Eco-fascism is our future

In the end, as the wildfires, droughts, ice melt and supply chain collapses mounted, a stark choice presented itself: an ambitious plan to Save The Earth, or a collapse into barbarism. That was how the media sold it, anyway, and since it had been long anticipated, nobody really minded much. We were all locked into the machine by now, after all: all reliant on its largesse to eat, sleep and work. The worse things got — and they were getting worse fast — the more appetite there was for bold, assertive, planetary-scale action. And since the Covid-19 pandemic, everyone had got used to obeying the authorities and submitting to behavioural monitoring, in order to prevent mass disaster.

And so, the global empire arrived, largely on schedule. Corporations, well-heeled NGOs, states and regional blocs, trailing a bevy of media and intellectual lapdogs in their wake, consolidated their Green New Reset, or whatever they were calling it today, with impeccable ease. The new world would be progressive, inclusive, open, sustainable, gender-neutral and, above all, intensely profitable. The ongoing assimilation of any ecosystems, cultures, perspectives and lifestyles that conflicted with progress would be implemented in a manner which ensured carbon neutrality. The sustainable global machine — smart, interconnected, perpetually monitored, always-on — would encompass everything and everyone, producing cascading benefits for all. The long-held Western dream would finally be achieved: the world would become one. One market, one set of values, one way of living, one way of seeing.

By the time some of the environmentalists realised who they had sold their soul to, it was too late. But what, in any case, had the alternative been? The small-is-beautiful crowd, with their patchouli-scented jumpers and their 1970s talk about limits and sovereignty, had been cancelled as eco-fascists long ago, exiled to distant smallholdings and housing co-ops with their well-thumbed copies of Tools for Conviviality and other yellowing tomes by dead white men. Now that an actual eco-fascism was on the horizon — a global merger of state and corporate power in pursuit of progress that would have made Mussolini weep like a proud grandfather — there was nothing to stand in its way.

Unlike previous empires, this one knew how to present itself: with wind farms rather than dreadnoughts, pictures of smiling children rather than squares of redcoats. It used eco-friendly, inclusive language as it enclosed land, funnelled wealth upwards and coated wild landscapes in renewable technologies made from rare earth metals (a regrettable necessity, but a temporary one: sustainable asteroid mining was well on the way). But it was curious how the wealth and power seemed to stay in mainly the same hands; odd too that the rolling eco-crisis never seemed to actually go away, however many billionaires and NGOs attempted bright new techno-fixes. In fact, the tighter the empire gripped, the more everything seemed to slip away from its grasp. It was almost as if the techno-fixes themselves were the problem.

Over time, the inevitable happened: the age-old progress trap closed in like a Venus Flytrap patiently digesting its victims. The genetic modifications and the nanotech “solutions” went awry, as Earth’s inscrutable systems refused to behave the way the computer models had predicted. The mass dumping of iron filings into the ocean did not sequester as much carbon as hoped, but it did lead to an unexpected collapse in whale numbers. The Bill Gates-funded sun-dimming technologies had succeeded in lowering the planet’s temperature, but the feedback loops that kicked in lowered it much more than expected, leading to mass crop collapse and famine, which in turn caused riots across the world. The early 2040s saw half of Africa subsisting for several months on locust swarms while Silicon Valley’s finest dined on sustainable insect burgers in their New Zealand redoubts.