What About Eco-Populism? A Neglected Historical Tradition

Abstract

A few years ago, Stéphane Foucart (2010), a science journalist at Le Monde, published a book entitled Le populisme climatique. Claude Allègre et Cie, enquête sur les ennemis de la science. Focusing on the climate skeptics Claude Allègre and Vincent Courtillot, respectively, a renowned geochemist (and former French Minister of Education) and a geophysicist, the book denounced an instrumentalization of geosciences which it described as “climate populism.” Allègre and Courtillot sought to invalidate global warming theories not on the basis of solid scientific arguments but rather using a simplifying rhetoric: hence the use of the term “populism.” By using it as a synonym for demagoguery, the book summed up one of the main problems of what is now widely labeled as “green” or “climate” populism, that is, the relationship to the environment of everything we call, vaguely and indiscriminately, “populism.”

Alongside the semantic inflation of the term “populism,” it is increasingly difficult to know what exactly it means in terms of environmental agenda. As many studies on the extreme right's political discourse have shown, these parties have a very weak relationship with the environment, either because of their climate skepticism (Lockwood and Lockwood 2022) or because their environmental concern is conditional to a productivist agenda, and thus largely opportunistic (Caiani and Lubarda 2024). The extreme right's green agenda seems empty enough to raise serious questions about the relevance of a concept that should specifically qualify its environmental philosophy. It is true that in some cases, identity claims are justified by environmental protection. This “climate nationalism” defends nature only for the “homeland citizen” (Forchtner and Kølvraa 2015; Koutnik 2021; Audikana and Kaufmann 2022), while adopting a patriotic stance of “environmental conservation” opposed to climate and energy transition policies (De Nadal 2022). But this more ideologically consistent approach to the environment is still marginal on the extreme right, whose attitude to the “green” remains essentially negative, dismissive, or instrumental (Schwörer and Fernández-Garcia 2023).

To increase confusion, this “green populism” can also refer to those who criticize the extreme right's climate skepticism. Like a chameleon, it can change sides by attacking the allegedly demagogic, simplifying and punitive nature of green policies. Thus, the Spanish far right (Vox) has described the left-wing government's plan to give legal personality to the Mar Menor as an “eco-populism” (Fuchs 2023). Furthermore, the most influential theories define environmental populism as an antielite style, “including ecological concepts” and going “beyond traditional left-right ideologies” (Fu 2025, 2–3). As such, the concept reflects the uses of its “matrix”—populism, which tends to amalgamate the extremes of the political field (Tarragoni 2022). But is this environmental populism, whether it is a political style or a thin ideology, really the same phenomenon between left and right? Are the people and the environment invoked by climate skeptics or “green patriots” at least comparable with those of the left who oppose them? These ideological incompatibilities on environmental issues are increasingly highlighted by scholars (Escobar Fernández and Hart 2023); nevertheless, a single category continues to be used with the effect of deleting them. So, according to Stone Jr. (2022), there is no common political element between Goldwater's anti-environmentalist ultra-conservatism in the 1970s and Ocasio Cortez's Green New Deal; however, he uses the same concept of “eco-populism” to bring them together, as if they belonged to the same phenomenon. Stone Jr. suggests that the extreme right rhetorically imitates an authentically left-wing political style, which consists of defending the people's interests against the elites responsible for environmental degradation. Yet, if this rhetorical imitation is illusory (i.e., a “sham” eco-populism), why consider that it is politically comparable with “genuine” eco-populism (the “progressive” one)?

This article tackles this problem head on. It proposes to put temporarily aside the current qualification of green populism and look at its historicity. Why do this? Because contemporary uses of this catch-all category fall into what Sartori called “conceptual stretching” (Sartori 1970), that is, their tendency to amalgamate fundamentally incomparable political positions. This is not the case with historical manifestations of populism, particularly those in which the label “populism” has been simultaneously invented by the political actors defining their project, and by their contemporary observers, commentators, and interpreters (Tarragoni 2019). So, if eco-populism is fundamentally a populism—which should not be demonstrated—then its history must be the history of populism. Its three founding moments are the Russian narodnischestvo (1860–1890), the US People's Party (1873–1896), and the national-popular movements in Latin America (1930–1960). These historical experiences are the only ones that social sciences consensually view as founding populist ideology1; they are certainly a good starting point for characterizing it rigorously. Their comparison provides us with a prima facie definition: a political ideology that appears in contexts of crisis and that mobilizes a socially heterogeneous plebe against an elite accused of robbing democracy (Tarragoni 2024). What role did the environment play in this ideology? How ecologically sensitive have these populist actors been throughout history? What can we learn from these historical cases, if understood in terms of eco-populism, about our current political situation?

