How fascist ideas permeate contemporary culture.
Part of what makes fascism unique as as a political concept is that it's not a stable ideology. It's more like a cultural process or phenomenon.
Kyle Boggs:I think you and I both write about the everydayness of it in a way that implicates people who might not immediately recognize either themselves or their own political affiliations.
April Anson:The discourse has been attentive to the fact that these claims are emerging from the identification of real problems, but then taking that lazy shortcut that circumvents any responsibility or even systemic critique.
Alexander Menrisky:Hello, I'm Alex Menrisky. I'm an assistant professor in English and affiliate faculty in American Studies at the University of Connecticut. And I'm the author of Everyday Ecofascism, Crisis and Consumption in American Literature from the University of Minnesota Press. I'm also the author of American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology, and I'm currently working on Routledge's Introduction to American Environmental Literature. That book, Everyday Ecofascism, is the reason I, we are here today, but I'm joined by two colleagues and friends whose work overlaps with mine in a lot of generative ways.
Alexander Menrisky:And I'm hoping that this conversation ends up being broader than everyday ecofascism itself to think about those connections across our work. So I'm going to hand it over to both of them to introduce themselves before we get started.
April Anson:Hi, all, and hello to the kitty meowing in the That was really lovely. My name is, Doctor. April Anson. I am an assistant professor in the departments of English and social and critical inquiry, specifically American studies and Native American and indigenous studies at the University of Connecticut. So I live and work on the land of the Eastern Pequot, Golden Hill Pagussett, Lenape, Mashantucket Pequot, Mohegan, Nipmuc, and Scattercook peoples who continue to steward this land, which is a place known as ground zero for Indigenous genocide on this continent.
April Anson:And I am absolutely thrilled to be here to talk about Alex's vital book, especially the ways that that genocidal history of land remains the subterranean ground out of which ecofascist ideas germinate. I've been fortunate to work on and think about these topics with Alex for many years before coming to work together at UConn. Our most formal collaboration to date has been co founding the Anti Creep Climate Initiative and co authoring Against the Ecofascist Creep with Bruno Seraphin at University of Connecticut, Shane Hall at Salisbury University, and Cassie Gallantine at University of Oregon. And the anti creep crew now includes Jane Henderson at Dartmouth. And I'm also currently finalizing my book on nineteenth century history of ecofascism with a more direct focus on literary genre than Alex's book.
April Anson:But this is certainly a kind of long standing conversation that Alex and I have been having and as well as with Kyle, Boggs. So I'm really looking forward to this conversation again and excited to, talk about the essential questions and topics everyday eco fascism takes up.
Kyle Boggs:And, my name is Kyle Boggs. I'm an associate professor in Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Boise State University. My PhD and my background academically is in rhetoric and gender studies. My forthcoming book actually coming out a couple weeks after Alex's is one I've been working on for a decade, at least. It's called Recreational Colonialism and the Rhetorical Landscapes of the Outdoors with Ohio State University Press.
Kyle Boggs:And that book kind of attends to the ways in which place based belongings are constituted by white settlers through outdoor recreation. You know, we'll talk about the overlap, I think, between eco fascism and settler colonialism. I think I write about it actually in a pretty similar way that Alex does is thinking about it as a process and a performance and embedded in a lot of different systems. But other things about me is that I run the Writing for Change journal at Boise State. It's a multimodal online publishing space out of Boise, Idaho.
Kyle Boggs:We publish thematic collections focused on change in different ways, essays, but also poetry and photography and and and all kinds of things. I'm a former journalist in Northern Arizona, which is where my book kind of extends from, extending from an issue I wrote about extensively, which was the expansion of a ski resort on the San Francisco Peaks. The peaks are also sacred to at least 13 regional tribes of the Southwest. So that controversy just, it raised a lot of questions about belonging and about some of the ways that settler colonialism persists in ways that we might not always feel comfortable talking about and confronting sort of the ways that it operates kind of in the background. Alex, I'm gonna jump into it with a question for you on your book.
