Burning Earth, Changing Europe: How the Racist Right Exploits the Climate Crisis – And What We Can Do About It
By Hilary Moore

German translation here.
Finnish translation here.

Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung – Brussels, 2020
83 pages – English – Free to download here.
To order a hard copy, click here.

In Europe today, more people than ever before are convinced that climate change is a pressing political issue. This is not a win by default. People anxious about ecological catastrophe are vulnerable to racist, xenophobic and even fascist methods of addressing the climate crisis, especially as far right and populist actors are occupying more and more positions of power across Europe, emboldening racist violence in the streets. 

Left and progressive movements must be more skilled in messaging, more precise in forging political alliances, and more articulate in positioning justice as a centerpiece of the climate struggle. The stakes are simply too high. This booklet represents a toolkit in that project: a roadmap for identifying what we must reject, how to counteract approaches adopted by the right, and how to keep climate change a progressive issue.

What people are saying about Burning Earth, Changing Europe:

“For ecological activists and anti-fascists alike, the environmental politics of the contemporary far right pose a significant theoretical and practical challenge. Hilary Moore’s critical new study provides an informed and up to date overview of responses to climate change across the European racist right, along with practical recommendations for confronting the slide toward anti-immigrant hostility in the name of the environment. Everybody committed to an emancipatory ecological politics should read this booklet.”

–Peter Staudenmaier, co-author of Ecofascism Revisited: Lessons from the German Experience

“Hilary Moore’s exploration of the racist Right’s attempts to influence climate change debates  is essential reading for environmental activists across Europe. In a rapidly changing political landscape, xenophobic arguments can quickly debase progressive causes. The rejection of  Neo-Colonial, Eco-fascist, Green Nationalist, and Eco-Malthusianism approaches to climate conservation is vital, as Moore proves, for the forging of a dynamic, internationalist anti-racist, green movement.”

–Liz Fekete, Director, Institute of Race Relations, author of Europe’s Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right

“The world is not only getting hotter, it is also falling to the right at a frightful pace. How can the left fight on both fronts simultaneously? Hilary Moore has produced an indispensable survey of the landscape and a call to activists – in the anti-fascist and climate movements and their allies – to search for paths forward. That call must be heeded.”

–Andreas Malm, editor of White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Dangers of Fossil Fascism

“Moore’s booklet is a much needed addition to the emerging literature on the intersection of far-right and climate-change politics. It does a superb job in reminding us that climate change is not simply a natural phenomenon, but a deeply political issue and it raises a series of important questions for climate activists.”

–Bernhard Forchtner, editor of The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse and Communication