‘So long, and thanks for all the fish!’: Urban dolphins as ecofascist fake news during COVID-19

Abstract

At the time of COVID-19 social distancing, the move from the real to a digital public life has propagated viral videos of ‘capturing’ wild animals performing unusual behaviours in typically urban habitats. From Welsh sheep using roundabouts to dolphins swimming in the Venice canals, the real from the fake becomes difficult to discern through technological advances but also in the belief in the underlying ideological environmental message it enables. In this article, I examine how these viral videos are not only being faked for the social validation of likes and retweets but have also become a tool for ecofascism: a far-right ideology that marries environmentalism with white supremacist ethnonationalism. I examine how social media is used to implicitly spread ecofascist ideas through an environmentalism fakery such as the urban Venetian dolphin that shows how humans, not COVID-19, are the virus and how these human-less vignettes are ultimately used by ecofascists to argue against immigration in order to ‘bring nature back to the natural order of things’. In conclusion, I look at what the initial implications are for communication and environmentalism and the potential these human-less lockdowns have for making convincing arguments for even the smallest of societal changes to mitigate climate change.