Kyle Boggs:I just kind of wanted to get a general sense of, you know, term ecofascism is it's not a new term and you come at it with a fresh perspective in the sense that you don't offer a direct definition of it, but you describe it as an ongoing process wrapped up in different kinds of performances tied to land, tied to this idea, this this fetishization and purity and natural order and willingness to entertain mass death. But the way that you talk about it, I think, is gonna be a little unexpected for readers in a lot of ways. So I wanted to just give you the opportunity first to talk about what you mean when you talk about eco fascism.
Alexander Menrisky:Sure. That's a that's a great question. What we mean when we talk about eco fascism today. The word has sort of had sort of bothered me for a few years just because it was gaining in popularity for I think necessary reasons. We saw a series of kind of high profile acts of white supremacist violence in The United States that were also in part environmentally motivated.
Alexander Menrisky:I'm thinking of the El Paso shooter in 2019 and the Buffalo, New York shooter a few years later, both of whom wrote manifestos in which to varying degrees, they argued that their mass slaughter of Black and Brown bodies was tied to the need to conserve resources for true white Americans. And so the word was gaining currency in popular as well as academic media. Kyle, as you mentioned, it's not necessarily a new term. It merged out of critical retrospectives on the conservationist element in Nazi Germany, especially. But also I think it's important to point out how that the word has been in use kind of across the political spectrum over the past forty or so years.
Alexander Menrisky:You know, commentators and right leaning media in the 1980s and nineties would use the word eco fascist to describe eco saboteurs, folks, you know, affiliated with Earth First, for example. And oftentimes just environmentalism more broadly, suggestion being that environmentalism was about controlling people's actions, which of course, you know, environmentalism is fundamentally about, you know, agreed upon limits to human behavior. But on the right, eco fascism became a kind of convenient cudgel. And then more recently, it sort of emerged to describe these very high profile acts of right wing violence and sort of came across media,
Kyle Boggs:I'd
Alexander Menrisky:say over the past eight years to refer to any sort of right wing evocation of environmental themes across the board. And that was sort of what was puzzling me about it is that just the kind of sheer variety of activity and speech to which that term was being applied. And I didn't think enough attention was, was being given to the term itself. Right? Why is eco fascism a good word to describe these things?
Alexander Menrisky:And is the fascism part even accurate? You know, is that an accurate term? Why not eco xenophobia? Why not eco racism? You know, why not eco conservatism?
Alexander Menrisky:There are all sorts of words we could use. Why is eco fascism makes sense as a catchall? And I don't think it does make sense as a catchall, but for me, part of this project was more precisely defining what eco fascism is. And that for me is also sort of an historical project, right? Fascism is an ism like liberalism or conservatism.
Alexander Menrisky:It's not like a real tangible thing that exists in the world. It's a heuristic that helps us describe certain patterns in political behavior. So for me, was about, okay, what is fascism then? As opposed to something like conservatism, liberalism, socialism, etcetera. So I really kind of turned to the work of comparative fascist studies, thinking historically, you know, any definition of fascism is necessarily going to kind of be a normative definition.
Alexander Menrisky:What, you know, what are the patterns in history that have made sense to give their own label? And the work of comparative fascist studies, there is a certain political tendency that makes sense to label fascism. But what was really, I think, one of the most important findings in comparative fascist studies is that fascism, unlike conservatism or liberalism or socialism or even anarchism, is not really a coherent stable ideology. It doesn't kind of have a body of philosophy or theory. And it wasn't necessarily the sort of organized political movement in the same way that, you know, progressive movements or even conservative movements have been in the past.
Alexander Menrisky:One really high profile scholar of fascism had kind of described it as a scavenger, fascism as a scavenger. It kind of cherry picked from the culture at large things that worked, things that were appealing. And part of what makes fascism unique as as a political concept is that it's not a stable ideology. It's more like a cultural process or phenomenon, maybe even a kind of an emergent quality of politics in general, one in which certain storytelling patterns identify certain people as belonging to a specific community in response to a period of perceived decline or crisis. And my kind of like big argument is sort of that if we wanna understand eco fascism in a in a precise way or use that word in a precise way, we have to understand it similarly.
