Summary: During the late Age of Domination, humanity’s relationship with nature bore striking parallels to fascist regimes: we elevated ourselves as a superior species, imposed centralized control over ecosystems, suppressed biodiversity and dissenting voices (including those of Indigenous peoples and future generations), scapegoated species and wild processes for problems of our own making, and waged a militarized, extractive war on the living world. This was not mere exploitation—it was systemic ecological authoritarianism rooted in hierarchy, fear, and the illusion of control. Only by confronting this dark mirror did we begin to heal, shifting from domination to kinship and rediscovering our place within the living web of Earth.
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Fascist In Our Relationship With Nature: A Legacy of Control, Suppression, and Erasure
By Lorenzo Alfani
A Mirror Too Uncomfortable to Hold
In the final chapters of the Age of Domination, few were willing to see the patterns etched into the foundation of their civilization. They saw themselves as modern, democratic, rational—a species charting its own destiny through ingenuity and grit. But viewed through the lens of historical pattern and ecological consequence, another portrait emerges. In our relationship to the living world, humans often enacted a script disturbingly familiar to those who study authoritarian regimes.
What we once thought of as benign stewardship or efficient resource management now reveals itself as a darker cultural formation—systemic, unconscious, and devastating. In the patterns of environmental control, ecological destruction, and human-centered ideology, the traits of fascism resurface—not in political uniforms or national flags, but in our relationship to life itself.
The suggestion that humans behaved as fascists toward nature is not meant to accuse individuals but to illuminate a system. A system that enforced hierarchy, erased diversity, glorified control, and suppressed the voices of those it deemed expendable—including forests, rivers, animals, and unborn generations.
The Cult of Human Supremacy
Fascism thrives on a central myth: that one group is inherently superior and destined to rule. In the Age of Domination, humanity cast itself in that role—not only over fellow humans, but over the entire web of life. We imagined ourselves at the apex, separated from and above all other species.
This ideology of human exceptionalism was rarely questioned. It was embedded in our science, our religion, our economics, and our education. Non-human life was granted value only in proportion to its usefulness. A tree was a board foot. A river was hydroelectric potential. A fish was protein per kilogram. The intrinsic worth of life was dismissed as sentimental or irrational.
This mirrors the fascist habit of dehumanization—denying voice, dignity, or rights to those outside the dominant order. Just as fascist regimes stripped minorities of citizenship and treated them as obstacles to national progress, the dominant global civilization treated ecosystems and species as disposable—barriers to growth, targets for control.
Authoritarianism in the Ecology of Power
Fascist systems are defined by centralization—power concentrated in a single party, a single leader, a single vision of order. The same logic permeated environmental governance. Decisions about the fate of ecosystems were made far from the lands and waters in question, often in boardrooms or ministries, with no input from the beings most affected.
This was not just a failure of inclusion. It was a fundamental denial of democracy. Earth’s intricate self-regulating systems—forests, wetlands, pollinator webs—were overridden by top-down interventions. Natural succession was halted. Rivers were dammed. Mountains were leveled. Soil was sterilized. The dynamic intelligence of ecosystems, honed over billions of years, was treated as an inconvenience.
This suppression of self-organization mirrored fascism’s disdain for pluralism and complexity. Diversity, spontaneity, and local autonomy were threats to be neutralized. Nature’s variability became a problem to fix. The solution was uniformity: single crops, standardized animals, regulated flows.
Militarization of the Land
Fascism glorifies violence as a tool of purification and power. Its symbols are weapons, uniforms, walls. The Age of Domination extended this logic to the Earth itself.
We spoke of “fighting pests,” “combating invasive species,” “taming the wilderness.” Our tools were bulldozers, chainsaws, aerial sprays, synthetic poisons. The industrialization of agriculture became a war machine—marching across continents with the force of an occupying army.
The land bore the scars of this assault. Ancient forests were razed to make way for palm oil plantations. Rivers were choked behind concrete. Entire species were extinguished, not by necessity, but by collateral damage. This was not maintenance. It was conquest.
The language of control was not metaphorical. It expressed a deeply held worldview: that the natural world should yield to human command. And if it resisted, it would be subdued—by chemical, by machine, or by flame.
