Contrary to what many are led to believe by mainstream media and our political adversaries, nationalistic thinking and enviromental conservation are not mutually exclusive. But who can blame the New Zealand people for thinking that the left wing cares about the environment, and the right wing only plunders it for mere economic gain? This is the false equivalence that an uneducated glance at the politics of this country will leave anyone with.

We in Action Zealandia are a group of true nationalists. We do not adhere to the word play or vote seeking of regular politics. We care about issues outside the remit of what lobbyists and big business allow for the “muddle” that passes for parliamentary debate in our nation’s capital. The so-called National party are no more nationalists than the Labour party. This is because these parties are neither nationalist, nor are they even meaningfully environmentally conscious in their governance.

Why does the environment matter to us? It’s really quite a simple continuity of thought. We 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. Our ideology is not driven by a need to be outside of nature, but to be within it. To quote the late Jonathan Bowden, the nationalist “stands for nature, and that which is given, nature is sentient within us”. We must not become deluded with ideas of conquering or abusing the very thing we come from.

As it stands, the government only wishes to use the environment for economic gain in terms of the carbon tax (Labour), or to use the resources found in nature to endlessly stimulate economic growth (National). To those in the Green party, it is simply a matter of gaining votes. Although somewhat sincere, these people will not be able to institute the changes needed to help preserve this country. The social policy that the far left represent is a major issue to most level headed New Zealanders.

The entire thought process of the ‘Greenie’ can be reduced to the leftists intense need to identify with anything perceived by themselves as being weak. We, on the other hand, do not wish to be seen as victims, nor do we see the problems faced by our country, people, and environment as anything more than challenges to be overcome by sheer power of will.   

The reality is that global finance, as well as international aid to the third world, has caused the lion’s share of environmental damage. Pollution of the sea is mostly contributed to by nations with low waste management and hygiene standards; such as India, Africa, and China. South America is one of the worst in terms of deforestation, and all in the name of profit. Illegal logging accounts for 30% of the global timber trade. In some countries, the rate of illegal deforestation is very high. For example, 70% of timber in Gabon is extracted illegally, 80% in Peru, 85% in Myanmar and almost 65% in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Overpopulation is something happening exclusively in developing and non western nations. Yet it is the west, with its low birth rates and low population replacement levels, that are continually told to have less children. We stand against such obvious attempts at subversion in the name of preserving the environment. The main concept you might have noticed is the way in which caring about the environment is politicized by the left. No longer a legitimate concern, but a point to be skewed against regular western people, a weapon to beat over the heads of strawmen. Greg Johnson put it concisely: “starting in the 1960s, is the Left, the New Left, rebranded itself, in terms of Third-Worldism and radical environmentalism simply as tools to attack capitalism—and that’s all it really is.”

The soul crushing industrial machine grinds ever forward, and the select few continue to turn a profit. Action Zealandia is a proponent of “deep ecological” environmentalism. We believe that simply “raising awareness” and whining about fossil fuels, isn’t going to actually help anyone. Such is the case if you claim to be against environmental degradation, but don’t realize that the current system itself is the problem. Being pro globalization and an environmentalist is therefore a useless, oxymoronic position.

We realize the major factors behind nature’s destruction. We oppose the system outright, we do not give it tacit approval and aim to make minor changes and reform. Globalization is the issue, an issue those we would term as “shallow ecological” environmentalists such as the ‘greenies’ of this country refuse to understand. To reject the ongoing degradation of nature in a meaningful way, is to reject modernity. We at Action Zealandia are forging a new path.

2 thoughts on “Nationalism and the Environment”

  1. Congratulations for addressing an issue that is intrinsic to the Right, yet insufficiently recognized. The Right is nothing if not the restoration of the organic community, as distinct from the present modernist ‘civil society’.

    The Left proclaims itself the vanguard of ecology, yet Marx referred to the ‘idiocy of rural life’, considering the Country, as distinct from the City, to be outside of history; whereas the Right states that it is the well-spring of the social community, as Spengler showed in the Decline of the West.

    With the colossal failure of the Left to appeal to the proletariat they jumped aboard a bandwagon of ethnic minority and ‘Green’ issues and the Trotskyites in particular started infiltrating the Green parties, latterly calling themselves ‘eco-socialists’.

    Yet the Leftist ideology is economic reductionism, and the so-called ‘laws of social production’ are supposed to circumvent all else, whereby human will can disregard ecological factors in the name of economic progress. Pure hubris. We see how the socialist states wrecked their environments at a faster rate than even the capitalists, insofar as they tried to surpass capitalism economically, and therefore did not really transcend the capitalist economic model of the Late West.

    Now however capitalism can see profits even in environmentalism, with carbon credits as a new form of speculative currency. Once again the financial system stands at the root cause . A few years ago the Green Party approached reality for a moment when Russell Norman called for ‘quantitative easing’, but within a day the Green Party had got the jitters and no more was heard of it, and they returned to irrelevance.

    The perspective of the Right sees it as imperative to reconnect man to the land, without which he is literally rootless. It should be apparent that globalism, whether capitalist or Leftist in character, disrupts the bond of man to land, and to place and that people are just economic pawns to be moved around the world as economics requires, whether it be for an international capitalist or an international socialist order. Both require detachment from land, family, home, community; what the seminal neo-Marxian philosopher Eric Fromm condemned as the traditional ‘primary ties’, which have to be destroyed before the global socialist utopia can proceed.

    The novels of Knut Hamsun should be essential reading for any ecologist, the works of the founder of Ethology, Konrad Lorenz; and the physiologist Alexis Carrel; all men of the Right, in comparison to which a Left-wing contribution to ecological questions is notably banal.

  2. A respect for the natural environment is, as Mr Bolton says, fundamentally of the right.
    The ecological movement has its roots in 19th C Germany, and cannot be separated from nationalism. Those gentlemen campaigning to save the forests from the new industrial scurge were doing so to ensure that Germany remained German.
    The environmentalism of the Third Reich necessarily followed.
    This is of great shame to left wing environmentalists and they waste a lot of time trying to undermine the origins of the movement.

    I would love to see an even more pronounced environmental policy coming out of Action-Zealandia, as this movement not only has a moral right to the legacy of the early ecologists, it also has the integrity to undertake such work.

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