Political compass for the21st century

[Eric the Green]

(06-24-2021, 08:01 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I didn't contemplate where environmentalist or animal-rights groups go. I can see all ideologies having some legitimate concern for the environment. It is possible to be a racist nationalist and be an environmentalist, to be both a religious fundamentalist and an environmentalist, or a socialist and an environmentalist. It is also possible to place economic gain, military power, and the elite indulgence above constraints on environmental ruin.

Well, I can't go with you there. Environmentalism did not exist until the 1960s, and was invented in the process of saving San Francisco Bay. Racist nationalists like Hitler, Trump or Bolsonaro just think of the environment as something to bulldoze and burn. Socialists are not always so keen on the environment; certainly not the totalitarian kind, which emitted horrible pollution in Eastern European coal and industrial plants. Industry is the mainstay of socialism, which aims to take it over, not transform it. And industry pollutes with alacrity until environmentalism restrains it. Religious fundamentalism seeks the rapture and views the Earth as something to escape or to conquer. Once environmentalism in the 1960s, and to a much lesser extent the preceding conservation movement in the 1890s-1900s, came along, some of the people in the other ideologies had to adopt it or face ruin.