In a similar perspective, Szasz (1994) has identified a historical precedent: the US movement for environmental justice, emblematically represented by citizens protest against toxic wastes in Love Canal (1978) and Warren County (1982). Szasz analyzes their denunciation of social and racial inequalities regarding the environment, as a populist opposition between the “democratic people” and the “anti-democratic elites.” Indeed, these popular protests targeted the industrial and political elites, deemed as responsible for the environmental risks threatening their neighborhood communities. However, the origins of such political discourse must be sought further back in time: the Russian narodnischestvo, the US People's Party, and national-popular movements in Latin America already express such environmental thinking. In these cases, since environmental degradation was not a major public concern, the main ecological issue is land: The people become a democratic subject by claiming their right to the land, against the elites who oppress them while destroying the earth. Thus, this popular right to land has a strong ecological dimension, as it is also seen as a right of nature to its protection, fertility, and renewal. In the history of eco-populism, the people's right to land precedes that to a clean environment. These two claims are of course conceptually different. But they are part of the same history: that which opposes the people's rights to enjoy nature, as synonymous with genuine democracy, to the oligarchic predation of nature, as synonymous with denial of democracy. Some clarification is required on how to conceive of this long history. Our argument is the opposite of any kind of foundationalism: The aim is not to establish an essence of eco-populism in its origins. Origins do not necessarily belie an essence. Rather, the ecological roots of populism and the renewals of the global environmental justice movement (Martinez-Alier, Temper, Del Bene, and Scheidel 2016) and part of the ecologist left do point to historical continuity. Within it, there are black holes and missing points because history is not straight-line. Throughout the 20th century, there have been long periods when this eco-populist sensibility became either dormant or replaced by other, more resolutely productivist and individualistic ways of articulating the people, democracy, and the environment.2

By comparing these founding moments, and particularly their most nature-oriented intellectuals and activists, the paper offers a novel historical perspective on populism, by providing new insights into its environmental thinking. Each sequence presents a different way of conceiving the people's rights to the environment. First, we examine Russian narodnischestvo and its problem of the “obshchina,” read in eco-political terms by one of its most penetrating thinkers, Pëtr Kropotkin (1842–1921). We then turn to the People's Party and the problem of corporate ownership of nature, whose main eco-political issues are conceptualized by James H. Davis (1853–1940) and Thomas L. Nugent (1841–1895). In their wake, we find the 1980s environmental justice movements, which point to the responsibility of the industrial and political elites in producing the environmental risks suffered by the working classes. The third section looks at Latin American populism through the Peruvian Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), whose organic intellectual was José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930). He developed a political ecology based on the Inca historical tradition.

At the end, eco-populism appears as a specific way of politicizing nature, whose singularity is to conceive of democracy in terms of the people's right to nature. Although many theories of justice, from Sen to Rawls, have stressed the importance of the right to land, eco-populism describes something more than an individual capability or primary good: A democratic protest tradition in which a popular conception of nature is opposed to an oligarchic one. This tradition highlights the importance of the environment as the foundation and grammar of modern democracies. Political theorists have traditionally focused on the juridical and institutional background of liberal democracies, including the rule of law, free and regular elections, checks and balances, minority rights, and political liberties. Emphasizing democracy as conceived by subaltern groups, eco-populism highlights the social and natural basis of democracies: the environment on which they are rooted, and the freedoms it allows to the people.

In 1844, the “chargé d'affaires” in the French Embassy in St. Petersburg wrote: “The great problem of emancipation consists in the peasant's innate idea that he is inseparable from the land” (Venturi 1960, 693). This “natural right to the land” was a tenacious political belief among the Russian peasantry that we can find, in the same period, in Jules Michelet's The People (1846) concerning the French peasants. But how to understand this land right? In fact, as Baron August von Haxthausen emphasized in his 1843–1844 survey of Russian peasants, they had remained outside the capitalist logic of property (Haxthausen 1856). Two elements proved it: firstly, the primacy of collective ownership, which led to land being valued through its social use; secondly, where individual ownership was observable, a “tradition of periodical redistributions of the land” (Venturi 1960, 70). In this context, the communal possession of land produced a sort of alchemy, and virtually an indistinction between the social and the natural: a real reciprocity between the peasant and the earth.

