“Patrick Crusius worried that Texas — hot and dry and facing climate calamity — was being overrun by immigrants.”
““If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.””
“I had been investigating climate change as a new driver of both large-scale migration around the world and of potential conflict. Traveling through the mountains of Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico, I heard accounts of migrants suffering shortages of food and climate-driven despair that had forced them to move”
“Worldwide, the number of displaced people has been climbing alongside what appears to be the rising severity of disasters, and research suggests that by later this century as much as one-third of civilization — billions of people — could be facing the kind of heat and drought that had prohibited most human settlement for thousands of years”
“His fear that white Americans were being replaced by an army of invaders who must be repelled seemed to me symptoms of a reactive white supremacy, exacerbated by worries over scarcity brought on by the radically changing environment”
“The roots of their sentiments lay in concerns that the United States has become overpopulated. Almost everyone I spoke with placed the blame on immigrants, holding the view, as Crusius did, that dark-skinned people from the global south are surging northward to overwhelm white Christians, what’s become known as the “great replacement theory.””
“It suggests we’re entering an era of climate nationalism, where the right could be poised to reclaim climate change as an issue of its own. As Jared Taylor, the white supremacist and founder of the New Century Foundation, put it when we met this year, a new wave of “eco-supremacists” is emerging”
“decades before, foresaw this collision of climate change and nativist fears coming and used it to set the country on its precarious course, creating the most powerful anti-immigrant organizations in the country today. It was through this history — and the story of this man, a Sierra Club environmentalist, a doctor, a father — that I suspected the clues to future strife in a hotter world might be found, because the conflicts unfolding now seemed to be the fruition of his work. The more I studied Crusius’ manifesto, the more I realized that I was also reading the imprints of a ghost, the ghost of John Tanton”
“Tanton wasn’t just a malignant force against immigration. Virtually unknown is that Tanton also had an early and lucid understanding that climate change would exacerbate the country’s immigration conundrum, and it ultimately framed his life’s work”
“Later, he declared outright that climate change, among other reasons, would require the United States to rethink its immigration policy”
“He organized salons. In many ways, nature became Tanton’s religion, and the mission to protect it consumed him. He co-founded one of the state’s first conservation organizations, the Little Traverse Conservancy”
“Early on, the cause was reining in the world’s population — the United States’ population, in particular. Tanton began working with the group Zero Population Growth, which posited that stabilizing the number of people on the planet was the best way to save the environment, and became its national president”
“In 1968, Hardin wrote his essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which warned that population growth will outpace the gains of conservation as people overuse the planet’s resources. The same year, the Sierra Club helped publish the bestseller “The Population Bomb” by Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, a Stanford scientific researcher, which argued that saving the planet was a numbers game”
“Much of the American environmental movement shared this sense of urgency. The Union of Concerned Scientists, the National Wildlife Federation, Earth First and The Wilderness Society, among others, all published articles or ran campaigns against runaway population growth well into the late 1990s”
“it was the Sierra Club, influenced by its first executive director, David Brower, that emerged as a leading proponent of the notion that the earth had a carrying capacity — that there was an optimum number for the planet’s population to be held at. Tanton, a long-standing member of the Sierra Club’s Michigan chapter, became the head of the organization’s national population committee”
“Here’s where Tanton’s personal history becomes essential to understanding America’s recent resurgence of immigrant hate. Even as he built an environmental legacy, Tanton was privately thinking more and more not just about the size of the population but about how to preserve what he described as the distinctiveness of European people”
“For Tanton, “population” became a euphemism for “immigration.” With time, “immigrant” would become a euphemism for “nonwhite.””
“Long before the great replacement theory became a dominant strain among mainstream conservatives — nearly 7 out of 10 Republicans have said the theory had merit — Tanton, while not using those words, began to define the term. We’ve been thinking so much about “how many” come to this country, he would write, it’s time to think about “who.””
“When Tanton blended ecology with eugenics and immigration, he was digging up the two-century-old principles of Thomas Malthus, who first theorized that human population growth would lead to poverty and suffering”
“Tanton drew on the views of some of America’s most influential environmentalists. Sierra Club founder John Muir rhapsodized about the purity of wilderness, supporting the push to protect Yosemite’s lands from the “dirty” influence of the native tribes who inhabited it. In the early 1900s, the conservationist and anthropologist Madison Grant, who helped establish Glacier National Park and the Bronx Zoo, wrote pseudoscientific tomes about the coming extinction of white people. The Nazis used some of the same references, braiding environmental purity and racial purity. Hitler himself is said to have called Grant’s book, “The Passing of the Great Race,” about European racial superiority, “my bible.””