Erasing Voices, Silencing Dissent
A defining feature of fascism is the silencing of dissent. In the Age of Domination, the same impulse guided our treatment of nature—and of those who spoke on its behalf.
Non-human life was never given a vote. Ecosystems had no standing in court. Future generations had no seat at the table. And those humans who tried to speak for them—Indigenous leaders, environmental activists, ecological scientists—were often ridiculed, marginalized, or violently suppressed.
We suppressed not only alternative views but alternative values. Ways of knowing rooted in relationship, reciprocity, and restraint were dismissed as unscientific or regressive. Indigenous cosmologies, which saw rivers and stones as kin, were viewed as primitive. The voices of shamans, shepherds, and forest dwellers were drowned out by the hum of engines and the clatter of profit.
Biodiversity itself—life’s ancient archive of possibility—was seen as inefficient. Wildness was weeded out. Species that did not serve the dominant system were pushed to extinction. Just as fascism targets minorities for being different, modern systems reshaped ecosystems to eliminate ecological “nonconformity.”
Scapegoating and Blame
Fascist regimes maintain power through fear. They invent threats and scapegoats. In the Age of Domination, we did the same—casting blame on species and systems that disrupted our plans.
Wolves were slaughtered for threatening livestock. Beavers were removed for flooding fields. Fire-adapted forests were suppressed because they burned too easily when mismanaged. Instead of addressing root causes—unsustainable farming, bad planning, poor soil management—we blamed the wild and tried to sterilize it.
This tendency to externalize blame—to deny responsibility and target others—is one of the most dangerous parallels between fascism and our treatment of the Earth.
Anti-Democratic Structures, Disguised as Progress
Even where democratic ideals existed, they rarely extended beyond the human sphere. Non-human life could not participate in deliberations. Future beings had no advocate. Decisions were made on short-term timelines, shaped by extractive economies and electoral cycles.
The result was ecological disenfranchisement. Whole regions were sacrificed for the energy needs of distant cities. Species were erased for economic goals they had no say in. Forests were turned into carbon credits—abstracted, commodified, stripped of voice.
The deepest injustice may have been temporal: the theft of ecological possibility from future generations. What we called progress was, for them, a narrowing of options. The coral reefs they would never see. The glaciers that would never return. The silence where birds once sang.
The Architecture of Control
Just as fascist regimes built grand monuments to their power, the Age of Domination constructed its own icons: mega-dams, highways through forests, massive mines visible from space. These were monuments to control—proof that humans could reshape the world at will.
But beneath their grandeur lay fragility. These systems depended on endless inputs—fossil fuels, rare minerals, cheap labor, and the acquiescence of nature itself. When ecosystems resisted—through drought, disease, collapse—the systems cracked. What had looked like triumph was only temporary dominance.
Healing After Fascism
To describe this era as fascist toward life is not a metaphor. It is a structural diagnosis. A pattern of hierarchy, violence, suppression, and exclusion that played out not in a single country, but across the planet.
Healing required more than reform. It required a transformation of relationship—a letting go of control, a return to humility. It began when we saw forests as communities, not commodities. When we listened not only to scientists, but to rivers. When we recognized that the rights of nature and the rights of future generations were inseparable from our own.
This transformation did not arise from guilt, but from grief. Grief for what we had lost. Grief for how we had acted. Grief for a world we could no longer pretend to master.
The End of Supremacy, the Beginning of Kinship
In place of supremacy, we began to cultivate kinship. We recognized that the Earth does not belong to us—we belong to it. That true strength lies not in domination, but in relationship. That diversity is not disorder, but resilience.
The Age of Regeneration—though we did not call it that then—was seeded in that shift. A shift from seeing ourselves as fascists over life to being participants in life’s great unfolding. It was not a political revolution, but a civilizational metamorphosis.
We could not undo the past. But we could face it. And in facing it, we could choose another way.
Lorenzo Alfani is a cultural ecologist and historian from the Central Apennines. With roots in both rural tradition and post-industrial scholarship, he writes on ecological memory, civilizational psychology, and the moral legacy of the Age of Domination.