The ideological susceptibility of ‘nature’: how common-sense notions of ‘nature’ are open to far-right capture in informal environmental education

The rising mentions of ecofascism in the media, and increasing discourses on far-right environmentalism in academic spaces, point to an underexamined phenomena of potential significance for environmental education. In this philosophical analysis, we suggest that the(concept) ‘nature’, is often handled straightforwardly, unproblematically, or ‘commonsensically’,within environmental education discourse. Further, we suggest that what we perceive as this apolitical handling of ‘nature’ creates what Reid and Scott (2013) might call a ‘blind spot’ of environmental education research - blind spots being those topics that we ‘don’t know well enough to even ask about or care about’. It is within this blind spot that a form of far-right informal environmental education is occurring, largely in online spaces, as evidenced in online forums such as 4Chan and 8Chan. Questions then arise around the mechanisms by which political ideology (and theology) interact with lived concepts of the environment in these and other spaces. For example, how do ‘normalized’ versions of taxonomized ecology interact with biologically and/or theologically driven policy/law making, such as abortion rights, gay marriage or racial inclusion? With this paper, we explore how this problem aligns with a Deleuzian understanding of concepts as always performing, to help better understand how various conceptualisations of ‘nature’ (environment, ecology, taxonomy, etc.) are implicitly more susceptible to far-right capture. The upshot, we suggest, is that environmental educators might better account for the always already political implications of the various concepts of nature which inform their practices.