Indeed, if peasants saw themselves as socially equal, it was because they felt this equality in relation to nature, to the earth which defined their common condition. They contrasted this with the elites: both the feudal aristocracy, who continued to own most of the land even after the 1861 abolition of serfdom, and the Empire's administrative elites, who promoted access to small property for peasants. As Haxthausen showed, the Russian peasantry had an institution for practicing this antielitist vision of equality: the “obshchina,” that is, the rural commune based on land common ownership and collective democratic decision (within the “mir,” a sort of peasant parliament). Thirty years after Haxthausen's survey, the Russian populists, influenced by Proudhon, Leroux, and Fourier, suggested that the obshchina could be the key institution of the coming democratic revolution. This was the birth of narodnischestvo as a political movement: a mobilization of intellectuals and students seeking to raise the people against the Tsar, by driving on popular democratic aspirations. When these activists went out to live in the countryside as part of the 1874 “People's Crusade,” they observed the peasants’ relationship with nature, which they linked to their democratic vision.

He quoted as examples the “semi-communistic brotherly organization” of Dukhobórtsy communities and the “complex forms of social organization” developed by natives “far away from the influence of any civilization” (1899, 107). Coming from a “serf-owner's family,” this discovery led him to understand the futility of the “principle of command and discipline” in human action, and the effectiveness of the “principle of common understanding.”

His geographical and ethnographic surveys of Siberian communities had a profound impact on his support for populism. From the spring of 1872, he took part in the St. Petersburg Tchaykóvsky circle, “a centre of socialistic propaganda among the educated youth, and a natural intermediary between […] students and workers” (1899, 148). This circle was the founding nucleus of Russian populism. Its distinctive feature was interpreting socialism not from abstract ideas, but urging militants to “live no better than the workers live” by “refusing to enjoy for their own satisfaction the riches they had inherited from their fathers” (1899, 149). In 1873, Kropotkin was asked to draw up the association's political program, which he based on his observations of Siberian communities. He stressed common ownership of the means of production, meaning that land and capital belonged to those who worked them, and self-management as the principle of political organization, as opposed to representative government (Gamblin 1999, 122–123). In 1874, the Tchaykóvsky circle initiated the People's Crusade, in which Kropotkin took part going in St. Petersburg slums. He met the weavers’ popular associations (“artel”): “[I] exchanged my fine clothes for a cotton shirt, peasant top-boots, and a sheepskin, and, joking with peasants on the way, went to meet my worker friends in some slum” (Kropotkin 1899, 158).

In this historical reading, structured by the opposition between a productive and creative majority and an idle and parasitic minority, nature plays a central role. Indeed, the relationship between humans and nature, which should be dictated by the greatest number's use (a social use value, as in the obshchina), yields in fact a purely nominal and financial value. The decision to make the land or soil fruitful no longer follows social needs but the speculative desires of an owner elite.4

Such a political program is the only one that can save the human species from extinction, by hastening a genuine democracy in which nature will be able to regenerate itself against oligarchy.

At the same time, on the other side of the Bering Strait, another populist moment was born. In the southern, western, and mid-western states of the United States, it involved a huge farmers’ mobilization against the big industrial trusts, Wall Street rentiers, and the bipartisan establishment: all economic and political elites deemed responsible for the corruption of the American Republic. These farmers had been ruined by the 1873 crisis of overproduction, which occurred at the same time as the United States joined the Gold Standard. They organized themselves into rural cooperatives and Farmers’ Alliances, first regionally, then nationally. In 1892, they formed their own party, the first populist one in history: the People's Party. Its candidate for the 1896 presidential elections, William Jennings Bryan, became popular with a famous political intervention, the “Golden Cross Speech.” In it, this young lawyer from Nebraska attacked the idle capital holders in America's big cities, accusing them of strangling the working classes and draining the country's “broad and fertile prairies.”