Alexander Menrisky:Right? And that also includes understanding that fascism was not limited to the far right historically, because so much of it was based on storytelling patterns, cultural storytelling patterns that circulated widely and got people on board with the more kind of concrete material political aspects of what fascism was in terms of surveillance, repression, etcetera. And actual, of course, acts of political violence. It's really important to understand that people across the political spectrum flocked to it, left, right, and center, far right and communist. Folks in Nazi Germany, folks in Mussolini's Italy from across the political spectrum found these movements and regimes attractive.
Alexander Menrisky:And that's a really important thing that I think gets left out a lot is that, fascism historically is not limited to right wing ideology. It was a broader storytelling pattern that consolidated, systems of racial supremacy. And my contention is essentially that if we wanna use the term eco fascism, we have to understand it in the same way, right? That it's an environmentalist discourse that does the same thing, that appeals to people across the political spectrum, that's not limited to the far right so that people across the spectrum can maybe participate in these storytelling patterns and in turn contribute to, at least rhetorically, if not actively, these consolidations of white supremacist sentiment in environmentalist contexts.
April Anson:In answering Kyle's question of like the big picture, you turn to El Paso and Christchurch and then Buffalo. But my sense is because your commitments to discovering or identifying these kind of unintended iterations of supremacy, my hunch is that some of the project was seeded earlier. And so I was wondering if you could just talk about like a moment or a kind of origin point or a moment where you had that sort of recognition.
Alexander Menrisky:Yeah, of course. And we'll have to go back probably. Kyle, you said you've been working on your book for ten years. I mean, realistically, it was it was about ten years ago that I guess technically started the project because it grew out of an article I wrote. In fact, when I was still a graduate student working on it, my dissertation.
Alexander Menrisky:And I ended up writing this article that was completely unrelated because I had read a story in the New Yorker about Ayahuasca and kind of the resurgence and popularity of organic hallucinogens, not just Ayahuasca, but psilocybin. Sort of not just why they were becoming popular again, but also the way people talked about them. And then the article was talking about figures like Terence and Dennis McKenna, these big psychedelic gurus of the eighties and the new age. And it really stood out to me at that point in time because, you know, I was a young scholar working on my dissertation. I was really interested in this kind of appeals to self dissolution, the idea of the explosion or expansion of the self.
Alexander Menrisky:And, you know, psychedelic discourse has been like right in there the whole time. I became really interested in that and I started exploring more about the rhetoric of psychedelics today and in the- in the 1960s and really thinking about how people talked about them. And I was also at the time, I was reading some fiction that was also kind of playing with these ideas in relation to other more kind of overtly political phenomena. And one thing that I was really interested in was the tendency for these psychedelic gurus to claim that by dissolving the self and sort of accessing the state of intimacy with the ecosystem, that they were not just enlightened, but sort of like environmentally superior, right? They had figured it out.
Alexander Menrisky:They had accessed a state of nature that escaped the rest of us. They had created this sort of situation of environmentalist privilege or at one point in everyday ecofascism I refer to this thing as their use of psychedelics was for them an appeal to environmentalist exoneration. Like this idea being that they were closer to nature and they'd have absolved themselves of any sort of damage that humans might do, you know, any sort of ecological disruption. They were claiming for themselves this sort of privilege. Right?
Alexander Menrisky:And especially over the past few years, and especially as global climate changes, the manifestations of global climate changes intensify, you often stumble across just these kinds of casual psychedelic enthusiasts online kind of writing about how they're not responsible for that. And they deserve to survive the calamities, you know, at hand because they've kind of accessed this, this state of purity. In one series I was reading at the same time that I was thinking about this things was Margaret Atwood's mad at him trilogy. And it was just kind of chance that led me to be reading that series at the same time I was thinking about psychedelics. There's this group of people in that trilogy that takes those ideas seriously.
Alexander Menrisky:And I found that really fascinating that she was sort of dramatizing that kind of argument, but she wasn't just dramatizing that sort of argument. And this isn't really spoiling the trilogy. It kind of starts off with readers understanding that most of humanity has been wiped out and it's been wiped out because of this biopolitical project by a tech bro, basically, you know, this tech bro, Craig. And what was kind of standing out to me as I was reading this was, you know, a lot of critics were sort of seeing this group of people, these psychedelic enthusiasts, and they're a Christian sacked that preaches like vegetarianism. And a lot of people were reading these as the answer to Crake, this more communalist mutual aid based alternative to Crake's biopolitical project.