“Tanton resurrected these sentiments and dressed them in liberal arguments about sustainability”
“Between 1979 and 1997, Tanton launched or helped create more than eight organizations aimed at curtailing immigration or preserving English-speaking culture, building an unparalleled modern force for shaping the debate about who should and should not be allowed into the United States”
“Tanton’s belief that mass immigration would supplant white America had one particular focus: He saw it as a threat to the country’s ecology and ultimately to the consensus among environmentalists about preserving the purity of that ecology”
“That’s why, he thought, the immigration fight had to be taken up inside the conservation movement itself, by what is viewed as America’s most prominent environmental organization, an organization that would have the moral authority to bring difficult messages to the public. “The Sierra Club may not want to touch the immigration issue,” he wrote in a 1986 memo. “But the immigration issue is going to touch the Sierra Club!””
“On a spring morning in 2002, the Sierra Club’s leaders gathered at the historic Ralston White Retreat”
“The board had just sworn in its newest members, including an astronomy professor from the University of California, Los Angeles, named Ben Zuckerman. With curly hair receding above his broad forehead and an energetic grin, Zuckerman was effectively Tanton’s Trojan horse”
“Six years earlier, the club’s board had declared the club neutral on issues of immigration. To a sizable portion of members, the decision was an abomination, and it provoked a mutiny”
“A faction formed a splinter group called Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization, or SUSPS, and assembled a roster of notable supporters including the Harvard evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson. Tanton offered thousands of dollars to fund the group’s efforts, but it was Zuckerman who led the charge”
“The Sierra Club fractured under the weight of the debate. Sixty percent of the club’s members rejected the initiative, but tens of thousands of members voted for it, demonstrating the reach of Tanton’s worldview”
“One afternoon shortly after the vote, members of the splinter group gathered outside of San Francisco, hiking through the chaparrals of the San Bruno hills, and plotted what to do next. They recognized that the club’s direct democratic process — and its annual elections of three members of its 15-person board — was a vulnerability, and they assembled the first stages of a plan: a hostile takeover”
“That morning in Mill Valley in 2002 was the moment of Zuckerman’s success”
“Zuckerman, like others involved with the early argument that population growth was a threat to the environment, vehemently denied prejudice against immigrants and did not advocate violence. He maintains that his work always arose from a genuine concern that more people will place an unsustainable burden on the planet”
“Nonetheless, he found common cause with people who prioritized race and eugenics”
“Tanton was also drawing closer to Jared Taylor, whose writings about the superiority of white people had earned him a zealous following. Taylor had become a regular at Tanton’s salons, which were growing into an annual conference with dozens of prominent anti-immigration activists meeting at a Marriott hotel outside of Washington, D.C.”
“began recognizing connections: FAIR and the Center for Immigration Studies had links to Brimelow; Lamm chaired the advisory board of FAIR, and Morris sat on the board of the center. A letter the Sierra Club received from the Southern Poverty Law Center alerted him that they all had ties to Tanton. For the first time, Cox and Pope both saw that the internecine battle appeared coordinated. “It was like, ‘Oh my fucking God.’” Pope told me. “I mean it moved from a five-alarm fire to nuclear war.””
“Old guard members of the board began to campaign against Tanton’s proxies. While the Southern Poverty Law Center publicly branded the takeover attempt as racist, news broke that a wealthy California investor, David Gelbaum, had pledged $100 million on the condition that the club never stand against immigration.”
“Tanton’s network began its own efforts to whip votes. In the fall of 2003, The Social Contract ran an ad encouraging its readers to join the Sierra Club so that they could help elect “leaders who will redirect this vital organization toward genuine environmental stewardship.” FAIR’s newsletter published the same ad. VDare encouraged its readers to “join the Sierra Club NOW and have your vote influence this debate. … The prize is enormous.””
“All three candidates lost — Lamm received just 13,000 votes — bringing an end to what Pope described as the first modern battle to bring white supremacy into mainstream America under the guise of environmentalism”
“Having lost the backing of the Sierra Club, America’s anti-immigration movement turned more explicitly to climate change — and to one of Zuckerman’s Sierra Club colleagues, Leon Kolankiewicz, an environmental planner versed in sprawl and impact studies and a longtime proponent of the idea that the planet had a limited carrying capacity”
“In February 2010, as Republicans gathered for the prestigious annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., the Center for Immigration Studies’ longtime executive director, Mark Krikorian, sat on a panel about immigration reform in front of a packed audience, along with Robert Rector from the Heritage Foundation and Steve King, the lightning-rod congressman from Iowa. Near the end of the session someone in the audience asked why the center was publishing reports about climate change if it was a hoax?”
