This chapter starts with a description of the massacre of Muslims in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

On 15 March 2019, a white man pulled up to Al Noor mosque in Ōtautahi Christchurch and began shooting people attending Friday afternoon prayers. There were 190 people gathered there on a fine autumnal day. Livestreaming, he sprayed bullets into the gathered worshippers. After five deadly minutes, he drove 6 kilometres to the Linwood Islamic Centre. There he killed more worshippers among the hundred gathered, before fleeing with the intention of travelling to a third mosque (Brown, 2020). He was stopped soon after by police. Ultimately, he killed 51 people and wounded many more. The worshippers he killed were from a range of backgrounds – some born in Aotearoa New Zealand, some were immigrants or former refugees. They included a three-year-old, a father and son who were worshipping together, students, doctors, restaurant owners (Royal Commission of Inquiry, 2020). ²

Almost instantly, messages of solidarity from horrified people flooded all forms of media, and decorated mosques and people's front gates (see Arkilic, 2021; Aslam 2019). One image of two women holding each other, drawn by artist Ruby Jones, was accompanied by the message ‘this is your home and you should have been safe here’. Other messages repeated Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's statements that ‘they [Muslims] are us [New Zealanders]’, and ‘this is not us’. These sentiments were well intended, as people grappled with the horror of what happened and sought to comfort the Muslim community, and, it must be said, our(white)selves.

However, Muslim and Māori activists and community leaders soon contested portrayals of the massacre as exceptional and at odds with the true nature of Aotearoa New Zealand. Nishhza Thiruselvam (2019) describes the attack as both shocking and unsurprising; the Muslim community had repeatedly warned state agencies of the threats they face (Rahman, 2019). The Al Noor mosque had been targeted by fascists since September 11, and concerns had grown in the five years preceding the massacre. More broadly, Tina Ngata (2019) and Moana Jackson (2019) draw a direct line from the colonization of Aotearoa to the massacre, pointing to the central logic of white supremacy. As Sahar Ghumkhor (2019) wrote in the days after:

The widespread statement, therefore, that ‘this was not us’, ‘profoundly invalidates the complex reality and history of Aotearoa/New Zealand, as experienced by those of us living beyond the rose-tinted lens of white liberal sensibilities’ (Thiruselvam, 2019: 62).

One aspect of the connection between the massacre and colonial governance is the underpinning ideas about nature. The shooter's motivations draw on familiar far-right tropes; nostalgia for some imagined pre-immigration past (obviously nonsensical in a [post]colonial place), extreme racism and Islamophobia. In his 74-page manifesto, a document that is banned in Aotearoa New Zealand, the shooter criticizes ‘[r]ampant urbanization and industrialization, ever expanding cities and shrinking forests, a complete removal of man from nature’ and proclaims that ‘Green nationalism is the only true nationalism.’ He labels himself ‘an Ethno-nationalist Eco-fascist’, describing his views as ‘Ethnic autonomy for all peoples with a focus on the preservation of nature, and the natural order’. Ross and Bevensee (2020: 4) identify the ‘cognitive dissonance’ of anti-imperial and green narratives like those included in the manifesto of the Christchurch shooter. But rather than exploring this dissonance, or trying to make sense of his actions and ideas, I argue that just as white supremacy is connected to everyday racism, the shooter's eco-fascism and mainstream white New Zealand ideas about nature are connected on a spectrum of white utopianism. This spectrum runs the gamut of the extreme, overt violence of eco-fascism through to the buried violence of white ideas about wilderness and pure nature in Aotearoa New Zealand (Sargent, 2001). Pākehā, or white, nationalism emphasizes the importance of place and natures while actively ignoring how that place attachment was formed (Bell, 2006). This chapter will explore this central thread through the emergence of a new white supremacy group, Action Zealandia (AZ), in the wake of the massacre. This group espouses ideas of white identity under threat, alongside deep ecology and pride in colonization. Through this example, I argue that to understand and confront eco-fascism, the points of continuity and divergence with banal whiteness and colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand need to be revealed.