Alexander Menrisky:But when I was reading it, was kind of seeing something quite different. I was seeing how this group of people, they're called the Gods Gardeners in the novel, these psychedelic enthusiasts were actually, for me, Atwood was juxtaposing them, lining them up and asking us to kind of consider how the really overt fascist project, this eugenic project by the character Craig was actually being paralleled by the psychedelic project of these everyday people and just in the kind of everyday psychedelic use they were participating in. Because both of these groups, Crake on the one hand, overt fascist, and the Godsgardners on the others, they were both kind of making the same argument that only certain types of people deserve to survive the calamity at hand, which is why when humanity kind of goes extinct, the gardeners aren't necessarily like upset about it. They're happy that it's happening. But the important part is that they think they are worthy and no one else of surviving.
Alexander Menrisky:And a large part of that is the psychedelic intimacy that they're kind of cultivating. So I was writing that years ago, and then I started a completely unrelated project that was about food traditions in Appalachia, specifically among queer writers in Appalachia. And as I was working on that, same sort of pattern, I started noticing, right? How certain writers were appealing to the consumption of certain rustic foods. And then I'm using that, you know, hearty mountain food, right?
Alexander Menrisky:It was all about the way people were talking about it. It wasn't so much about the actual food ways of people but the way in which certain writers and activists were framing those food ways. So I kept noticing all these everyday contexts in which people were replicating this narrative of privileged environmental belonging in the face of catastrophe. In many cases, in situations where they did not just believe people were going to die due to environmental crises, but actively wanted it to happen, to purify the earth with the expectation that they would live. And oftentimes in these everyday contexts, right, that seem, you know, they're not like overt fascism, right?
Alexander Menrisky:Or outward juxtaposes the gardeners and the overtly fascist craic for a reason, because my contention is that there's sort of asking readers to think about these two things alongside each other. And I started thinking about parallels like that in other kinds of contexts as well, and thinking about storytelling patterns. And then when I started noticing the word eco fascism and more currency and started really looking into it, I was like, oh, I think this is what's happening here. It's the kind of storytelling pattern and not just over political movements. Right.
Alexander Menrisky:But there are these threads throughout American culture in which people are making these appeals to kind of a privileged environmental sensibility and their worthiness for survival when environmental catastrophe comes. Those narratives, even if they're reiterated by really well intentioned people, just given, you know, the histories of The US, those narratives often end up kind of being told over this scaffolding that the tellers are not necessarily acknowledging that's highly stratified based on race, the legacies of settler colonialism, disability, etcetera. So that, and then Kyle, you'd mentioned the word unintentional, right? When you think about those narratives and you notice them in the world and you start kind of thinking about, well, where did they come from? Right?
Alexander Menrisky:The tellers of these narratives often aren't necessarily aware of that kind of scaffolding underneath the logics they're reiterating.
Kyle Boggs:Yeah, I think one of the challenges of writing a book like this on a topic that's kind of a moving target, especially over a period of time, is that the world is changing, right, as you're writing the book. I have a question about that. How you went about organizing the book as you were writing about it and why you made the decisions that you made. I think that the book reads very well. I love the organization of the interludes.
Kyle Boggs:And I just I wondered what it was like for you writing this book during the last ten years.
Alexander Menrisky:Yeah, of course, the way the book is organized is the chapters are pretty standard length, you know, like there's an introduction, there's chapter one, and then there's an interlude, which is just a very short, it'd be like, I don't know, 2,500 word kind of mini chapter. Then there's two more chapters, another interlude, two more chapters, and then a conclusion. The interludes were kind of a late addition. As for how I chose to organize the book, you know, most of the chapters are named after objects. And an object is sort of like it's a reductive word and I go to great lengths to pick that word apart, but but I'll just say the objects in question being land, tools, food, psychedelics, and even contagion.
