He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature, and shared the following:
Page 99 of Everyday Ecofascism chiefly highlights the cultural critic Theodore Roszak’s concept of “reversionary-technophiliac synthesis,” which he developed in his long 1986 essay From Satori to Silicon Valley. In it, Roszak, who popularized the term “counterculture,” suggested that participants in the back-to-the-land movement of the late 1960s and 1970s were not as averse to technological advancement as popular media often portray them. Rather, they were often confident that new technologies could (perhaps paradoxically) help them to rediscover and reclaim putatively originary lifeways, social arrangements, and authentic modes of being on the earth. Perhaps no primary text of the time captured this optimism better than Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, which served not only as a guidebook for many communalists but also as a directory of tools they could purchase to help them establish their communities—as well as a sense of their own privileged belonging in a given environment. As I put in the book, “[c]onsuming (and using) products in a marketplace of organic commodities would itself be one way to prove that one had been ‘chosen’ by the land.”Learn more about Everyday Ecofascism at the University of Minnesota Press website.
Readers opening Everyday Ecofascism to this page would get a good sense of the scope of this chapter, which focuses on how commodity consumption grounded certain counterculturalists’ claims to a naturalized relationship with the earth. They would likely not, however, immediately understand its relation to the book’s titular term: ecofascism. The word has become increasingly prominent in both popular and academic takes on right-wing environmentalism, especially among mass shooters such as those who targeted Mexicans and Mexican Americans in El Paso, Texas, in 2019 and Black Americans in Buffalo, New York, in 2022. My argument throughout the book, however, is that we should understand ecofascism much as the field of comparative fascist studies has come to understand fascism in general: not as a stable ideology but as a political genre that reinforces white supremacy, in this case in environmentalist contexts. Scholars of fascism have demonstrated that deep-seated, nonpartisan storytelling patterns in Germany, for example, helped propel Nazism to power across the political spectrum. Roszak’s “reversionary-technophiliac synthesis” speaks to similar cultural narratives in the U.S. that have informed not only actors such as the El Paso and Buffalo shooters, who frame people of color as “invasive species” threatening white Anglo-Saxon blood on U.S. soil, but also certain Silicon Valley executives who believe that only the investment of authoritarian power in the hands of tech tycoons can save the world from ecological catastrophe.
--Marshal Zeringue
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