In the next section, I explore ‘Pākehāness’ – white New Zealand identity – and how it relates to nature. I then describe the emergence of Action Zealandia and its eco-fascism. This is connected to a third section about the state: through decisions about who is a ‘terrorist’ and who needs surveillance, the state has promoted white utopias by attempting to suppress decolonization movements that would see land returned to Māori, and continue to ‘other’ Muslims from white utopias.

In exploring these themes, I am mindful of critiques of white studies, that I risk further centring whiteness when it already dominates much research and scholarship. And I am aware of my own position as a white person, and that my work relies heavily on the ideas of Indigenous folks, people of colour and Muslim communities. However, careful and critical examination of whiteness is necessary to highlight and excavate embedded colonialism and challenge the idea that Pākehā bear no culpability for the broader ecosystem that fed the shooter's murderous desires. In addition, Indigenous folks and communities of colour are tired of having to speak back to and educate Pākehā (see for instance Mire, 2019). Instead, they ask us to work on ourselves. So this chapter is an attempt to do some of that work by criticizing the way Pākehā have constructed nature here – places cleansed of Indigenous people and sovereignty and thereby rendered pure – and the multiple violences this construction has necessitated and permitted.

Pākehā identity and pure nature

The intention of colonizers coming to Aotearoa New Zealand from England was clear – to transplant English society, and build a better version of it (Cupples et al., 2007). The aspirations for a good life, and the sense that it is possible to build that, led Sargent (2001: 14) to argue that Aotearoa ‘New Zealand appears to have developed a stronger utopian tradition than any other country’. Better-than-England narratives dominated in Ōtautahi Christchurch for 150 years as the city built and fed an English identity through carefully curating nature and space. Spaces used by Māori as meeting and trading areas, marked by particular indigenous flora, were turned into monuments for British royalty (McCrone, 2013). The city's Botanic Gardens were designed to reflect Englishness and order, and were positioned as the opposite to uncivilized, unruly native flora (Glynn, 2009). Like other colonized places, space has been portrayed in binaried terms; wildernesses and true nature are imagined to be elsewhere, outside the city borders (Howitt, 2001). The kind of wild nature that would inspire awe was at the doors of the city for colonizers to venture out and be re-created in (Sargent, 2001), but always with the safety of the domesticated city to retreat to.

Whiteness studies in (post)colonial societies has interrogated the power and privileges afforded through whiteness and the way white societal structures are positioned as ‘normal’. There is a growing, cross-disciplinary body of work that explores whiteness in Aotearoa New Zealand. In this work, ‘Pākehāness’ is unpacked and examined. Pākehā is a word from the Māori language that has come to signify non-Māori of European descent. It is at times a controversial term; some white people mistakenly understand it to be an insult, or insist that ‘we are all kiwis’. For those who do identify as Pākehā, including me, this identification is often claimed to demarcate our difference from Europeans and other white people; we may not have strong attachments to Europe and see our identity is quite separate from that distant continent. Pākehā, as an identity, locates us in this place, in relationship with Māori and with this land (see Jones, 2020).

It can, however, be a problematic way of identifying. Gray et al. (2013) argue that in naming ourselves as Pākehā, we avoid naming ourselves as white, and in this way race and structural racism are pushed out of identity definition. Their research explored what whiteness meant for people who identified as ‘Pākehā’. For Gray et al.'s (2013) participants, rejecting the label of white was an intentional way to distinguish themselves from skinheads.

Yet whiteness is fundamental to colonization and colonialism. Drawing on the work of Yogarajah (2018), Thiruselvam (2019) writes that Pākehā have a rose-tinted version of self that reflects an ‘angel complex’ where white New Zealand ignores the institutional nature of racism because we are not as bad as, not as racist as, Australia, the birthplace of the mosque shooter. In claiming, for example, that this was ‘not us’, people implicitly and sometimes explicitly centre the fact that the killer was Australian and came to live in Aotearoa New Zealand with the intention of committing a massacre (see Royal Commission of Inquiry, 2020).