Alexander Menrisky:Land and contagion, like a lot of problematic reasons to describe those two things as objects, but I promise there's a a logic behind it. To go back to the the psychedelics and the food cultures examples, there's an act that's shared by both of these, even if the objects themselves are different, and it's consumption. You know, people are consuming psychedelics, people are consuming food. One could argue that the settler colonial history of The States is a drama of the consumption of land as a commodity, even if it was not a commodity for its original inhabitants. What I was sort of like noticing is that in, in a lot of these cases where these stories were being told in which people were positioning themselves as the privileged inhabitants of, or inheritors of a purified earth after ecological catastrophe, the trope of consumption kept coming up.
Alexander Menrisky:They're engaging with some kind of object. And it was that engagement that granted these speakers the sense of kind of purity that they were arguing for. Right? Psychedelics, think is probably the one that makes the most sense, you know, like where the idea of consuming a psychedelic, an organic compound creates this psychological situation in which you are closer to nature is similar on a more kind of like biophysical level, thinking about consuming certain foods as tying one to the land. I used the word scaffolding earlier.
Alexander Menrisky:These stories are being built on a scaffolding that aren't acknowledged or understood by the people doing the talking. And for me that scaffolding is The US's settler colonial history, right? This consumption of land and the conquering of land and later the recreational use of land. Often these activities go hand in hand with representations of them that are suggesting that it's the activity itself that gives one a privileged place upon it. Throughout the book, I kind of trace lines from those original acts of the consumption of land to activities like psychedelic use to particular food cultures in The US.
Alexander Menrisky:And so I kind of start the book with that kind of like historical background, you know, thinking about how settler colonial activities were often accompanied and still are today with storytelling that positions the act of consumption itself as the basis for one's privileged belonging on land. And then I look at how that kind of throughout history, it gets attached to other objects for contextually specific reasons. And I think I moved from the land to the tools, to the food, to the drugs, to contagion. And it moves more or less chronologically from that first chapter. It really kind of goes backward and forward again in time, about like the El Paso and Buffalo shooters, their rhetoric, and then kind of like going way back and showing how it resonates with nineteenth century, seizures of indigenous land and then the representations accompanying them.
Alexander Menrisky:And then then kind of moving back through history to the present and thinking about how that logic really kind of continued and continues, not just in kind of like right wing movements, the wise use movement of the nineties, but also in the kind of rise of modern environmentalism in the sixties and seventies as well, which is often associated with the left. So really thinking about storytelling patterns across the political spectrum, right? Storytelling these patterns that are particular to an entire culture and not just to a particular political affiliation. The interludes, as I said, kind of came to me late because as I was writing the book, it was important to me to spend at least a little bit of time really thinking about resistances to those storytelling patterns. What other kind of storytelling traditions are there that face the one I was looking at sort of head on and offer kind of a different sort of narrative in response.
Alexander Menrisky:And the conclusion as well is kind of clapbacks. But I think clapback is the wrong word. A lot of the sort of patterns that I'm looking at are arguably in some ways older than the kind of eco fascist narrative patterns. I look at Tommy Pico, who Kumeyaay poet, who's really thinking with indigenous storytelling traditions. The subject of the chapter on food is actually, I would say probably one of the richest writers to work with for this project.
Alexander Menrisky:Was really thinking about the gay Appalachian poet, essayist, and novelist Jeff Mann. Even as he is sort of doing the thing I've been talking about where consuming food makes one a privileged inhabitant of land at others' expense, he's also really inconsistent and at the same time is really gesturing toward and working within other storytelling patterns that I find far more generative in line with writers like Tommy Pico. And I also work with Gloria Anzaldua in thinking about these alternatives. So the second interlude is actually about him. I moved from a chapter where I'm kind of really critical of his rhetoric and then move into one where I'm really celebratory of other instances in his writing.
Alexander Menrisky:He's a great example of how really kind of genuinely progressive people, writers, activists, teachers can work within these storytelling patterns despite themselves, right? But also still be providing us with really generative work at the same time. That was the tricky balancing act of this book is that because, you know, with comparative fascist studies understanding of fascism in large part, not just kind of the concrete material political movement and regime, but also so much about broader cultural storytelling patterns is that I found it really necessary to approach a lot of the writers I worked with with a great deal of generosity, despite the storytelling patterns I was seeing here. Because we all are implicated to varying degrees in these storytelling patterns, and we might have ourselves participated in them in the past. It's not my goal to demonize people, right?
