25 years later, Olsen's first book enjoys revival

July 29, 2024 – DENTON – Jonathan Olsen appears to have struck a nerve. In a good way.

Olsen, chair of the Texas Woman's University Department of Social Sciences and Historical Studies and professor of political science, published his first book 25 years ago. The book, Nature and Nationalism: Right-Wing Ecology and the Politics of Identity in Contemporary Germany, was the product of years of research in Germany, and found good reception at the time.

Recently, however, he noticed something happening. Something really satisfying.

"Every once in a while I'd check to see who's writing on the topic," Olsen said. "A lot of them would cite my work. I remember one said, 'Jonathan Olsen's seminal book.' I love to hear that.

"Then, around 2019, suddenly it started being widely known again," he added. "I started to see my citations start to tick up. In the last five years, the book's gotten more citations than it did in the previous 20 years. It's a new generation of people coming up working on this topic."

It's a generation that was in their teens or grammar school or had yet to be born when Nature and Nationalism was published, but who are discovering Olsen's work and using it as a building block of their own research.

Problem is, Nature and Nationalism has long been out of print, and since it was published before eBooks became an industry staple, readers are left trying to find used copies, which are difficult to find.

But here's the really nice bit: there has been enough demand to warrant the book being republished later this year.

Nature and Nationalism was originally published by St. Martin's Press. In the intervening years of publisher musical chairs, St. Martin's Press was acquired by MacMillan Publishers, now known as Palgrave Macmillan, which focused on academic works while St. Martin's Press transitioned into mainstream and bestsellers.

But Olsen has an ongoing relationship with Palgrave Macmillan, which earlier this year published a book he co-wrote with Michael A. Hansen, Political Entrepreneurship in the Age of Dealignment: The Populist Far-Right Alternative for Germany.

"I approached the editor and said, hey, my book was published by St. Martin back in 1999," Olsen said. "I'd like to make this available. I know it's out of print, so maybe you could just send me the manuscript and I could have a PDF of it and I could send it off to people. The editor said, 'Well, why don't we look into republishing a book?' I said that'd be great."

The cover is getting a makeover, and this time there will be an eBook.

"It's funny when you find out 25 years later just how much staying power the book has."

This re-publication will not be a re-write of the original. Olsen reviewed the original manuscript, checking and updating footnotes and clarifying bits here and there, then wrote a new forward to explain the book's context.

Olsen took an interest in the rise of the German Green party and went to Germany on a Fulbright scholarship in 1988.

"I started seeing stuff about the far right and the Greens," Olsen said. "I thought that's really intriguing, and I came up with this basic framework."

Olsen spoke with two German colleagues, Thomas Jahn and Peter Wehling, and they shaped the direction of his research.

"Is there something to this far-right ecological view of nature?" Olsen said. "We usually associate environmentalism with the left. So what's the far right doing? A common perception, especially among the radical left, was that the far right was just trying to smuggle in far-right extremist ideas via environmental discourse and environmental rhetoric."

But Olsen found the German Greens had left- and right-wing greens.

"I discovered the far right's engagement with environmental questions goes back a long way. What I tried to do in the book was outline what I thought were the kind of essential ideas and conceptual categories of a right-wing ecology versus a left-wing ecology."

Olsen came up with three central categories of a far-right ecological worldview:

• Eco-naturalism – using nature as a blueprint for social and political order. "You can see versions of that on the left, but the right always read nature as having discipline, authority, order that feeds into a kind of a right-wing worldview, and how the nation is intimately connected with the environment."
• Eco-organicism – humans and nature have their own eco-niche. "Just as you talk about the properties of a particular ecosystem, these right wing or far-right groups wanted to talk about the nation as a part of that ecosystem, and that we should protect the unique characteristics of an ecosystem, that the flora and fauna that are indigenous to that ecosystem, and these far-right folks say it's the same with peoples. Peoples are indigenous and part of that particular ecosystem. The upshot of that for many of them was being very anti-immigration, anti-multiculturalism, all about kind of the ethno nation. The ethnically pure nation.

"I found some ideas on the left that toy with this idea. There's a theory propagated in the 1980s, and it still has a lot of currency, called bioregionalism, which suggests that the best thing for nature would be to kind of have political, social units based around a bioregion or an ecosystem. They talk about human beings belonging to that ecosystem as well. Their conclusions are different, they want democracy growing out of these things. But I thought it was very uncomfortably close, and I started to see more bleed over between right and left.

• Eco-authoritarianism – to save the environment, more authoritarian solutions are required to a perceived environmental crisis.

Olsen also traced the history of the far right in the environment in Germany, from 19th-century romantics up through the Nazis.

"I tried to be very careful not to argue that there's some unbroken line from German romanticism through Hitler, or from Hitler to these modern groups," Olsen said. "But I did say there is this tradition, which is where I get the title of Nature and Nationalism. There was a strong stream within all these conservation movements binding the nation to environmental questions and environmental protection.

"There was a group of German environmentalists who were committed national socialists, and they tried to pursue more extensive environmental protection within this ideological framework. In the early days of the German Greens, these far right people were gradually expelled and formed their new organizations.

"It was all very interesting to see these far-right ecological ideas. If you look at the far right today, they talk about the environment in two ways. Climate-change deniers who reject the idea that there's climate change or maybe accept it but they talk about the costs. At the same time, when they talk about climate change they talk about the protection of the homeland and environmentalism as a national task."

Nature and Nationalism received modest attention and fared well in its initial run. But in 2019, others began to build on Olsen's work, updating its ideas and making their own contributions. Olsen contacted one of these authors, Austrian Bernhardt Forchtner, who invited Olsen to contribute to a new book he was writing. Suddenly, Olsen found himself back in his old network. He was asked to give the keynote address to a conference in Sweden.

"I was very honored to be at this conference where people knew my book. I didn't think it would disappear completely, but not get the attention that it did. But it did. So I kind of got a second life."

The empirical data Olsen worked with is now dated, the specific parties he examined are not a force anymore and a lot of that generation of far right environmentalists are dead. But Olsen's conclusions and his three categories have survived.

"It's basically the same ideas and the same categories that I had back in 1999," he said. "People still talk about Jonathan Olsen's three categories of far-right ecology. That's cool."

Olsen, however, is not resting on those revived laurels. He is co-writing a book with TWU assistant professor of political science Vivienne Born, Critical Thinking in Political Science, to be published next year.