This reference was not merely a captatio benevolentiae from the orator, who thus added a real-life touch to his criticism of the government's monetary policies. In the political thinking of the People's Party's activists, these “broad and fertile prairies” meant something specific: a form of political ecology. For the audience, they referred to the farmers’ material autonomy and that of their living spaces. Both were threatened by economic speculation: that of the railways (which charged usurious prices for transporting agricultural products), that of the agribusiness trusts (which competed unfairly on price), that of the banks (which increased interest on the agricultural investments for machinery and seeds), and that of the financial sector (whose bets on the rising dollar increased interest rates and lowered the price of agricultural exports).

Populist farmers personally experienced such changes. After the 1862 Homestead Act, they pioneered farming on the arid Great Plains.5 At that time, large-scale and capital-intensive farming companies were boosted by high prices for export (corn, wheat, and cotton). To resist competition, they tried to imitate their methods, though they were more or less forced to by their creditors. So, they gradually expanded their land holdings, succumbing to the real estate developers who were selling off the prairies after the buffalo massacre, hunted down for the industrial hide needs (Isenberg 2000). They believed that the exceptionally wet climate on the prairies in the 1870s would continue indefinitely. Inspired by this belief, they introduced intensive monoculture farming, which required a lot of water (Argersinger 1995, 37–38). Confident in the soil's fertility, they eventually destroyed its ecological basis: the grass that the natives had maintained over the centuries, by allowing several plant species to coexist and by practicing prairie fires (Courtwright 2011). The result was catastrophic. Their debts increased, amplified by the falling prices of corn, wheat, and cotton in the 1880s and 1890s, at the same time as the soils were exhausting. The two coincided in 1886. During an unprecedented episode of wind erosion, prairie farmers plunged into debt and big agriculture companies bought back their mortgages.

Thus, the farmers who formed the People's Party perceived a link between the economic pressures they suffered from monopolies, banks and finance and the ecological pressures they themselves imposed on nature. This was why the populist critique of the elites, deemed responsible for the destruction of nature, went hand in hand with the apology of the “productive citizen,” which had to restore the balance between economic value and ecological value (Sussman Squires 2021, 102). In this sense, populism opposed the two main American ecological traditions of the late 19th century, that is, John Muir's environmentalism and Gifford Pinchot's conservationism. Muir defended the preservation of wild nature in a romantic and elitist way, while criticizing its agricultural transformation (as his battles against farming in Yosemite Valley and the Sierra Nevada). Pinchot sought a balance between economic development and nature's conservation, while neglecting the workers’ interests. Despite their different interpretations, both approaches were based on an elitist ecology, whereas populists emphasized popular relationships with nature as a source of collective utility (White 1996).

As the populist Senator Marion Butler put it in his address to the North Carolina Farmers’ State Alliance, “the industrial and agricultural classes” are “the bone and sinew, the wealth producers of the land” (Butler 1893, 3). Like the physiocrats (of whom Jefferson, the People's Party's political model, had been an admirer), for these farmers, land was the main source of value. Value creation linked to intermediaries, such as railways or East-coast merchants, was considered illusory and unfair, for no value could be created by activities disconnected from the land (Cronon 1991, 360). Such a position attributed to agriculture the role of mediator between land and collective wealth, between nature and the nation. As such, the American republic was conceived as a partnership between producers and nature, with the aim of preserving its fertility (Sussman Squires 2021, 97). The republic opposed “corporate despotism” (Postel 2007, 121), that is, the unlimited and abusive power of the big trusts, of which the railway companies were emblematic, with their rapacious policy of imposing “transit rates” on farmers as well as acquiring land for purely speculative purposes (Goodwyn 1978, 69–70).6 Populists saw this appropriation of land by corporate power as threefold unnatural: first, against human nature, because corporations were not living beings, as a people capable of empathy, labor, and suffering; second, against nature tout court, because land speculation caused it to become infertile; third, against divine nature, because such appropriation defied the Creator's will, namely, that the earth should be put to the benefit of the greatest number.

