e.g. McCright & Dunlap, 2003; Anshelm & Hultman, 2014; Forchtner & Kølvraa, 2015; Forchtner, 2019; Hess & Renner, 2019; Vowles & Hultman, 2021). But the topic is, unfortunately, anything but exhausted. As Bernhard Forchtner illustrates in his chapter, insights into the emotional appeal of far-right climate denial can be gained by looking at the imagery deployed. In the age of the social media spectacle, the visual image is among the most effective instruments for spreading denial. As the case of Levin's national bestseller suggests, these ideas have a remarkable capacity for self-replication and hold sway over significant segments of voters in a key country such as the US – but for how long?

Overt climate denial, observers have long predicted, must soon go out of business. With more knowledge and first-hand experience, with ever more wildfires and droughts, with even more researchers saying the same thing about the climate crisis, it would seem unthinkable that the far right can stay impervious to the realities of a world aflame. But several chapters in this volume demonstrate how the anti-climate politics of the far right rather has nine lives and more to go. In her contribution, Laura Pulido studies how far-right segments of the Oregon public responded to the devastating wildfires of 2020: by denying any link to the climate crisis and instead blaming supposed arsonists from Black Lives Matter and Antifa (on such narratives of innocence see also Norgaard, 2012 and Loftin, 2023). David Eliot and Rod Bantjes point to a fresh technological tool that could give climate denial a new lease of life: sophisticated and apparently convincing texts produced by means of Artificial Intelligence, the prospect of which the latest ChatGPT phenomenon only speeds up. Armed with AI writer bots, far-right agents might penetrate various barriers against untruths and sow deeper seeds of doubt about the severity and nature of climate disasters. Popular climate denial is far from a thing of the past: as Rodrigo D. E. Campos, Sérgio B. Barcelos and Ricardo G. Severo detail in their chapter, it continues, as of this writing, to rule Brazil; while in Canada, as Jacob McLean makes clear in his, it has channelled oppositional forces that call for even more aggressive extraction of coal, oil and gas. Such populist tendencies have for several years been an expression in climate and environmental policy (see e.g. Allen, 2021; Bosworth, 2021; McCarthy, 2019; Ofstehage et al., 2022). We are unlikely to have heard the last word from this brand of the far right, with its various inflections of denying the realities of the climate crisis.

This is so because denial is constantly evolving in close relation to more ‘mainstream’ approaches, indeed feeds off them, highlighting their complicity. As several contributors suggest, the politics of the centre is not always antithetical to denial: much of it rather proceeds on the assumption that global heating can be continuously ignored in deed (if not necessarily in word). Ståle Holgersen examines how the important case of Norway – the largest oil and gas producer in Europe – has generated a symbiosis between ‘delayers’ and ‘deniers’. While the former fall back on a ‘fossil ideology’ contending that Norwegian oil is uniquely good for humanity, the latter deny any existence of a problem altogether. But they are united in almost identical petroleum policies, nourish and give legitimacy to each other, and as long as the centrist ‘fossil ideology’ remains dominant, various spin-offs of denial are to be expected. Again – the ‘far’ is more near than anticipated (see also Ekberg & Pressfeldt, 2022). On the other side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, the spectre of Trumpism has refused to go away after the presidential election of 2020 and hovers over many of the pages in this book.

And yet the far right is Janus faced: alongside climate denial and fossil fuel boosterism sits an opposite profile – one threaded through the manifesto of Gendron, self-proclaimed foot-soldier of eco-fascism. This is the tradition – again, as old as the far right itself – of valorizing nature, the local landscape, the soil and forests and mountains of the nation, the natural order. Aliens and subversives must not trespass against that order, the far right has always averred. Its fascination with nature as source of purity and good has been alive since at least the nineteenth century. Several studies have examined how the classical fascists – the Nazis, above all – had an interest in animal welfare, national parks, and hunting and wildlife practices (e.g. Armiero & Graf von Hardenberg, 2013; Uekötter, 2006; Biehl & Staudenmeier, 2011; Brüggemeier, et al. 2005). Today, this tradition often translates into nostalgic and romantic notions of the simpler, more authentic rural life, at a remove from the global and urban hustle and bustle of the IPCC or the UNFCCC; the far right has yet to make international climate politics an object for anything else than repudiation and derision. And (much like the Nazis), even the far right that portrays itself as the truest guardian of agrarian traditions often slips into advocacy of unrestricted extractivism and entrepreneurial freedom. In its most fervent form it appears, as we have caught a dreaded glimpse of, as eco-fascism, sadly not something to be brushed aside as irrelevant, a yesteryear bogeyman. But how does the far right and the environment intersect and manifest today?

Amanda Thomas here investigates one of the most highly publicized acts of eco-fascist violence in recent years, the Christchurch massacre – inspiration for Gendron – and more precisely its afterlife in the ideas of the ultra-nationalist outfit, Action Zealandia. Here, too, the far right has umbilical cords to its innocent-looking surroundings. Thomas raises some uncomfortable questions about the links between the ideology of the eco-fascist fringe and the culture of purportedly benevolent, enlightened Whiteness in New Zealand. A similar connection between Whiteness implanted through settler-colonial aggression and a concern to protect and preserve the fruits of the land (for some) is found in South Africa, the case studied by Lisa Santosa (see also McFadden, 2023). Back in the erstwhile metropolis, White men can ruminate on how best to purify themselves and their environment from polluting elements. In his close ethnography of a group of ‘traditionalists’ in London, Amir Massoumian pinpoints how vegan diets and environmental concerns can be mobilized by individuals on the very farthest right of the spectrum: here the pure and clean body is a line of defence against Jewish emasculation and despoliation. Such notions of defending a supposedly threatened masculinity either by turning towards eco-fascist ‘restoration’ or through the rejection of climate science and climate action have been identified as a key feature of far-right environmental thought (see e.g. Daggett, 2018, 2021; Allen, 2021; Benegal & Holman, 2021; Darwish, 2021; MacGregor & Paterson, 2021; Loftin, 2023). The far right is certainly able to put its own spin on the latest aspects of ecological crisis, for purposes that are anything but new.