Alexander Menrisky:But to instead really think about those storytelling patterns in an effort to think about where they come from and what their implications are.
April Anson:I kind of want to ask you to sit with your method or elaborate on your method rather, a bit more in thinking about political genre, its relationship to literary genre and literary criticism. And then this term that I found so, useful as threshold objects. And what is the relationship do you see between the three? Why talk about figures like the patriotic producer rather than stereotypes or tropes or language more familiar to literary criticism. So yeah, if you could just talk about like method and and how you see political genre relating to some of your methods or pushing back and then where threshold objects sits in that space.
Alexander Menrisky:Yeah, sure. That's a great and such a huge question. I'll try to do it justice. So the threshold object term that you're referring to April, that's the phrase I use for the land, the tools, the food, the drugs, the contagion. And again, is such a tricky word, and I won't get into it here.
Alexander Menrisky:But for me, the term threshold objects, it's not about the objects themselves. It's not about land writ large. It's not about psychedelics writ large. It's about how they're being represented. Certain qualities of certain representations make objects threshold objects, if that makes sense.
Alexander Menrisky:And the word threshold was for me, it's just an indicator of that sort of movement that I've been referring to. You know, engagement with organic hallucinogens enables one to cross a threshold into a state of environmental innocence. One way I put it is think like Eve's apple in reverse. You know, that's kind of how it's working for these people. It's a movement into like a spatial and temporal purity, make environmentalists great again, right?
Alexander Menrisky:And consuming these objects enables one to cross that threshold. So that's what I mean by that term. As for what you said about, what's the relationship between political genre, these broader storytelling patterns that circulate across conventional political lines and literature, right? Representation. And the way I'll put it right now is just the way I put it.
Alexander Menrisky:I teach a big 100 student lecture in literature and environment. I tell students I want them to think of literary texts sort of like collapsed accordions. Literary texts have the potential to unfold ideas we take for granted in the world around us. I normally start semesters by asking students to like define environment, which is a famously impossible word to define. And then we move immediately into kind of knocking those definitions down.
Alexander Menrisky:Literary texts encode storytelling patterns that circulate more broadly, but they're very useful. They put a microscope on those ideas and how those storytelling patterns circulate in our society. They might, you know, take those storytelling patterns very seriously, but they might also be kind of teasing them apart. And they might also be thinking about alternatives and they might also be thinking about implications and ramifications and histories behind those ideas. And that's what's valuable to me when teaching literary studies to students.
Alexander Menrisky:It's a language that's been valuable to me and something that students tend to really grasp. But even if it's sort of like a really simple metaphor that has its own plot holes in it, so to speak, I think that it captures my own approach to writing about literature pretty well, which is that these literary texts, a lot of them are working with these storytelling patterns that you can also observe in news media, in manifestos written by mass murderers. You know, they're working with these storytelling traditions. Some of them are working with them quite genuinely. Others are a little more critical and kind of canny about it.
Alexander Menrisky:Louise Erdrich is a great example of a novelist who takes these storytelling patterns and pulls them apart. Future Home of the Living God is the one I really focus on in the book. The novel that came after that, the sentence about the COVID-nineteen pandemic, which was less speculative, far more realist, also does a lot of work in this vein. And I think the fact that it does that work in a realist and not a speculative mode is, is really important. It's really instructive.
Alexander Menrisky:That's a book that is in a lot of ways about settlers appropriating native identities also as a way to claim environmental innocence. So the, yeah, the, I mean, the accordion metaphor is useful with students, but in many ways a little simplistic, I think it gestures to the way I think about the relationship between literature and broader cultural narratives and why reading literature and studying it is really valuable.
April Anson:I would add too that your metaphor makes an implied argument that addresses what Kyle's earlier question about. How do we talk about fascism and eco fascism when we know it's dynamic and syncretic and unable to be stably defined. I feel like the metaphor of the accordion is actually an argument for why literary methods are absolutely essential to tracking. Okay, there's a stable logic here, but it's getting packaged and reframed in different ways. Literary analysis is so equipped to do that kind of analysis.