Gray et al. (2013: 99) argue that when people self-label as Pākehā to distinguish ourselves from skinheads and fascists, we:

Lawn (2015: 263; drawing on Bell, 2014) argues that this attempt to wriggle out of a white identity is common across (post)colonial states. Settler imaginaries share ‘a set of common discursive manoeuvres – fantasies of unity, myths of origin, entrenched narratives of innocence, the appropriation of authenticity – by which settler cultures have sought to secure a distinct identity from the imperial centre and legitimate their habitation on indigenous territories’.

Similar discursive manoeuvres, that locate problematic whiteness as ‘elsewhere’ and outside of mainstream Pākehāness were explored in research by Audrey Kobayashi (2009) when she visited Ōtautahi Christchurch. She describes a 2004 rally that was organized in response to racist violence, and specifically anti-Asian racism, in the city. There were three particular discourses evident in reaction to the rally: discourses of denial (that racism is contained with the far right, not everyday people), of affront (it is insulting to claim that there is racism) and discourses of whiteness that Othered non-white people. These discourses were echoed after the 2019 massacre; racialized people were simultaneously Othered – ‘they’ – and enfolded into the discourse of denial – racism is from elsewhere, specifically the far right, and Australia.

As well as these discursive manoeuvres that place racism ‘elsewhere’ and fail to acknowledge the white supremacy that pervades contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand, Avril Bell (2006) argues that Pākehā ‘belonging’ is focused on attachment to place, attachment that is claimed by an active forgetting of how we came to be here – through the violence of colonialism and the persistent denial of Māori sovereignty. This is evident, for example, in the ways that Pākehā ‘claim authenticity’ (Lawn, 2015).

Within te ao Māori (the Māori world), a pepeha is a way of emplacing yourself when making introductions. For Māori it often involves tracing the waka (vessel) that ancestors arrived on, tribal affiliations, and mountains and waterways that people are genealogically connected to. The function of the pepeha is to locate yourself in relation to others and the landscape. The politics of Pākehā doing pepeha are complicated but it is common for Pākehā to not know where our ancestors are from, and be proud of this ignorance. Instead, Pākehā will often dodge this aspect and talk about the places we grew up, or the mountains and rivers we love. This is a ‘collective wilful amnesia’ (Jones, 2020: 203) that erases colonialism and seeks to place Pākehā alongside Māori as belonging to this place, and only this place, and therefore as Indigenous. In doing so, non-white/Pākehā migrants are Othered over and over again, persistently rendered as outsiders to a bicultural utopia (Nasr, 2020).

Nature, and particularly, wild and pure nature, is portrayed as the unproblematic, apolitical canvas upon which a bicultural national identity is created (Bond et al., 2015; Ginn, 2008). The links between nature and wilderness and national identity abound, from appeals to ‘tidy kiwis’ to clean up litter, through to tourism marketing campaigns that promote Aotearoa New Zealand as ‘100% pure’. The long-running 100 per cent pure campaign is typically accompanied by imagery from national parks of a landscape devoid of humans, with clean rivers and the promise of wilderness. Around 30 per cent of Aotearoa New Zealand's land area is in national parks with strict rules and norms about who enters, how and what they are allowed to do there. But, like all colonized places, wild and pure landscapes are places violently cleansed of Indigenous folks.

Coombes and Hill (2005) chart some of the mechanisms by which Māori were alienated from their land, for national parks to be formed later. For instance, through the infamous Kemp purchase in 1848, the Crown paid Ngāi Tahu, an iwi (tribe) with attachment to and responsibility for much of the South Island including Ōtautahi Christchurch, two thousand pounds for most of the island (and a third of the entire country). Ngāi Tahu were effectively coerced into the purchase arrangement, and promises made to them to create reserves were never fulfilled (Waitangi Tribunal, 1991). Prominent national parks were created from the land taken through the Kemp purchase; these parks, characterized by soaring, snow-capped mountains and alpine lakes, often feature as examples of 100 per cent purity. In other parts of the country – such as Taranaki and Te Urewera – land was confiscated from Māori, sometimes as punishment for disloyalty to the Crown, and later became part of the conservation estate (Coombes and Hill, 2005). The rules established to regulate these spaces criminalized many activities that underpinned Māori livelihoods, like hunting birds (Coombes, 2020).