In her original take on the nexus, Shehnoor Khurram lays bare how the drying out of Lake Chad and other climate-induced miseries in northern Nigeria have fuelled the Boko Haram insurgency, and how it should be understood as a form of far-right terror – not an innately Islamic, African or otherwise distantly barbaric terrorism, but a manifestation of trends in the totality of ‘the Capitalocene’. On a conceptual level Khurram's chapter puts the notion of the far right as a Western phenomenon into question and distorts the ideas of far and near, inside and outside. How will groups like Boko Haram make use of coming rounds of climate suffering in the Global South and elsewhere? Khurram's chapter makes for disturbing reading and insists on tracking the political ecologies of the far right beyond the locus classicus of European politics.

Global heating is only one of many vectors of misery which feed this phenomenon: the present decade has also given us COVID-19, a zoonotic disease with roots in deforestation, wildlife trading and other facets of the biodiversity crisis. How has the far right responded to and deployed it? Largely by denying the existence of the pandemic and resisting measures for containing it, while accusing elites of conspiracy. In his chapter, Balsa Lubarda looks at the differences and significant overlaps between far-right interventions in the climate and those in the corona crisis (see also Forchtner & Özvatan, 2022). The ‘Freedom Convoy’ occupying central Ottawa in early 2022 (Murphy, 2022) marked a continuation of the ‘United We Roll’ campaign analysed by McLean; as in Eastern Europe, the Canadian far right that had recently denied climate now protested corona measures with vehemence. Given the likelihood of new zoonotic diseases – not to mention the many other unknown unknowns of the ecological crisis: from the effects of pharmaceutical pollution of rivers to those of insect collapse – this is another conjunction with a future ahead of it. More far-right responses will spring up as certainly as more crises will erupt. Ideas about ecology on the far right have a remarkably long lifetime and stubborn persistence. This makes them amenable to replication and further elaboration, in theory or practice.

This is not to say that ecological crises deterministically lead to far-right politics, but that the far right, as this volume highlights, is increasingly demonstrating itself to be an actor well versed in using ecological crises to its benefit. Indeed, with a wide palette of compelling historical myths and modernized narratives to draw on in this vein, the far right might be best prepared to take advantage of the opportunities they present to capture political ground over and above other forces coldly cashing in on disaster but forgetting to draw the crowds. That all ecological crises can, and no doubt will, come with racist explanation in tow therefore needs to be taken deadly seriously (Holgersen, 2022). The far right will continue to march, or perhaps rather drive its jeeps and trucks, through Ouagadougou as much as through Ottawa. And certainly, its ideas, its tracts and manifestos, know no borders, circulating within the underbelly of the virtual world without stoppage. If we are not vigilant, far-right mobilizations will be there to offer their ideological politics dressed as clear-eyed explanation. And in informational and imaginary vacuums, charged with fear and insecurity, such politics can and will take hold. Any artificial restriction of our purview, therefore, to these now global zones, would risk leaving out the most affected areas and people, where forces of the far right might find highly fertile ground – among the dispossessed, disturbed and disorientated, including in ecological terms.

How can we pre-empt and fight back against this insidious infestation of these scenes? One obligation, surely, is to maintain a glaring spotlight on their machinations through rigorous research and analysis. In addition to encouraging the expansion of the study of the political ecology of the far right geographically, therefore, the volume also seeks to showcase the wide range of methodologies that might be used to do so: ranging from quantitative to qualitative methods, engaging with interviews, ethnographic field observations, images, emerging technologies, analysis of policy documents and other written texts, as well as scrutinizing social media. Through this, the present volume is intended to stimulate further research on the political ecologies of a far right in perpetual motion, offering a number of innovative entry points for tracking developments on the ground.

It is also the hope of the editors, that – just as with the PEFR conference, whose secondary rationale was the recognition that knowledge exchange between sectors of academia (students and scholars of the far right and of ecology) and of social movements (for climate justice, against racism and fascism) were few and far between – this volume will find wide readership among those with boots on the ground confronting this politics head on. Scholars and activists have spoken far too little to one another, just as pro-environmentalist, anti-racist and anti-far-right movements have. With the second Political Ecologies of the Far Right conference in 2024, held this time at the University of Uppsala, and in offering the final afterword in this volume to the scholar-activist Zetkin Collective, we hope to contribute to greater collaboration and cross-fertilization in the building of a united front against this assault on a liveable world for all. No one with an interest in combatting climate or ecological catastrophe and fighting injustices between people – in particular those relating to race and ethnic origin – can afford to ignore the political ecologies of the far right. They will tragically leave their mark on the years ahead, fanning fast-spreading flames.

Acknowledgements

Andreas Malm would like to thank Formas 2018–01702; Ståle Holgersen would like to thank Formas 2018–01702 and Vetenskapsrådet 2020–04164; Kristoffer Ekberg would like to thank the Swedish Energy Agency 2018–002424, 46178–1 and Formas 2022–01844.