Eco-Authoritarianism

Historical development

The position took shape after The Limits to Growth (1972). Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968) called for “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon”, and his “lifeboat ethics” (1974) argued for refusing aid to overpopulated nations. Robert Heilbroner concluded in An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (1974) that only authoritarian government could manage the scarcity to come. William Ophuls argued in Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977) that the “politics of scarcity” required a return from liberal individualism to classical, communitarian and hierarchical politics.

The position faded in the more optimistic 1980s and returned with the climate crisis. David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith published The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy (2007). More cautious work followed on “authoritarian environmentalism” in China (Beeson, 2010) and on emergency powers for climate.

Principal claims

• Ecological limits are real, close and not open to negotiation.
• Liberal democracy depends on growth, thinks in short time spans and is driven by interest groups. Its structure leaves it unable to respect those limits.
• A strong, centralised state guided by ecological knowledge has to impose limits on consumption, population and resource use.
• Individual liberty and local autonomy must give way to collective survival.
• If authority is not chosen deliberately, catastrophe will come first and a worse kind of authority will follow.

Policy implications

The position supports central planning of resource use, rationing and caps, population policy, emergency powers, and expert bodies shielded from elections. It would have strict protection of ecosystems enforced from above and limits on economic freedom. Versions differ on whether the state should be national or global.

Internal disagreements

Eco-authoritarians disagree about how much coercion is justified, and who should exercise it. They differ on whether authority should be national, global or local and communitarian, and Ophuls’s later work moved toward the last. They also disagree about whether the regime would be a temporary measure or a permanent one, and whether the original prediction of scarcity has come true.

Criticisms and controversies

Critics from every tradition argue that authoritarian regimes have the worst environmental records, and that concentrated power is itself the greatest environmental risk. They point out that the scarcity forecasts of the 1970s failed, that the position offers no way to keep an ecological authority focused on ecology, and that it has served as cover for taking land and resources from the poor.

Eco-authoritarians answer that democracies’ record on climate since 1990 is not obviously better, and that nobody has answered the question of what happens when democracy fails to act.

Relationships to other traditions

Eco-authoritarianism shares the limits of deep ecology and the scarcity analysis of steady-state economics, but rejects their preference for decentralisation. It is the political ancestor of some proposals for planetary stewardship and of the coercive practice of fortress conservation. Ecofascism is its racialised extreme. It is the declared opposite of green liberalism, social ecology, green anarchism and the traditions built on justice.