Fighting Fire and Fascism in the American West
A homemade sign in Sublimity, Oregon, posted during a wildfire in September 2020. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images
Ecological crisis, rural deindustrialization, and real estate speculation have created conditions in which the far right thrives.
by Patrick Bigger and Sara Nelson
Late in the summer of 2020, forests across the western United States were on fire. In that year alone, California experienced six of the twenty largest fires in its recorded history, including the North Complex Fire, which killed sixteen people and burned more than 300,000 acres. Further north, the Beachie Creek and Lionshead fires merged near the Oregon-Washington border, ultimately burning more than 600 square miles (an area roughly half the size of Rhode Island) and killing five people. Across the West, more than 10 million acres burned—the second-highest annual figure since record-keeping began—incurring $18.9 billion in economic losses and firefighting costs.
In the febrile atmosphere of the looming presidential election and nationwide racial justice protests, the fire crisis pushed some Oregon reactionaries into action. Rumors quickly spread that Portland-based anti-fascists and Black Lives Matter organizers were setting fires to punish their rural (white) enemies and then looting evacuated areas. These rumors were boosted across social media and by a QAnon “drop,” leading militia members to set up armed checkpoints to search for arsonists. While the militias failed to turn up any antifa arsonists, they did offer a kind of social response—albeit paranoid, violent, and exclusionary—to the effects of climate change. It’s a response that risks becoming more common as the ecological crisis deepens.
The scope and urgency of the wildfire crisis in the U.S. West are forcing communities and governments to respond, but the ultimate form of the response is yet to be determined. Milton Friedman infamously quipped that “when [a] crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” Gaps in state action have left at-risk communities to formulate their own theories about the causes and consequences of socio-ecological breakdown, and as the far right surges across the rural West, it is leaving plenty of warped ideas “lying around.” Strange mutations and alignments are starting to take shape among different factions of the right, including Trumpist Republicans, libertarian localists, and eco-fascists, against this backdrop of punishing environmental change—and in many cases they are starting to take power.
The roots of this problem are far-reaching: more than 100 years of intensive logging and wholesale fire suppression have made forests denser, more homogenous, and more dominated by non-fire-adapted species, decreasing their resilience. These changes are magnified by the effects of climate change, including drought, extreme heat, insect infestations, and high-wind events. With the belated recognition that improved management practices are urgently needed, state and federal resources are beginning to flow to forest restoration, which involves thinning and controlled burning. But these interventions are not coming quickly enough to keep pace with the crisis, nor in ways that support transformative reinvestment in forest communities. Long-term declines in the logging industry have left both the land and people in vast swaths of the country abandoned by the state and by capital, and a huge mobilization of resources and labor will be needed to start undoing more than a century of damaging forestry practices.
A green industrial policy for the rural West could invest in sustainable industries and high-quality jobs, while building on the existing knowledge and skills of rural communities. Such an approach must also involve initiatives to strengthen Indigenous resource governance and support the ongoing revival of traditional management practices that have been criminalized since Spanish colonization. A progressive green industrial policy that delivers material improvements to rural communities is a necessary condition for battling the far right across the West.
Incendiary Conditions
Megafires that cover more than 100,000 acres are now so common they are no longer tracked as exceptional events by the National Interagency Fire Center, and 30 million homes in the United States are at risk from wildfires. This fire regime both reflects and produces alarming environmental conditions, including a historic drought that has dried out cities, farms, and forests; smoke that chokes skies throughout fire season; the billions of tons of CO2 released by fires; and local effects like mudslides, degraded water supplies, and the loss of habitats for vulnerable species.
These ecological conditions are coupled with the grim social realities of rural deindustrialization, real estate speculation, and environmental change. California has lost more than three-quarters of its saw mills since the 1980s, and logging jobs across the West have declined by 40 percent since 1997. Much of the rural West has become significantly more unequal than it was fifty years ago—a process that accelerated dramatically amid the economic carnage of the 2008 financial crisis, and then again as white-collar migration driven by pandemic remote work turbocharged rural gentrification. Many rural communities are suffering from the social problems that come with deindustrialization: economic precarity, addiction, and exposure to the criminal justice system have all been exacerbated by the structural reorganization of rural political economy.
Declining standards of living, with little apparent prospect for improvement, have created conditions in which the right thrives. Across the United States, far-right organizations, protests, and political violence have been on a sharp upswing since 2008. They accelerated again after the Trump election: incidents of right-wing political, racist, misogynist, and anti-LGBTQ violence (which have included the explicitly eco-fascist mass murders in El Paso in 2019 and Buffalo in 2022) have all spiked since 2016. More recently, there has been a marked rise in armed protests across the West, with mobilizations against pandemic public health measures morphing into support of stolen-election conspiracy theories. As outright political violence has increased, so has apologism for that violence within the mainstream right.
Support for Republicans has risen in many rural Western counties over the past twenty years, coinciding with the party’s drift rightward. According to data from the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, the West has a particularly high concentration of state legislators who belong to right-wing social media groups. Common themes in these groups include portrayals of regional big cities as policy failures and dens of iniquity, rejection of state authority in some areas (like public health and environmental regulation) alongside full-throated support for repressive state functions such as policing and border enforcement, and ubiquitous calls to “save America” or to put “America first.”
The Far Right in the Forests
The January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol has become the iconic image of far-right mobilization, but the year before, right-wing activists had already tried, in some cases successfully, to breach state capitols or governors’ mansions in California, Oregon, Idaho, and Washington. There has also been a flurry of environmentally tinged far-right outbursts over the past decade, including the Bundy family’s standoffs with the Bureau of Land Management over grazing rights, which culminated in the occupation of the Malheur wilderness area in Oregon in 2016. More prosaically, far-right candidates have won numerable government offices, from county sheriff seats to governorships, putting important levers of power in the hands of libertarians, Christian dominionists, QAnon fabulists, and militia members.