The prepper scene, informed by visions of annihilation, is a less intellectually motivated outgrowth of this current of thought, but is taking it in the same direction. Ecofascists and the adjacent right wing look at a future defined by scarcity and chaos and respond to it with plans to create ethnic enclaves within which they will find only people they can trust, by virtue of their mutual cultural identification. They desire to maintain a simplified social context for themselves, a milieu that can be clearly circumscribed and within which all rules and norms are mutually understood and unchanging. The environmentalist fascists emerge from the slime, blinking, and look around themselves in horror at the reality of life on a warming planet, under a changing climate, and subject to elemental forces that threaten them unthinkingly. The same line of thinking underlies much of contemporary right wing and neofascist thought, and informs the ecofascist philosophies of those movements. That’s the logic of white flight- simplification of the social environment, and the maintenance of a sacred relationship with the land you define as yours. By creating siloed social contexts to inhabit they tried to maintain that simplicity. They want only to have to think about their interaction with what they perceive to be the soul of the land, either in granary or coal silo. It is the ideology of the terraformers that to be forced to have to complexify their understanding of the world is to be unmade, to be infected.
Terraformers definition full#
In cities full of immigrants who can barely speak enough of each others languages to make themselves understood, social contexts become increasingly more complex. The desire at the heart of this impulse is a need to preserve simplicity.
I think Mike Davis speaks specifically about this in one of his books. The process of suburbanization is an echo of the terraforming impulse, and the creation of the gated community is a futher step beyond that, a point on a logarithmic spiral turning in onto itself.
When the forces of finance swept westward along the railroads and overtook the terraformers, their ideology needed to find somewhere to go, and so it invented newer, and smaller frontiers. Beyond that line of blue water no further terra could be formed, and so that impulse, noble or not, to simply produce and extract what was untapped in this continent, found itself suddenly constrained. This process of terraforming is the entire story of the colonization of North America, and by the time they were developing wheat farms in Washington the process was very well advanced and approaching the terminal stage of contact with the Pacific. This is what people think of when they think of terraforming Mars. They were part of a simple idea, the elements of a simple plan, striking into the apparently untouched soil of a continent and seeing what they could haul forth from it, and sending it away towards the swarming urban cores where someone else could decide what would be done with it. They were sending the grain east, providing for the growing populations in the cities on the other side of the Mississippi.īasically his father and those around him were terraformers. People felt that they were a part of something and that they were doing it together. He said if you can’t understand that things were different, people were different, then I can’t explain it to you. I took a moment to note that the land they were making all that money off had been until very recently someone else’s, and expressed some doubts. He was describing how things were different then, how there wasn’t the same sort of greed that we suffer under now, the culture of making a living and making money was more respectful and generous. After a few years, or at least after all the big trees were gone, they moved to the Horse Heaven hills in Southeastern Washington and his father started work as a manager of an impossibly enormous wheat farm, the kind that reached from horizon to horizon and across which combines crossed and recrossed like beetles in the heat haze. It was cold there during the winters, and the snow was deep, and they had to drive tractors to get to town when the drifts got too intense. They lived in northeastern Oregon in the Enterprise valley and his dad was the manager of a lumber mill.
Over Christmas I visited my family and at dinner one night my stepfather was telling a story about his childhood, and how his father had made a living.