This interview is based on Miranda Jeanne Marie Iossifidis’ paper “The Populationist Climate Futures Industry: NGO SF Capital, Eco-emotions and Speculative Ecofascism”.
The interview was conducted by Sara Hill.
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Many people may associate ecofascism primarily with acts of extreme violence or the Nazi ‘Blud and Boten’ rhetoric, but your construction is much broader and more contemporary, could you expand on this and its importance?
I really like the work of Out of The Woods Collective and they define eco-fascism as this use of ecological crisis by the far right to justify actions of extreme violence, necropolitics and racial cleansing, but there’s many different ways in which people are engaging with thinking about ecofascism. That’s the definition that I have been working with, but I also like the work of Sam Moore and Alex Roberts, who think about far-right configurations as a spectrum, including political parties, environmental authoritarianism, but also young far-right and fascist movements, as well as ecofascist terrorists. The work on far-right ecologism is also critical, with work by Forchtner and Lubarda, for instance, contending that ecofascism doesn’t allow for the complexity and breadth of far-right environmentalism.
I think ecofacism is useful in terms of being able to identify the violent and pernicious elements and discourses, which you can find in diverse places, not just the far-right. So, it’s useful to think about ecofascism not being reducible to just spectacular violence or the far-right. I think it’s important to consider how these ideas, narratives and violence come in very different forms, and can be found in different places and actors; from political elites and parties, liberal environmentalism, climate journalism and environmental movements. Ecofascism allows scholars and activists to be able to identify and contest these narratives as we find them in these multiplicitous places.
Could you expand on those multiplicitous places and where we see these narratives coming up?
There are a lot of unexpected or, on the surface, surprising places, there’s interesting work around the wellness industry and ecofascism, for example. The Anti-Creep Climate Initiative has a zine called ‘Against the Eco-fascist Creep’ on debunking ecofascist myths, where they go through different myths and popular culture, which is accessible and great. Alex Menrisky’s ‘Everyday Ecofascism’ (2025) draws on Yuval-Davis’ work to think about how ecofascism is tied to narratives of ecological belonging which is mapped onto discourses of territory and race. So, thinking about narratives of belonging as producing the ongoing and variable maintenance and reproduction of the boundaries that separate the world’s population into us and them, which is a form of everyday ecofascism. We then see these violent bordering practices within ecofascist narratives – eco-bordering (Turner and Bailey, 2022) – as well, which links to the idea of everyday bordering practice beyond the physical borders of territories. I see ecofascism as really closely connected to populationist ideas and discourses, where people are seen to be both the problem and the solution of the climate crisis, and these ideas and interventions are geographically and racially demarcated but also exist as really dangerous discourses which have material effects.
Can you elaborate on your term ‘populationist climate futures industry’ and the narratives and ideas of speculative ecofascism?
The term came out of wanting to explore how these populationist organisations – or what has been referred to as ‘population (control) establishment’ by Betsy Hartmann – are harnessing speculative technologies to advance what I argue are ecofascist visions of a future Earth with fewer people on it. I’m really indebted to the work of Kodwo Eshun (2003) on the futures industry, which he sees as the intersecting industries of techno science, fictional media, technological projection, market prediction and how they produce all these projections, reports, science fiction, and hybrids like global scenarios. I find his work really productive and how it engages with Mark Fisher’s notion of SF Capital (2000) – the positive feedback loop between future-oriented media and capital through which power operates because it’s envisioning, managing, and delivering these reliable futures.
I then added another term – NGO SF capital – because the kind of SF (speculative fiction) capital that’s being harnessed is akin to the aesthetic and speculative strategies associated with contemporary NGOs. It’s a homogenous and banal aesthetic that’s easily identifiable, paying lip service to sustainability, empowerment, reproductive justice, and climate finance, but in a superficial way which obfuscates the violent, ecofascist nature of populationist ideas. World population projections are used for the basis of a global futures industry and I’m interested in the visions that different organisations fabricate – with their insistent focus on apocalypse and scarcity – because they have material and cultural effects. This is building on a lot of important feminist scholarship looking at the violence and racism of populationist ideas and interventions made in the name of sustainable development. The work of feminist scholars on populationism, such as Rajani Bhatia, Jade Sasser, Anne Hendrixson, Diana Ortega and Suzanne Schultz, has been really influential on me. So I’m hoping to contribute to this work by looking at the role of eco-emotions and the speculative.
Is this where your focus on speculative fiction comes in?
I’m interested in speculative futures, and in the past my research has focused on everyday engagement with climate futures through speculative fiction and reading groups, focusing on the collective negotiation of presents and futures, particularly through the work of Octavia E Butler. I love Butler’s work! That research came out of wanting to attend to the radical claims made about the potential of speculative science fiction – what happens if we attend qualitatively to ordinary reading practices? I worked with reading groups in 2018, and then during the pandemic as well, to consider how collectively reading and talking about SF nourishes the capacity for collective and individual resistance and struggle. My experience of some reading groups is that they demonstrated a lively and ordinary negotiation of how life and society could be organised and lived differently, which can be inspirational for (climate) activists. The sometimes ambiguous hopefulness that comes out of some SF like Octavia E Butler for example is useful!
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Dr Miranda Iossifidis is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Newcastle. Her current research focuses on the nexus of reactionary reproductive and environmental politics, pasts, and futures. She is also interested in using creative participatory methods to explore speculative climate justice futures. A collective zine – Care, Justice, Temporality – was made as part of a recent project.
Sara Hill is a PhD student at the University of Sheffield with a research focus on narratives of ecofascism and far-right ecologism apparent on social media and the normalisation or mainstreaming of them into public and political discourse. Coming from an activist background, she is keen to ensure her work also examines counterstrategies and provides support to those combating hate speech online.
Miranda and Sara are members of the RPRN.
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