As iwi continue to work their way through ‘settlement’ processes, whereby the Crown makes some atonement for breaches of the foundational Te Tiriti o Waitangi / Treaty of Waitangi, returning these wild places to Māori is off the table. In 2009, the Prime Minister at the time ruled out returning one national park to the Tūhoe iwi because ‘he felt that, however the Crown got to own Te Urewera [National Park] was irrelevant, it was now public land and all New Zealanders owned it, and loved it and admired it. Even more so perhaps than Tūhoe people’ (Kruger, 2017). According to this narrative, non-Māori love and admiration for the national park, and public ownership administered by the (post)colonial state, both erase and justify colonial violence; non-Tūhoe may love it more and therefore be more deserving and better caretakers of the land. Tūhoe have been subjected to wave after wave of Crown-sanctioned violence that has created and maintained a wilderness, and attempted to alienate people from land and to violently suppress movements for tino rangatiratanga (supreme chieftainship, its values and practices) (Aikman, 2017; Coombes, 2020; Kruger, 2017). While there have been significant gains in drawing Māori knowledges and values alongside Eurocentric ideas of environmental management, the kind of decolonization that sees land and sovereignty returned seems like a long way off.

Pākehā identity, through our wilful amnesia, draws heavily on connection to place rather than claims of culture or history (Bell, 2006). We are stubbornly resistant to attempts to get us to acknowledge how we came to be here (Elkington et al., 2020). The effects of this are evident through the way space is ordered and represented. Nature is, for the most part, out there, in national parks that are portrayed as 100 per cent pure, ahistorical and apolitical wild places.

Action Zealandia

Discourses of purity can also be found in the more overtly racist and violent narratives of eco-fascist groups. Just three months after the mosque massacres, a new group, Action Zealandia, emerged out of the remains of the Dominion Movement, an alt-right group. By 2021, AZ was the largest white supremacist group in Aotearoa New Zealand. The number of active members is relatively small – one report puts the number at 30 – but this number is not insignificant in a national population of 5 million (Weir, 2021a, 2021b). There are no known links between the Christchurch shooter and domestic white supremacist groups prior to the massacre (Royal Commission of Inquiry, 2020), ³ but AZ members have praised his violence (Weir, 2021a). The group, therefore, is a useful case study for examining the particularities of fascism, and especially eco-fascism, in the context of post-massacre Aotearoa New Zealand and understanding the ongoing threat of racist and xenophobic violence.

Action Zealandia is explicitly for fit and able-bodied, white, heterosexual men, who ‘are the foundation of strong communities and successful families’. ⁴ The group's website lists their ‘ideals’ as self-improvement, New Zealand European identity, community building, nationalism and sustainability. Under each ideal is an explanation, and these broadly reflect an anti-capitalist, anti-globalization version of white nationalism. Since July 2019, AZ has published articles on its website, and monthly activity reports that include anonymized photos of group members stickering university campuses and the offices of Members of Parliament, banner drops in support of ‘Boers’ and boycotts of China, and members boxing, going on tramps in the bush ⁵ and up mountains, and cleaning up rubbish.

