This opinion piece was published on January 29, 2022 in the online edition of "Front Populaire," and subsequently republished on the Lieux Communs website . Hyperlinks removed during the initial publication have been restored.

Sandrine Rousseau 's pronouncements regularly provoke disbelief, consternation, or hilarity, to the point that people rejoiced at seeing the bland Yannick Jadot promoted to embody "government" ecology—that is to say, impotent ecology. But we must take seriously the power of the so-called "woke" movement within the environmental movement: countering these delusional pronouncements requires, above all, understanding how we got to this point.

Islamo-indigenous entryism

In reality, it is not only the EELV device who parades and rubs shoulders with Islamo-leftists like Esther Benbassa, Fatima Ouassak ou Ali Rahni, or “green” municipalities (Grenoble, Bordeaux,Lyon…) at the forefront of “neo-feminism” or vegan ideologues. There are most circles university, editorials et media who massively disseminate the speeches of the“decolonial ecology” but also reference newspapers such as Reporterre who promote the Traore gang ou Nabil Ennaseri, close to Qatar. There are still many small groups like "For a Popular and Social Ecology" who are following the school of Danielle Obono ordeRhokaya Diallo, but also historical activist magazines such as Silence ! who convert to this new catechism or the environments of the permaculture, organic and eco-friendly places gradually infiltrated by the halal, inclusive writing andeco-jihad. And it only took one trip to the USA for Greta Thunberg to declare the fight "for the climate" a fight against the “colonial, racist and patriarchal systems of oppression”. The few rare opponents like the review Degrowth ou Parts and Labor harvest the agreed anathemas,threats or even violent actions.

This is not simply the consequence of a circumstantial infiltration: this groundswell constitutes the latest stage in a long trajectory which mobilizes the very foundations of political ecology.

Questioning the foundations of political ecology

This was gradually established in the post-war period, tying together the scattered threads of previous decades and centuries, at the intersection of feminism and the exact sciences, popular struggles and hygiene, resource economy and religious sentiments. This heterogeneity was swept up in the movements of the 60s and then ousted over the course of the ideological domination of the progressive left. Since then, and despite a few attempts, political ecology has never freed itself from this mental universe, and has only been drawn into the slow degeneration of the left until today, of which "wokism" is both the glaring symptom and the terminal phase. Just as the continuous outbidding of the Islamo-leftists forces the left and its extremists to a deep, but tacit, introspection, ecologists should also ask themselves how they could have gotten to this point.

The ecological critique of the modern world being a radicalization of the critique made by the historical left towards modern societies, it takes up their worst faults while also radicalizing them.

Absence of nature workers

Thus, contrary to its historical roots, the left has progressively abandoned the "working classes," too disobedient, gradually preferring the fellagha, the Viet Cong and the Chinese masses, then immigrants, preferably Muslims and today "racialized"... Political ecology, as it was established at the end of the Trente Glorieuses, almost immediately cut itself off from the "countryside," from all those who worked, concretely and daily, on this nature with which it was nevertheless a matter of reconnecting: hunters, farmers, fishermen, gardeners, breeders or foresters, with their millennia-old knowledge and practices, their questions and their desires. Environmentalists, despite their vigilance and meticulousness in safeguarding Indigenous peoples worldwide, have been unable, unwilling, or simply unwilling to include the dying representatives of a civilization directly connected to the biosphere, a civilization grappling with state bureaucracies and corporations. The consequences of this glaring disconnect are incalculable: the very core of political ecology has remained unexamined, and consequently, any tangible connection to a concrete, lived nature, or to any real people, has been lost. Even more so than voters on the left, the clientele of environmental parties is caricatured as urban, affluent, educated, and organically integrated into the economic machine. These well-meaning souls thus hope to avoid having to choose between oligarchic/progressive forces and populist/nationalist revolts. Environmentalists struggling to gain popular support inevitably encounter, in their wanderings, indigenous, Islamist, communitarian, and racialist ideologues who present themselves as the "wretched of the earth" and promise them, not without calculation, a replacement people.

