We propose to examine the far right's reading of the famous article by the American medievalist and Presbyterian Lynn White, Jr. (1907–1987), “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis.”1 This article had a strong impact in environmentalist circles from the 1970s onwards.2 It was originally a lecture given by Lynn White in December 1966 in Washington, DC, to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, published the following year in the association's journal, Science.3 Like Dominique Bourg, who had it translated in 2019,4 we consider it to be a seminal article, both for environmentalists and for researchers interested in these issues.In a long introduction, White explains that humanity has always modified the environment, then highlights “the Western technical and scientific tradition” and the need to move away from it, before returning to “the medieval conception of man and nature,” to finally arrive at the heart of his demonstration, i.e., the relationship of Christianity to the environment, particularly in its Catholic version, and finally to the promotion of Saint Francis of Assisi as a “heretic” close to nature. We are particularly interested here in the end of this text, as it is mobilized by the far right, in particular by the Groupement de Recherches et d’Études pour la Culture Européenne (GRECE), better known as the “New Right.”Although Lynn White develops several important ideas, such as the distinction between ancient technology and the Western origin of technology and science, and the fusion of the two during Middle Ages, the central purpose of his article is to demonstrate that Christianity is a religion harmful to nature. According to Lynn White, the rupture between humanity and nature occurred in the ninth century when Christianity, in its Catholic variant, became hegemonic. For Lynn White, human ecology is deeply conditioned by ”beliefs about our nature and destiny—that is, by religion,”5 in this case Christianity in its Catholic version. The transition from polytheism to Christian monotheism was the “greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture.”6 Above all, the victory of Christianity brought with it a belief in the idea of continuous progress, i.e., a linear conception of time, unknown to Pagan peoples, a desacralized nature and the appearance of materialist ideologies such as Marxism, which was merely a Judeo-Christian heresy.Although White criticizes Christianity—in his mind it is only Catholicism that is criticized, which he sees as the Western conception of Christianity—the author quickly forgets orthodoxy, which he believes is closer to nature, and essentializes Christianity to make a radical critique of the Old Testament, seeing in it the origins of the enslavement of nature: Christianity inherited from Judaism not only a concept of time as nonrepetitive and linear but also a striking story of creation. . . . God planned all of this explicitly for man's benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man's purposes. And, although man's body is made of clay, he is not simply part of nature: he is made in God's image. . . . Man shares, in great measure, God's transcendence of nature. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia's religions (except, perhaps, Zorostrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.7On the contrary, according to him, Paganism offers a calmer relationship with nature: In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.8From then on, animism, which is specific to certain Pagan practices, disappears: natural objects, in particular springs, woods, clearings, etc., are no longer inhabited by protective genies. The Christian saints who sometimes took their place do not inhabit them: according to White, there are sanctuaries, but “his citizenship is in heaven.”9 In affirming this, the author deliberately overlooks the fact that Catholicism has integrated a large number of Pagan customs into its practices, particularly through the worship of saints, whose chapels were often built on ancient sanctuaries.10To support his critique, White relies on the extremely elaborate Genesis narrative to show that there is a divine project for the benefit of humans. Thus, through Adam, he names the animals. By doing this, Adam—and therefore Man—made in the image of God, let us not forget, places himself de facto above nature and is its master. His exploitation is therefore part of the divine project. According to White and his followers, the Christian understanding of the world can be summed up in several passages from the Bible, one from the Gospel of John: “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him”11 and the others from Genesis: “The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.”12 All these quotes would, according to White, show the Old Testament's contempt for nature.Furthermore, he sees in this appropriation of nature the origins of Western techno-scientific development: ”Our science and technology have grown out of Christian attitudes toward man's relation to nature.”13 In this sense, Christianity would be at the origin of the technical and rational modernity, born in the Middle Ages: modern Western science would be born in the bosom of Christian theology, “the dynamism of religious devotion shaped by the Judeo-Christian dogma of creation, gave it impetus.”14 The historian sees an evolution of thought towards the thirteenth century: according to him, from this moment onwards, natural theology, implicitly transforming biblical view into scientific reflection, was at the origin of the rationalization of the world and the advent of modernity. The natural theology of the thirteenth century, therefore, did not looking for “the decoding of the physical symbols of God's communication with man and was becoming the effort to understand God's mind by discovering how his