Kyle Boggs:Yeah. And I think that's really crucial to that idea that I think you play with throughout the book, which is there's a vast difference between one's intentions and the effects of a rhetorical act, a speech act. We love that in rhetorical theory because the author's intention, you know, often matters far less than the rhetorical effect that it has. And so I wanted to talk about that just a little bit and a little bit about settler colonial theory and its relationship to eco fascism and in the way that I think you and I both write about it as the sort of everydayness of it in a way that implicates people who might not immediately recognize either themselves or their own political affiliations alongside. So it's easy, I think, for a lot of people to, and rightly so, condemn mass violence and the El Paso shooter and and and all of that, and all of these really overt expressions of eco fascism, conscious commitments to the projects of fascism.
Kyle Boggs:And I think the same is true for for settler colonialism. When European settlers first arrived on this continent, they brought more than just themselves. They brought entire ways of understanding and being in the world. They brought Eurocentric meaning making systems, philosophies, religions, codified today through legal, educational, economic institutions. It comes out in land use policy.
Kyle Boggs:It comes out in property ownership, everyday things like family and marriage, and it's certainly wrapped up in supremacist systems based on ideas of race. When I talk about settler colonialism, I talk about it in terms of the way that everyday folks sustain the systems upon which settler colonialism depends in everyday kind of practices. So we're not just talking about settler colonialism, we're talking about capitalism, heteropatriarchy and white supremacy that operate in ways that are like often unintentional. These are often well meaning folks. It's a little easier, I think, when we're talking about settler colonialism.
Kyle Boggs:There's like a language for it that's wrapped in identity that people can kind of see themselves in and understand their history. My ancestors are European settlers who came here and then how is my kind of identity wrapped up in that legacy? And I feel like it's a little bit trickier with eco fascism because people are not going to readily try to identify with their inner fascists, right? I wonder if you can kind of go through some examples throughout the book that I think some people might find surprising but illuminating in the sense that like when you're talking about eco fascism, you're not just talking about the stuff that will make the newspaper, right? But you're talking about these simple like quotidian expressions that constellate within the orbit of eco fascism.
Alexander Menrisky:Yeah, sure. That's such a great question. I also think this is a great question for all of us. Think, I mean, depending on the person you're talking to, is a language, there's a vocabulary for folks to at the very least try to come to terms. And by which I mean white Euro American settlers, To confront the histories that put them here and their role in sustaining it.
Alexander Menrisky:Eco fascism is a little trickier because that word fascism is just such a There's an interview recently with Robert O. Paxton, kind of one of the giants of comparative fascist studies about how useful the word fascism is to describe the political phenomena of today. And he was very kind of blunt saying like, oh yeah, I think it's fascism. Like it checks all of the boxes. If we think about fascism, again, not as a stable ideology, but as a phenomenon, as a process, he's like, it's very historically resonant.
Alexander Menrisky:Does that mean it's useful to use the word right in this context? Has the rhetorical context changed? Has the rhetorical situation changed? And he thinks, it has. And I think that's one of the tricky things about what you're talking about is that fascism is such a loaded term and people have such a visceral reaction to that term.
Alexander Menrisky:Is it historically the case that people left, right, and center supported and like fully enthusiastically supported fascist regimes in the 1930s? Yes, a 100%, not just in Germany, but in The United States. People in The United States thought it was like it looked great until Hitler started invading other countries and after effects were made clear. But people were on board with it. Even in The U S people were on board with it worldwide.
Alexander Menrisky:It was attractive to people for a variety of reasons, not least because of the kind of storytelling patterns. And there were explicitly fascist movements here in The U. S. That were building on that. And that's just to kind of reiterate that that is what fascism is, right?
Alexander Menrisky:That it is a left, right and center thing, but the storytelling patterns are left, right and center. And that's what makes it so tricky. But because it sort of has that people have that visceral reaction because of what such an important world historical event as World War II kind of lent to it is that it's really kind of hard to have that conversation with people today where you say this storytelling pattern can be accurately described as fascist, like let's talk about it, right? And that's a really tricky thing to do.