The populist judge Thomas L. Nugent saw this equal right to land as a right of nature: the right of natural entities to persistence and regeneration. Inspired like Davis by the Bible, he extended this right to all those natural resources that could not be appropriated as such: he believed “that a bounty of nature, as air, light, land, cannot by any process become private property. That only the products of labor, physical or mental, may be justly so claimed and owned” (1896, 113). These considerations were not only economic or moral but also ecological. The right of all to enjoy natural resources, considered unlimited7, became nature's right to react to human excesses. Ceteris paribus, one might hear echoes of contemporary rights of natural entities, such as forests, rivers, or oceans, against the excesses of artificialization, capitalism, or extractivism (Stone 1972).

In the 20th century, this eco-populist sensibility has been completely reinvented through the environmental justice movement. The context was quite different. In the People's Party, environmental thought was linked to the political issue of land, in a society where environmental degradation was not yet a “public problem” (Gusfield 1980). From the 1970s onward, a new environmental problem became public, particularly through the first industrial waste scandals. Its inaugural act was the Love Canal citizens’ movement. As its name suggests, Love Canal was a shipping canal in Niagara Falls, New York. It had been used as an illegal waste dump by chemical companies between 1942 and 1950, before being covered over and sold to the local authorities for a dollar and a legal discharge. Between the 1950s and 1970s, many families settled on the site, most of them white and working class. In 1976, after intense rain, toxic waste such as dioxin and benzene began to seep into the built-up areas. Residents began mobilizing for these chemical products were gradually poisoning their drinking water, leading to abnormal increases in cases of leukemia and congenital birth defects. A local newspaper revealed the truth: the whole district had been built on a huge industrial dump, with 22,000 tons of toxic products thrown out by the Hooker Chemical Company. In 1981, the mobilization's spokeswoman, Lois M. Gibbs, founded the Citizens’ Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste, whose mission was to fight against the environmental nuisance power of the big trusts and their consequences on ordinary citizens’ lives.

In 1982, another citizen mobilization followed in North Carolina: the Warren County movement. It added a strong racial dimension to the protest. In this working-class Afro-American community (70% of its inhabitants were Black and 20% poor), residents challenged the Democratic Governor's initiative to bury 40,000 cubic meters of soil contaminated by polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). These toxic substances used in electrical transformers and paint had been dumped since 1978 by Monsanto Chemicals and General Electric throughout the area. For six weeks, local residents took civil disobedience action. The movement immediately joined the civil rights struggles, which fed it back (McGurty 1997). Taking advantage of this junction, the mobilization pointed to the “environmental racism” of industrial and political elites. The term was coined in 1987 by Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., executive director of the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ, when presenting the report “Toxic Wastes and Race in The United States: A National report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites” at the National Press Club in Washington DC. By developing citizen counterexpertise, these activists proved that there was no serious scientific argument to justify the choice of Warren County as the ideal dumping site. Far from being a purely technical issue, the political problem was how to distribute the environmental damages of the elites: produced by the elites, these environmental damages were suffered by the people (McGurty 2009).

The environmental justice movements shared the People's Party's political imaginary: “a struggle of the small people against big government and big business… ‘the people’ against the privilege and power of dominant, exploiting, selfish, and uncaring elites” (Szasz 1994, 81). In the late 19th-century eco-populism, the problem was access to land for those who needed it and used it, guaranteeing its fruits for the whole republic. The people's figure was the poor peasant, and the elites were the corporate power that appropriated land to increase its speculative value, while at the same time degrading it. Behind land, nature was seen as the basis of the common democratic condition.8 In the late 20th-century eco-populism, environmental degradation had become a public issue. Thus, the problem was the unequal distribution of environmental risks. The people's figure was the inhabitant as an ordinary citizen (Castells 1983; Keucheyan 2018, 28), and the elites were polluting multinationals in collusion with public authorities. Behind the right of everyone to a healthy environment, this eco-populism defended the equal opportunity of all to inhabit the earth and, by extension, the democratic dignity of the people against any form of racism or class contempt by the elites (Meyer 2024).9

In the 20th century, the main political arena for populism was south of the Panama Canal. New “national-popular movements” (Germani 1978, 11) proliferated as a consequence of the Great Depression. Highly dependent on demand for raw materials from the North, Latin America was on its knees. These populist movements came to power and structured durably Latin American political cleavages. Despite their national diversity—each country experienced a populist government between the 1930s and 1960s—they shared a common understanding of “the people” and “the elites”, in which the plebeian and democratic definition of the people took precedence over its identity-based definition. They also shared a similar philosophy of public action: extending suffrage and combating electoral fraud, creating new social rights for workers, and promoting redistributive policies and cultural democratization.