creation operates. The rainbow was no longer simply a symbol of hope first sent to Noah after the Deluge: Robert Grosseteste, Friar Roger Bacon, and Theodoric of Freiberg produced startlingly sophisticated work on the optics of the rainbow, but they did it as a venture in religious understanding.”15 With the advent of modernity, nature has become mute, losing both its sacred and magical aspect: there are no longer explicit divine signs in Nature.16 Thus, nature “does not by itself give rise to any kind of meaning. . . . For moderns, trees in themselves are empty of meaning and say nothing.”17Since their formulation in 1966, these theses have gained in importance. The assumptions of Lynn White, Jr., are now widely shared by radical ecologists. Ecological theorists, furthering White's theses, consider that being an ecologist implies being a Pagan, or at least having sympathies for a cosmic and cyclical conception of nature. Thus, White was joined in 1986 by another American historian, David Hughes, who wrote: “Greco-Roman polytheism was from the beginning a religion that sacralized nature, and its eradication and/or absorption by Christianity implied the death of the personification of divine power that inhabited nature . . . in such a world, human beings became free . . . to use their power to transform natural resources into their own creations, to alter the natural arrangement of things, to kill and pollute.”18This view is widely shared by some radical ecologists, in addition to those coming from a neo-Pagan and often identitarian radical right.19 Among the former, we can mention Roderick Nash, an environmental historian, considered an important reference in American deep ecology. In Wilderness and the American Mind,20 Nash is indeed very critical of Christianity: he claims that this religion is harmful to wilderness. He argues that Christianity is a religion of the garden and agriculture, a doctrine of domesticated and, above all, human-dominated nature. Nash also sees a link between deforestation in the Middle Ages and the fight against the persistence of Paganism, which is historically false because deforestation in Europe began with the Celts.21Although White's article has had considerable success and resonance in ecological circles, it is not innovative, including on the monotheistic origins of the “ecological crisis,” to use his expression. A similar idea can be found in Martin Heidegger's work, who had, let us not forget, elaborated a form of philosophical neo-Paganism, of völkisch tendency.22 Here is what he writes, in his particular style: “The ‘naturalness’ of man is—for Christian thought—that which was given to him in his own right at the time of creation, that which is left to the discretion of his freedom; this ‘nature’—left to itself—leads by the play of the passions to man's ruin; that is why ‘nature’ must be continually rebuked: in a sense, it is that which should not be.”23 This quote is taken from “What Is and How is Phusis Determined,” a 1940 seminar commenting on Aristotle's Physics. The reason for placing Heidegger in parallel with Lynn White is because of his use by the Pagan, or at least neo-Pagan, far right, particularly the New Right. Moreover, the reference to Aristotle is important for our purpose: we should not forget that the philosopher irrigated all medieval scholasticism. Therefore, we can legitimately ask ourselves what was the influence of the Greek philosopher on the medievalist and historian of science Lynn White, Jr.White and Heidegger are indeed important references of the French New Right, which itself has influenced a part of the European and North American far right. This New Right is distinguished doctrinally by constant references, since its creation in 1968, to a Pagan conception of European identity, which would have been destroyed by a Middle Eastern religion: Judeo-Christianity. For its intellectuals, and its main theorist, Alain de Benoist, it is a question of ending the Christian parenthesis, an idea that has been present in his work since the 1970s and that he has been stating since the publication of Comment Peut-on être païen? (On Being a Pagan) in 1981, which was reissued in an expanded version in 2009.24Since the 1990s, Alain de Benoist has associated paganism with ecology. His conversion to radical ecology dates from the mid-1980s. It followed a renewal of intellectual references, which became openly anti-modern, ranging from respectable academics to appeals to the German “conservative revolution” (Spengler, Heidegger, Niekisch, Jünger, etc.). In 1997, Benoist wrote: ”Ecology is obviously very close to paganism, because of its global approach to environmental problems, the importance it gives to the relationship between man and the world, and also of course its critique of the devastation of the Earth under the effect of the obsession with productivism, the ideology of progress and technical control.”25 In 1993, Benoist devoted an issue of his journal Krisis to the ecological question. What is particularly interesting is that he published a French translation of White's article (translated by himself), implicitly showing the importance of this text for these circles, as well as that of Arne Naëss, “Eight Theses on ‘Deep Ecology,”26 another important text for the radical ecologist movement, with openly pantheistic content.The anti-Christianity of the New Right is a legacy of the Europe-Action group, founded in 1963 by Dominique Venner, who was one of the first far-right militants in France to develop a radical critique of the religion, which is seen as a Semitic and Oriental religion that had perverted the positive scientific spirit of the “white race.” Europe-Action proposed a return to the Indo-European pagan myths that would constitute the common ground of European populations, thus prefiguring the theses of the New Right. Above