The group writes about ‘demographic integrity’ and criticizes abortion as a threat to a ‘healthier and stronger’ nation, a concern rooted in white fears of ‘replacement’ by people of colour. It is a ‘duty’, according to the group, to remain a majority in ‘our homelands’. The idea of Aotearoa New Zealand as a homeland is developed in a different way from Pākehā described earlier, who learn a pepeha but refuse to identify links with Europe as a way of trying to claim a version of indigeneity. In contrast, the claim to Aotearoa New Zealand being a white homeland is made by rehashing racist tropes of Māori – as undeveloped, savage, destructive – and in need of civilization. Through colonization and white labour, Europeans built this country, they state. Like other fascist groups, they create myths that romanticize and falsify white history – for instance by claiming that Māori gave sovereignty to Britain – while also essentializing racism through claims that it is natural for people with shared ethnic identities to want to be together. Multiple posts on their website trace the origins and praise the actions of white colonizers.

Guest comments on its website congratulate the group for not targeting Muslim communities, and publicly a spokesperson has described the 15 March massacre as having mostly negative effects on white nationalists. However, investigation by the White Rose Society (2020) has shown the group building international connections with neo-Nazi groups and threatening Muslim communities in Aotearoa New Zealand. For example, in conversations on Telegram with the Nordic Resistance Movement, some AZ members have praised the mosque shootings (Clark, 2020b). Further, in the lead-up to the one-year commemorations of the massacre, an AZ member was arrested after threatening Al Noor mosque, and other members plotted a terror cell and discussed buying weapons on the black market (White Rose Society, 2020). So, while the membership of AZ is not large its white supremacy is violent and does target Muslims. As Clark (2023: 51) writes, the ‘men of Action Zealandia are not driven to a violent ideology by marginalisation, but by entitlement, and a disdain – if not outright hatred – for genuinely marginalised groups’.

Eco-fascist groups can be identified by their belief that the world is overpopulated and white men have been unfairly attacked (Ross and Bevensee, 2020), particularly by Jewish and non-white people. According to AZ, most environmental damage comes from Africa, India, China and South America, places that are, they claim, the source of overpopulation. In typically neo-Malthusian language, they contend that ‘in nature there is no equality. … If we are not striving to overcome, we are not European.’ Environmental degradation is one of the threats to be overcome because ‘[w]e care about our people and their future, so of course preserving the environment for future generations is a primary concern. Not conserving the habitat and ecosystems for other life forms is tantamount to the downfall of our own people.’ The notion that white New Zealanders and nature are fundamentally intertwined is repeated elsewhere; one commenter draws parallels with nineteenth-century Germany and its protection of forests from industrialization, therefore protecting Germany itself.

Their trips into the bush or climbing mountains are written about as antidotes to, and escape from, modern urban life, as overcoming adversity and conquering nature while building camaraderie. In this sense, they echo the mosque shooter's fears of urban degeneracy. One regional AZ group, for example, described their day trip into a national park: ‘Exposed to snow, rain, clouds, and extremely strong winds, they marched onwards through the tussock towards their objective.’ Activity reports about bush walks are often accompanied by photos of members – with their faces blurred – gathered at mountain summits or on rocky outcrops holding a New Zealand flag or AZ symbol. In other activity reports, AZ members report cleaning up others’ degeneracy by picking up litter from beaches. ‘As always,’ they write, ‘thank your local nationalists from preventing rubbish causing damage to the environment.’

The way these activities are described reflects pioneering, frontier narratives about the colonization of Aotearoa New Zealand. Tropes about early colonizers relate to the figure of the ‘man alone’, forging his way through sheer hard work, not constrained by the class dynamics of Britain. The man alone tamed the land, and remade the entire economy of the country. As is obvious, this narrative is deeply gendered; men are at the centre of work to remake wild land (Cupples et al., 2007). The hyper-masculine (white) rural figure continues to shape national identity, although its dominance is waning. AZ's militaristic masculinity – boxing on the beach, marching through the tussocks – reflects the toxic masculinity of fascism (el-Ojeili, 2018).

Gilbert and Elley (2020, see also Cunningham et al., 2022; Ford, 2020) trace the history of white supremacist groups in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the way that in the decade leading up to the massacre in Ōtautahi Christchurch, little attention was paid to these groups by the public. There is still very limited public discussion about groups like Action Zealandia, and the discussion that does happen is the result of a few journalists and anti-fascist groups, like Paparoa and Tāmaki Anti-Fascist Action.