Obsessive anti-Westernism

This contempt for the indigenous working class is widely shared by the left, which has long since abandoned the analysis of capitalism to blame Western societies for all ills—even those of the antediluvian past—and now, to transform the "white male" into a global scapegoat. This stance is reproduced by the majority of currents within political ecology, which, here again, amplify it. While critiques of consumerism, productivism, and reification are essential elements in a perspective of societal self-transformation, they have, over time, become the basis for an unequivocal condemnation of Western civilization in its entirety—in continuity with Heideggerian philosophy, the mother of all contemporary deconstructionisms. At the same time, the interest in traditional societies, local knowledge, and the inextricably linked biological and cultural diversity has morphed into a caricatured primitivism, elevating the entirety of the non-Western (even pre-Neolithic) world to the status of a model of "harmony with nature." These two complementary positions, each as false as the other in numerous ways, deny political ecology its eminently Western essence . For ecological science is not a religious cosmogony, but rather an open and rational inquiry into natural processes, directly stemming from the great scientific adventure that began in Europe in the 13th century. Similarly, politics, as we understand it, is not the prerogative of the prince, the sultan, the pharaoh, or the tribal chief, but rather an explicit deliberation on the self-organization of adults forming a society—an eminently Greco-Western creation that is now disappearing. The postmodernism that is loudly pervading political ecology is actually bringing us back to a pre-modernity , whose infantile fantasy quickly dissipates in the brutal contact with unpleasant realities that are easy to experience, for example, in the "lost territories" of metropolises and their margins.

Secular-religious millenarianism

Originating from materialist and rationalist currents, the Marxist left spawned a simplistic narrative and totalitarian regimes whose profoundly religious character was slow to be understood. Ecology is no exception, and here again, it reactivates, with even greater radicalism, a distinctly mythological imaginary . This is no longer a question of a new monotheism with a sacred book, prophets and apostles, a chosen people, and the Second Coming, but rather of a syncretism tending toward a genuine millenarianism: the great cosmic reconciliation through the establishment of communion with a sacralized Nature. It contains a jumble of apocalyptic overtones and noble savages, Gardens of Eden and Golems, a sinful Man who must reintegrate into a divine Creation molded for him, the return of the categories of pure and impure, contrition and destitution, Mother Nature and witches, magical thinking and the children's crusade ("for the climate"). This translates, in the respectable academic and activist language that is proliferating, into the "questioning of the naturalist ontology of the West," that is, the abandonment of the Nature/Culture distinction, on the model of the animism of the Achuar of the Amazon popularized by P. Descola. This anti-Enlightenment intellectualism thus seeks to "transcend" the distinctions between human society and natural forces, politics and science, opinion and knowledge, belief and rationality, the human and the non-human… It is therefore understandable that the ludicrous theories now taught in lecture halls under the guise of so-called "gender studies" or "decolonial studies" resonate with many environmentalists. These individuals seem incapable of grasping the totalitarian undertones emanating from this confusion, induced by the desire to make politics a science and science a politics— precisely what those who claim to be proponents of political ecology are attempting to achieve.

These are, as we can see, significant trends: the "radical deviations" of political ecology are in reality merely the logical unfolding of its left-leaning axioms inherited from history. They also explain the almost total ineffectiveness of so-called "reasonable," "managerial," or "realistic" ecology, of which Yannick Jadot is the latest incarnation, and which allows for the avoidance of any questioning of social organization, its means and aims, or the role of contemporary techno-science behind the generalized greenwashing. Abstract radicalism and reformist justification point the finger at each other regarding their lack of a coherent societal project—they are not political ecology but form an ideological conglomerate that must be called environmentalism , currently hybridizing with the most regressive currents that further darken our already bleak era. Those who dissent from this ready-made thinking are numerous – they even constitute the majority of those who care more about the future of human civilization on the planet than about their own reflection in the mirror of political correctness. It is they who, silently, without even realizing it, always far removed from the environmentalist or leftist "language effects" of these vocal minorities, are working to bring about a genuine political ecology, which has yet to be born.