However, the agrarian character of the “people,” typical of narodnischestvo and the People's Party, was marginal. While in some cases, such as Mexican cardenism (1934–1940), the peasant question was crucial (giving rise to the largest land redistribution in Latin American history, the “ejido”), these mobilizations remained essentially urban. Latin America invalidated one of the oldest comparative ideas of populism studies, namely, its essentially agrarian character (MacRae 1969). Here, not only was the land question politically marginal in relation to working-class labor, but ecological concerns were also practically absent. Most populist governments, such as Argentinean Peronism, Brazilian Varguism, and Venezuelan Adecism, pursued import-substituting industrialization policies with no concern for their environmental damage. This productivist agenda persists in Latin American neopopulisms, such as Venezuelan Chavism or the governments of Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador: They all have been criticized by indigenous mobilizations for the damaging effect of their rent-seeking fossil policies (oil and gas) on the environment (Svampa 2019).

This definition of democracy was structurally linked to ecology. It was José Carlos Mariátegui, one of the leading intellectuals of APRA, who developed this link. He made it in a 1928 book that adapted Marxist thought to Latin American history: the Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality. The political relationship between its author and Aprismo has been amply demonstrated, even if a personal break occurred in 1929 between Mariátegui and Haya de la Torre (Leblanc 2019). Thus, the original core of the APRA members was that of the journal Amauta, founded by Mariátegui in 1926: In fact, his book was published in the journal collection (“Biblioteca Amauta”). Moreover, from 1923 onward, Mariátegui took part in the Manuel Gonzalez Prada Popular University, the APRA's main center for militant training. Lastly, despite their occasional differences, Mariátegui and Haya de la Torre shared a common vision on land (Helleiner and Rosales 2017), which was the main ecological issue of APRA's populism.

As Alimonda (2007, 82) points out, Mariátegui's political ecology addressed the issue of colonial exploitation and commodification of nature. The Seven Interpretative Essays10 open with a description of precolonial Peruvian society, which Mariátegui considered applicable to all of Latin America: “an economy […] that sprang spontaneously and freely from the Peruvian soil and people” (E1S1§1). The Inca Empire was a “grouping of agricultural and sedentary communities,” typical of a people who were “industrious, disciplined, pantheist, and simple” (E1S1§1). The result was “material comfort” and a very high social utility of work, linked to collective ownership of the land. The affinities with the Russian obshchina are evident, as Mariátegui explicitly pointed out.11 After colonization, which disrupted this human–natural harmony, “the Spaniards began to till the soil and mine the gold and silver. On the ruins and remnants of a socialist economy, they established the bases of a feudal economy” (E1S1§3). Mariátegui made a historical and social divide between two modes of organization: an Inca (socialist) mode which was still part of what we today call the “Holocene,” based on a balance between human societies and their ecosystems, and a colonial (feudal) mode that inaugurated what we call the “Anthropocene,” based on the intensive use of land and the exploitation of natural resources (first gold and silver, then guano and saltpeter). However, despite this huge historical break, traditional Inca customs persisted in modern Peru, thanks to the indigenous great majority of the population. Nevertheless, they did not achieve their social potential because of the capitalist organization of land that followed colonization. It was the latifundium system: large landholdings cultivated intensively, requiring forced labor (“gamonalismo”) from the indigenous population (E2S1§11, E3S2§1).

