Regarding the links between Nazis and Greens, here's an excerpt from an article by Steve Chase in the October '99 issue of Z Magazine:
***Hitler, a long time vegetarian, called for legislation to protect animal rights, arguing that "in the new Reich cruelty toward animals should no longer exist." On November 24, 1933, the Nazis adopted the Tiershutzgestz law, and its provisions were more far reaching than any other anti-cruelty legislation that had been passed elsewhere in Europe and the United States. For one thing, it offered its protection to both domestic and wild animals. For another-- as the law's authors noted-- "Cruelty is no longer punished with the idea that one must protect men's sensibilities from the spectacle of cruelty toward animals. Men's interests are no longer the backdrop here, but rather it is recognized that the animal must be protected in and of itself." The rhetoric of the law's preamble offers a glimpse into why a historian like Anna Bramwell can call the Nazis "Hitler's Green Party." The Nazis gave this legislation their own special spin by including a long section vilifying the practice of Jewish animal slaughter. Using the text as another opportunity to portray Jews as cruel, unfeeling, and unnatural people, the authors went on to argue that Jews did not even deserve the same moral consideration that was now being extended to animals. Such chilling rhetoric had been foreshadowed three years earlier when Hitler's personal attorney spoke before an animal welfare conference and pushed through a resolution on ritual slaughter that warned, "the time will come for the salvation of animals from the perverse persecution of retarded sub humans." [...] By smearing the Greens with a Nazi paintbrush, anti-environmental propagandists hope to convince the general public that Green politics will inevitably lead down an authoritarian and misanthropic path. This is a ridiculous notion and needs to be challenged whenever it arises... Yet, the horror in what I have discovered about the German experience is the seemingly untroubled ease with which a Green spirit of biophilia-- a spirit I deeply embrace-- can stand alongside and be integrated in the human heart with the genocidal spirit of the holocaust... Is it not time, given the searing reality of eco-fascism, to finally give up any illusions that embracing a deep ecological consciousness is "inherently and necessarily progressive and benign?" It isn't. What path people's ecological awareness takes largely depends on the political perspectives they embrace. Ecological politics is not a monolith or a single track... If we are to avoid future disaster, we will need to do something the Wandervogel [Nazi-era greens] neglected to do, and that many contemporary Greens still resist. We will need to open ourselves more to political critique, debate, and dialogue... Can we afford to believe that radical environmentalists and Greens cannot be seduced into supporting Draconian measures? Even Helen Caldicott, an Australian physician who has selflessly devoted the last 30 years of her life to the international peace and ecology movements, has stumbled and succumbed. While on a speaking tour in the early 1990s focused on the problem of global population growth, Caldicott advocated that Northern industrialized governments work together on a massive effort to lace the water supplies of Third World nations with irreversible sterilization drugs.***
If your concern is with ancient forest, you might demonize landless peasants who burn rainforest to make way for cropland. Yet this practice results from inequitable land distribution. The real problem is capitalism, not population, which, after all, is just another word for people. If you believe that people are animals and that animals are people, then meat-eating is grounds for execution, much as Jewish ritual slaughter was grounds for genocide.
Ted