>> That's a good point to keep in mind. The voelkish ideology that led to
>> Nazism posited a mystical connection between the features of a people and
>> the land that gave them birth -- i.e., Germans were deep because they came
>> from forests, and Jews were shallow and rootless because they came from
>> deserts. It's not organic farming that has a natural affinity with
>> Nazism. Rather it's the idea that land determines race, a key voelkish
>> idea that was important to both Nazis and organic farming types at the
>> time. And this is an idea that's completely missing from modern American
>> environmental and vegan consciousness, whatever it's other faults. You
>> can say many bad things about Americans and veggies, but our mystical
>> attachment to our rural birthplaces is not one of them.
On the contrary, being intrinsically a reactionary movement, environmental ideology very quickly gravitates towards national chauvinism and mysticism. (I just note in passing that the target of the animal rights protesters that Chrissie Hynde joined was directed specifically against Indian leather products.)
Key figures in the British environmental movement include such aristocratic landlords as Prince Charles, Lord Melchett (Head of Greenpeace and inheritor to Lord Mond), Guardian journalist George Monbiot (whose family name was changed from Beaumont, when the Ducs de Coutard fled the French revolution) and Sir Crispin Tickell (Royal Guards and UN Ambassador, now head of the Gaia centre at the University of East London), and Teddy Goldsmith (editor of the Ecologist).
The anti-GM campaign rests squarely on the defence of British organic farming against the foreign importation of American produce (as shown with Greenpeace's attack on a ship porting at Liverpool). Furthermore, environmentalists regularly mystify the relation of farmers to soil in the 'appropriate technology' discussion, which holds that high-yield seeds and fertilisers are 'not natural' for use by African peasant farmers (as though farming was a natural activity!). Finally the anti-GM campaign rests on a plainly non-scientific, and mystified objection to cross species gene transfer, summoning up the old fears of 'miscegenation'.
-- Jim heartfield