Just as the Incas were religiously attached to the land, its fertility and its renewal, and invented a social system capable of ensuring them, the Peruvian peasantry remained committed to these values and practices. Mariátegui highlighted the incredible “survival of the Indian ‘community’ and of elements of practical socialism in indigenous agriculture and life” (E3S1§7), such as cooperation and solidarity. They constituted the Indian's “only defense” against the elite's oppression. He “has never felt less free than when he has felt alone” (E3S9§8). This was why a land redistribution based on the individualist principle of ownership—the “liberal solution”—was inapplicable for Mariátegui. On the contrary, the only political solution was to reintroduce collective and communal ownership. For “the land tenure system determines the political and administrative system of the nation. […]. Democratic and liberal institutions cannot flourish or operate in a semi-feudal economy” (E3S2§3). Reintroducing collective ownership of the land would therefore make it possible both to democratize the republic and to reestablish a pantheistic relationship with nature that capitalism had been fighting against for centuries. As Mariátegui succinctly put it, “the earth cannot be populated and, above all, made fruitful with slaves” (E3S8§6). As such, democracy and the protection of ecosystems are two sides of the same political battle.12 In defending this idea, Peruvian Aprismo has developed a quite unique eco-populism in Latin America. Its fight for land redistribution reflects a “Pachamama” ecological sensibility that is specific to the Andean culture—we will find it again in Bolivian neopopulism with Evo Morales. Changing the land tenure system had not only a social purpose but also an ecological one, as it aimed to restore the harmony that linked the people to their ecosystem, destroyed by colonization and capitalism.

In current democratic theory, the historical relationship of populism with environmental issues remains totally unknown. This article seeks to fill that gap, by showing the centrality of land in the populist thinking, as a key connection between democratic and ecological goals.

In the founding experiences of populism, democracy is perceived in light of the opposition between a people whose rights cover those of nature, and the elites whose economic predation goes hand in hand with environmental degradation. If their eco-political issue is the land, their organizational form is the rural commune, a democratic institution based on the social value of nature, against the excesses of exploitation or speculation. For Russian populists, who are anticapitalists, land is the very foundation of democracy: As the fundamental aspiration of the oppressed masses and a space for human cooperation, it forms the basis of all democratic communities. For American populists, who do not reject capitalism, the right to land and the rights of nature are intertwined in a democratic capitalism to be built, capable of balancing economic and ecological value for the benefit of the majority. The environmental justice movement has repoliticized this democratic dimension by focusing on the question of how the people inhabit the earth. Although not central, this issue was also present in the People's Party: The right to land, as nature's right to preservation and renewal, was also the right of the oppressed social majority to inhabit its ecosystem. For Latin American populists, finally, the land is the basis of the social, cultural, and spiritual organization of the people: It is the link between the democratic community and its ecosystem.

This eco-populist tradition has nothing to do with the way the extreme right politicizes environmental issues. As far as climate change is concerned, the concept of climate skepticism seems more accurate, although it should be reformulated more rigorously as “climate denialism” (Jacques 2012, 9, 11), as the extreme right denies the existence of a scientifically proven phenomenon. As regards the relationship with fossil energies, which constitute a symbolic and mythical resource for nativism, the concept of “fossil fascism” is more heuristic (Malm and the Zetkin Collective 2021). Like eco-populism, its historicization is crucial. Fossil fascism's genesis can be traced back to the early stages of modern capitalism, with this “association between whiteness and fossil energy that is rising to the surface like magma in these times of climate collapse” (Malm and the Zetkin Collective 2021, 225).13

Like fossil fascism, eco-populism is still alive today. It is certainly not the main ideological reference for social movements. In fact, most contemporary environmental movements refer to other ideological frames, such as political autonomy, communalism, eco-feminism or eco-socialism. But some of them take up the opposition between the majority who are victims of environmental degradation and the elites who are deemed responsible for it, with the dual aim of radicalizing democracy and preserving our ecosystems. This is the case with certain neo-rural movements fighting to preserve natural resources, such as the French march against the Sainte-Soline water basins or the grassroots resistance to the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines in the Upper Midwest (Bosworth 2022). Behind defending “their” resources as common goods, they claim for the people's democratic sovereignty against productivist and fossil elites. In other movements, this democratic aspiration is clearly formalized, as in Extinction-rebellion (XR), whose main claim is a World Democratic Assembly to constitute a people against fossil governments. This eco-populist sensibility was also present in former democratic struggles, such as the occupying movements in the 2010s (Occupy Wall Street, Indignados, Nuit debout, Gezi Park, etc.) and the parties that emerged from them, such as La France Insoumise (Chazel and Dain 2023) or the US Democratic Socialism, with its transformative Green New Deal inspired by the Sunrise Movement. In all these cases, eco-populism is one way of politicizing the environment at the same time as democracy: a dual challenge whose topicality is constantly demonstrated by the worrying advance of the extreme right around the world.

The author declares no conflicts of interest.