The state

In March 2019, state security agencies had no strategies relating to the far right and threats to Muslim communities (Clark, 2020a). This is despite a long thread of the far right targeting Māori, Muslims and people of colour. Neo-Nazi groups have been active for more than 50 years, attacking synagogues in the 1960s, fire bombing a marae (meeting house) at the bottom of the South Island in the 1980s, organizing street patrols targeting Pasifika youth in Christchurch in the 2000s, and dumping pigs’ heads at the Al Noor mosque in the 2010s (Ford, 2020).

In the face of white supremacy and Islamophobia, the Islamic Women's Council of New Zealand (2019) ‘made intense efforts to engage with the New Zealand government in the five years before the Christchurch mosque killings, seeking protection and support for an increasingly vulnerable and exposed Muslim community’. State security agencies were so focused on supposed threats from the Muslim community that white supremacists and the alt-right were almost entirely absent from their briefings to the Prime Minister. Despite apologies after the massacre by security agencies, police and state agencies have continued their lacklustre response to threats from the far right against Muslim and Jewish communities (see, for instance, Daalder, 2020). In the weeks before the two-year anniversary of the massacre, a new threat was made against the two mosques where the massacre took place. The anonymous anti-fascist group Paparoa tipped the police off about the threat, and has criticized the domestic spy agency's inadequate response (Scotcher, 2020).

In addition to surveilling Muslims, state agencies have directed their attention to Māori sovereignty activists. Māori never ceded sovereignty, a fact that is profoundly troubling to Pākehā claims to being of this land, and to the settler colonial state's legitimacy. Any discussion of nature and the environment in Aotearoa New Zealand directly relates to questions of sovereignty – who decides what counts as nature and the relationships that can exist with that nature.

In 2007, the state raided the homes of Māori sovereignty, anarchist and environmental justice activists across the country. In a post-9/11 world, there seemed to be pressure to directly identify and confront a terrorist threat. The raids particularly targeted Tūhoe in Te Urewera, where police erected illegal road blocks, stopped a school bus full of children and terrorized families. The raids were framed as ‘anti-terror’ operations, a label that has been hard to shift, despite the fact that no one was prosecuted for terrorism. Of the 18 people who were arrested, only four were successfully prosecuted for firearms offences. Aikman (2017: 69) argues that the raids on Tūhoe were ‘not exceptional, but routine functions of the settler colonial state’ and their efforts to secure sovereignty. Tūhoe have been subjected to punitive actions by the Crown, including the confiscation of much of their land, since the mid-1800s. Much of this land was turned into a national park, the same park that the Prime Minister ruled out returning because New Zealanders love it just as much as (if not more than) Tūhoe. In other examples, attempts to assert tino rangatiratanga (supreme chieftainship, its values and practices) have been met with an overwhelming police presence, or the involvement of the military. For example, when one of Tūhoe's neighbouring iwi (tribes), Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, attempted to stop seismic surveying in their ocean territory, the navy assisted the police to arrest an iwi leader.

The New Zealand state plays a pivotal role in underpinning white utopias. This role is most apparent in this case study in relation to the framing of ‘threat’ and ideas about who the threat was against (Bargh, 2012). The colonial state has always understood the central threats to territorial sovereignty to be from claims of tino rangatiratanga – and all its possible implications for the wilderness constructed through colonization (Coombes, 2020) – and from incursions by non-white and non-Christian ‘Others’ across borders. As Aikman (2017: 59) argues, ‘state sovereignty is articulated through on-going acts of violent legitimation’, in this instance the violence enacted through state security agencies’ choices about who to surveil and target, and who to ignore.