“Krikorian, who declined to be interviewed for this story, offered the group a simple yet telling answer: The climate issue was a potent opportunity. He saw it as a wedge that could scare — and divide — the American left on immigration. The suggestion was that by doing so the Center for Immigration Studies would give liberals reason to support hard-line immigration controls and perhaps also offer conservatives an avenue to fold global warming into their narratives of a country under assault.”
“All these efforts helped launch Tanton’s words and arguments into the flea market of American ideas. Now, politicians, newscasters, podcast hosts and white nationalists were picking up his ideas about pollution and scarcity, immigration and global warming, that fit their agendas, swirling them together with historical tropes about ecology and racist thought and conspiracy theories, not sure, necessarily, where the ideas had come from but eager to trade on their currency.”
“Some of those ideas could be found in the right-wing website Breitbart News, where Stephen Miller, the principal architect of President Donald Trump’s immigration policy, flooded editors with research from the Center for Immigration Studies”
“Tanton’s ideas could also be found in the proclamations of the prominent “alt-right” white nationalist leader Richard Spencer. In 2014, three years before he led the torchlight march at the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Spencer tweeted, “Is not population control and reduction the obvious solution to the ravages of climate change?””
“Tanton’s ideas could be heard on Fox News. “The left used to care about the environment, the land, the water, the animals,” Tucker Carlson said on his show on Dec. 17, 2018. “They understood that America is beautiful because it is open and uncrowded. Not so long ago, environmentalists opposed mass immigration. They knew what the costs were. They still know. But they don’t care.””
“Half a world away, Brenton Tarrant had been absorbing similar ideas and decided to act on them. On March 15, 2019, inspired in part by a 2011 shooting in Norway and frustrated by what he described as the overtaking of white people by immigrants in New Zealand, Tarrant entered two mosques in the city of Christchurch and shot 91 people, killing 51 of them. There is no evidence that Tarrant has read or even heard of Tanton, but in his 239-page manifesto, which he titled “The Great Replacement,” he was drawing on nearly identical notions”
“He pointed to “White Genocide.” He described climate change and immigration as parts of the same problem and decried “rampant urbanization and industrialization, ever expanding cities and shrinking forests, a complete removal of man from nature.” To Tarrant, conserving the purity of lands was indistinguishable from conserving white European ideals and beliefs”
“Patrick Crusius read Tarrant’s words and felt similarly. His attack in El Paso unfolded four and a half months later. In his manifesto he pointed to many of those same reasons, and they were familiar”
“Jared Taylor. For three decades Taylor had worked to advance eugenicist ideas. He was both an old associate of Tanton’s and a leading proponent of the great replacement theory”
“He framed his highest priority — the preservation of the white race — in environmental, even ecological, terms. Immigration is a battle for habitat and species. White people are an endangered breed, fighting to delay their extinction. The great replacement theory is a statistical fact, being cemented into reality. Just look at the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Climate change, he added, “is just going to add to whatever pressures we already have.””
“Taylor described Crusius’ actions as “fantastically stupid.” But he can explain them. Crusius was like all the great preservationists “maintaining what is and what is beautiful for the benefit of future generations.””
“’d come across a guy named Mike Mahoney, a 20-something rising star in white nationalist circles who worked for Breitbart News and accompanied Milo Yiannopoulos, Breitbart’s firebrand tech editor, on his speaking tours. In 2019, going by his byline of “Mike Ma,” he self-published a novel called “Harassment Architecture,” which glorifies those lone-wolf acts of terror, picking up on strains of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who expressed fears about the future “greenhouse effect” and disavowed modernity and its consumerist culture”
“The book drew a following, and Mahoney launched the “Pine Tree Party,” using the same symbol of a pine tree derived from the Christian Nationalist banner “An Appeal to Heaven” that could be seen during the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol and would later be flown outside the vacation home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito”
“The Pine Tree Party’s mission is environmental, broad and violent”
“As recently as May, a Telegram account ostensibly linked to the party posted a video calling for the violent toppling of electrical towers and the destruction of power grids”
“Graham Macklin, a researcher at the Center for Research on Extremism at the University of Oslo, has written that what connects these far-right groups is the view that liberals are disconnected from “wild nature” — a Kaczynski term. This is part of an emerging eco-fascist belief, he said, that the right must now take stewardship of the environment”