all, Europe-Action recycled several openly Nazi themes. Although the group criticized “Hitlerism,” it never condemned National Socialist ideology. Moreover, several former SS members participated in it, like Robert Dun, Jean Castrillo, Pierre Bousquet, and Saint-Loup.27 Europe-Action disappeared in 1967. The following year, a significant number of its cadres created GRECE.28 The more explicitly Nazi aspects of Europe-Action were gradually watered down by the New Right, although several former SS members, both German and French, collaborated in its work until the mid-1980s. These references were downplayed by Alain de Benoist, though not explicitly abandoned.However, these far-right activists do not use the first part of Lynn White's article, in which he rejects the idea of a scientific and technical solution to the ecological crisis. Although far-right activists make the same observation about the danger of technology, they prefer to highlight the texts of Heidegger in this respect. Above all, the criticism of technology by the far right is sometimes fragile on a theoretical level: the intellectuals of the radical right hesitate between, on the one hand, a rejection of technology and, on the other hand, the Nordicist promotion of a technology born in the North with an ungrateful climate. In 2008, Alain de Benoist wrote, under the pseudonym Robert de Herte, that “The Nordic people were only able to create their cultures by confronting a hostile environment. They have sometimes been left with the idea that human existence is that which is opposed to the world, and that in order to overcome any obstacles one must constantly resort to technical rationality. The world of generalized industrialization, of growth at all costs, of mechanical efficiency, of technological calculation, of rational hygienism, is a world that took shape in the North. Individualism, too, today comes from this North. . . . ”29 This technicist postulate, taking up the idea of the Nordic origin of technology, had already been developed by Europe-Action. The journalist Joseph Algazy reproduced a document from this group, dating from 1966, which stated that “The objective study of history shows that only the European race (the white, Caucasoid race) has continued to progress since its appearance on the upward path of the evolution of life, in contrast to the races that are stagnant in their development, and therefore in virtual regression. The European race has no absolute superiority. It is only the most apt to progress in the direction of evolution. The originality of its culture reflects the complexity of its language. The complexity of its language reflects the specialization of its technique.”30Indeed, from the nineteenth century until the 1970s, the far right postulated the idea that technical capacities were specific to Aryans, and then, after the end of the Second World War, to Indo-Europeans, the “white race” being the civilizing race par excellence. It is therefore difficult for the far right to abandon this type of discourse, and when it does, as is the case here, it does so with some theoretical fragility or contradictions: the New Right was technophile until the end of the 1970s, promoting biotechnologies, eugenics, and “Indo-European Prometheism,” and despising ecology. The abandonment of the praise of technique corresponded to the integration, as a major doctrinal reference, of Martin Heidegger and anti-modern authors such as René Guénon or Julius Evola. Anti-modernism, Nietzschean vitalism of the early years, and Pagan discourse allowed for a logical evolution towards a form of ecologism in the second half of the 1980s. This was a complete reversal of ideological positions.If the New Right has evolved a lot doctrinally since 1968, we can distinguish several constants. These are 10 in number: (1) national Europeanism; (2) a critique of egalitarianism through a critique of Christianity; (3) a nonlinear conception of time (spherical and/or cyclical) under the influence of Nietzsche; (4) an eulogy of Paganism (quests for Indo-European origins); (5) anti-universalism; (6) anti-Westernism; (7) anti-liberalism; (8) “right-wing” Third Worldism to avoid uprooting and immigration; (9) regionalist rootedness; and, finally, (10) since the 1980s, a critique of technology, perceived as responsible for the arrest of nature.The first cadres of the New Right, denying the role of Christianity in the development of European civilization, proposed a return to European Pagan traditions, heirs of the Indo-Europeans. They claimed, and still do, the existence of a vanished “Indo-European culture,” infected by foreigners from Asia, the Christians, those “Bolsheviks of Antiquity,” who built cathedrals on the site of Pagan sanctuaries and placed crucifixes on menhirs. In line with White's lecture, they argued that the Christianization of Europe was a disastrous event for European history and that Paganism was more respectful of nature. Thus, Dominique Venner wrote in A Samurai of the West, his testament book published in 2013, the year of his death: Having adopted the biblical God, while profoundly modifying him under Hellenistic influences, having made him a universal deity transplanted from his original habitat, the nascent Christianity took up its anathemas and its prescriptions against Nature. The new religion decreed the death of the spirits of the springs and woods, considered as superstitions all the more condemnable because they were in competition with the new God who claimed to be unique. It gradually made Nature a soulless, “inanimate” thing, which it would be licit to use and abuse. The nymphs, fairies and leprechauns having been chased away from the moors, woods and rivers, desacralized Nature could be studied, exploited and manipulated like inert matter. The new religion placed man at the centre of creation, as long as he