Continuity and divergence in white ideas about nature

Colonialism, banal whiteness and eco-fascism exist in relation to each other; exploring the points of convergence and divergence is an important part of anti-fascist and decolonial political projects. As Hala Nasr (2020) argues, terrorism rooted in white supremacy is intimately connected to everyday racism. From the beginning of the colonial project in Aotearoa, particular nature discourses have had material impacts on the land and Indigenous people. The pure and wild spaces that are preserved through the large tracts of land locked into national parks are fundamental to national identity. This national identity is not an exclusively Pākehā identity; people from a range of backgrounds value and seek to preserve these spaces. What distinguishes the relationship between wilderness and Pākehā is that it is fundamental to Pākehā nationalism to forget and erase how Pākehā came to be here, and the violence that was used to dispossess Māori of these same places. Through this ignorance, Pākehā are able to maintain our own sense of innocence and claim that racist violence is not us. Banal Pākehāness often seeks to locate us as also Indigenous, and this is partly done by disavowing our ancestral ties to Europe (Elkington et al., 2020). In this way, we make similar claims to this being our ‘homeland’ to the eco-fascist group, Action Zealandia. That group, however, does not deny connections to Europe. Instead, it amplifies European pioneering myths and attempts to build white pride in connections to colonial Europe, and Britain in particular.

Across the eco-fascism of the shooter and Action Zealandia, and the refusal of the state and Pākehā to grapple with the violence through which wilderness areas were created, there is a positioning of Eurocentric ideas, if not white people, as the rightful caretakers of nature. Banal Pākehāness, the state and AZ share a presumption that preservationist conservation is the best, perhaps the only way, of maintaining nature. For the state, there have been shifts towards co-management with Māori, and recognition of the personhood of nature. However, the refusal to repatriate national parks reflects the supremacy of white ideas about wilderness (Coombes, 2020), and a prioritizing of the connection to and ‘love’ for these places that ‘all’ New Zealanders feel. When Māori sovereignty activists have sought the kind of decolonization that sees land returned, they have often been surveilled or subject to police or occasionally military action. AZ are more overtly racist in the way they try to position white people as the natural caretakers of the environment. Māori needed civilizing through colonization, they argue, and migrants and non-white foreigners represent a constant threat to the environment and sustainability. Similarly, for the Christchurch shooter, ‘invaders’ threaten the integrity of place. Across this spectrum of white ideas, there is also a shared construction of true, wild nature as out there, beyond the city. This was apparent from the earliest colonizers of Ōtautahi Christchurch who understood the city as a place for domesticated nature, reflected in the English gardens.

Sargent (2001) argues that one of the key features of Pākehā identity that emerged from utopian traditions was conformity – there is a reasonably narrow spectrum of what is acceptable in Aotearoa New Zealand culture. The radical fringes are typically small and not well tolerated, but some researchers demonstrate there has been a recent rise of the far right and worry about what that means in the context of climate change (Campion and Phillips, 2023). The extreme rhetoric of Action Zealandia has, for the most part, not taken hold. And while I am placing mainstream Pākehā ideas about nature on a spectrum of white utopia with eco-fascism, it is important to distinguish liberal white identity from fascism (el-Ojeili, 2018).

Most Pākehā were and (largely) still are horrified by the mosque killings, although white fragility has also limited the extent of self-analysis that should have followed, including a reckoning with similar acts of violence committed by the colonial state in the 1800s (see McConnell, 2020). When Pākehā insisted ‘this is not us’, we denied that white violence characterized the earliest encounters with Aotearoa, and has continued through the dispossession of Māori land and the Othering of non-white migrants. The idea that ‘this is not us’ was able to take hold because of our ‘collective wilful amnesia’ (Jones, 2020: 203) of our own migrant histories, and the myth of a bicultural utopia built through wild and pure nature. As Moana Jackson (2019) writes:

They – the barbarian white supremacists – are us – emerging from Pākehā, white society. Without an honest accounting of whiteness in its full spectrum, the actions of the (post)colonial state, and the impact of white utopic ambitions, there will always be the risk of eco-fascist myths taking hold.