feared God.31According to these militants, it was a totalitarian religion, originally sectarian. Thus, Jean Varenne, an academic, Indianist, and member of the New Right, wrote in 1985, but his view is widely shared within the Pagan extreme right, that Christianity was only a successful sect: “And if one thinks indeed of what the first Christians were: fanatical (to the point of seeking martyrdom), arrogant (‘we alone have the words of truth’), living in small closed communities, one cannot but accept this definition.”32As for Alain de Benoist, since the end of the 1970s he has been tracking down the manifestations of this violent intolerance in Christianity. In 1996, he was able to say the following in an interview in the Belgian neo-Pagan and neo-right review Antaïos: “We must not forget either . . . that between Paganism and Christianity, there have been streams of blood. I am not saying this out of excessive concern for commemoration, nor to set martyrs against other martyrs. I say it only to recall the importance of what was at stake for Christianity in the eradication of the pagan world. The fact that this eradication was imperfect, that it was achieved only at the price of a relative distortion of the original Christian impulse, does not change the essence of the matter.”33Thus, neo-Pagan right-wing extremists accuse Christianity of being responsible for all the evils: world disenchantment, egalitarianism, culture-destroying uniformity, and the current ecological crisis. This religion, by disenchanting the world, has opened the door to the intensive use of nature. The text by Lynn White, Jr. is, in this sense, particularly important because, in addition to confirming their theses on the dangerousness of Christianity, it offers the advantage of avoiding mobilizing ideologically connoted authors, i.e., of völkisch or openly Nazi tendency. Being the text of a respected and influential academic, it serves as an intellectual guarantee. It should not be forgotten that part of the theoretical content of the extreme right comes from National Socialism, whose discourses it has watered down and whose influence is to be strongly reassessed. Thus, the New Right takes from the SS the idea that medieval heretics, especially those from the Rhineland, were representatives of the “true faith” of Europeans. This idea is also found in White who, at the end of his article, not only makes St. Francis of Assisi the saint of ecologists, because of his ”Sermon to the Birds” of 1225 and his ”Canticle of the Creatures,” but also asserts that he was a heretic because of this particular vision of Christianity and nature. In the ideological grid of the extreme right that interests us here, this means he was a Pagan,34 or at least a follower of a nondualistic form of thought. . . . Furthermore, the circles concerned the support the thesis of the survival of Paganism in Europe in the form of medieval heresies: “After the Christianisation of Europe . . . paganism survived itself in several forms: first in the collective unconscious, which was liberated in particular by music, then at the level of popular beliefs and traditions, and finally within or on the fringes of official religion, by ‘heretical’ currents that have found extensions right up to the present day.”35In themselves, these theses are old. The SS supported them36 and they were taken up and promoted in the 1960s by the German Sigrid Hunke, a Pagan activist close to the New Right. But Hunke was not only that: she was involved in the activities of the SS research center, the Ahnenerbe. She published articles of a racist and Nordicist nature in her journal Germanien. Although she did not join the National Socialist Party until 1937, when it was again possible to become a member of the NSDAP, she was a member of the leadership of the National Socialist Student League (Nationalsozialistischen Studentenbunde). After the War, she became an important leader of the German neo-Pagan movement. She was also a fellow traveler of the New Right, even by the admission of the neo-rightists. Violently anti-Christian and Pagan, she made a name for herself in 1969 with the publication of a book, Europas andere Religion: Die Überwindung der religiösen Krise,37 translated by the New Right in 1985 under the title The True Religion of Europe: The Faith of the “Heretics.”38 In this book, she takes up an idea forged by the SS during its open conflict with the churches: Christianity would be a bloody religion, torturing and shedding the blood of heretics. In return, these heretics, especially those from the Rhineland, became followers of the true religion of Europe, i.e. a nondualistic, ethnic, and Pagan religion. Finally, it promoted a differentialist and Pagan vision of cultures and civilizations, and saw in Judeo-Christianity a risk of acculturation, and a destroyer of particularisms and identities.Lynn White, Jr.’s, “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis” is thus an important foundational text, not only for environmental activists in general, but also for an extreme right that claims to be neo-Pagan. For the latter, as we have seen here, White's text makes it possible to take up old anti-Christian criticisms coming from the most radical right-wing margins, without quoting them, and substituting them with ideologically unassailable scientific references. The American historian's article gives radical theses a new legitimacy and respectability. Finally, it has also helped to forge links with nonextremist right-wing environmental activists. Indeed, the issue of Krisis39 in which White's article was published was well-received in the French ecologist movement. This reception was facilitated by the fact that world-renowned ecologists such as Teddy Goldsmith and Peter Berg were at the same time entering into a dialogue with the New Right, in particular De Benoist.