Kyle Boggs:Yeah, people used to actually in rhetoric, it was kind of a running joke that if you're in a debate with someone like the first person to utter Hitler loses. Exactly. And this is another thing that's really important
Alexander Menrisky:to kind of say, right? Is that since so much of what can be described as fascism is about cultural storytelling, we can point at something and say, that's fascism. I know it by its effects. I know it by the political violence it's giving rise to or the rhetoric it's giving rise to. But the road by which a given culture takes to get there is necessarily going to be different because every culture has its own particular historical conditions and storytelling patterns.
Alexander Menrisky:And that's why Paxton's absolutely right. Does it make sense to draw comparisons to Hitler? Not necessarily because this is not 1930s Germany, right? It's a complete we're in a completely different context. Like naming the process as fascism can be meaningful, but saying fascism, yes.
Alexander Menrisky:Nazism, no. That's a great way to put it, right? Is that we can describe the phenomenon as fascism, but can we describe it as Nazism? No, because Nazism was a very particular thing. I use this phrase in the book.
Alexander Menrisky:April used it in her question, political genre, right? The word political genre is useful, right? We might observe a political genre called fascism in numerous contexts worldwide. The genre is the same, but the cast of characters and the setting changes, right? So we can recognize the genre as being constant, but the cast of characters will change.
April Anson:Yeah, I'm wondering since settler logics play such a foundational role in your analysis of ecofascism, I'm wondering in the context of a current moment where we see those logics travel, we'll say, how you're thinking about eco fascism's relationship to fascism, but also liberalism. Thinking about the settler project is so wedded to liberalist explanations and justifications for its violence. I know comparative fascist studies has a lot to say about the relationship between liberalism and fascism, but I'm wondering if you can locate eco fascism kind of in that matrix.
Alexander Menrisky:Yeah, that is such a big question. Thinking about, I had referenced a few times this chapter on tools, which is probably the least self explanatory of all of the kind of titles. And that's really a reference to a particular use of that word or a particular kind of resonance with that word in the late sixties and in the seventies through the eighties. And I'm thinking of the Whole Earth Catalog and I'm thinking of the tagline on the Whole Earth Catalog, Access to Tools. Whole Earth Catalog was this project of this guy Stuart Brand who was really frustrated with many currents in environmentalism as modern environmentalism was kind of taking shape in the 70s.
Alexander Menrisky:He was frustrated with how it was turning towards a more managerial, you know, like environmental policy happens through courts. And then it's a top down imposition of regulations. He was really dissatisfied with that. People look back just the counterculture writ large, which is itself more of an obfuscating term than anything else. They think leftism.
Alexander Menrisky:They think hippies. But the counterculture was quite politically muddled. Right? And we can trace a lot of threads from there to right wing movements today as well. And the counterculture was exactly what the word says.
Alexander Menrisky:It was countercultural, countercultural and that doesn't mean left or right. And Stuart Brand was this big figurehead of the counterculture. He really identified with this arm of it that was very like free markets, free minds and free markets. You know, the guy who popularized the term counterculture, Theodore Rozak, has this really little known other book he wrote, From Satori to Silicon Valley. I think he published it in the '80s.
Alexander Menrisky:And it's him tracing how many elements of the counterculture were the seeds that gave rise to the Silicon Valley that was taking shape in the eighties and nineties, but also his observations really hold up today. He was really thinking about how the free markets part for many sectors of the counterculture was really tied to the kind of like free minds part and other movements like free speech, sexual liberation, etcetera, and anti war movement, right? All of these things were kind of bound up together. There was this big financial conservatism strain in many sectors of the counterculture and Stuart Brand was that. And he was really interested in creating this resource, the whole earth catalog that was about individual choice and individual lifestyle and having access to certain tools through this sort of marketplace, you know, in order to kind of establish oneself as an environmentalist subject.
Alexander Menrisky:In some cases, not Sue Brand himself, but others who are working within this similar logic. In some cases, they bring it to that place I've been talking about where it's not just access to tools to be environmentally self sufficient, it's access to tools so that you are environmentally innocent and in effect superior in ways that really kind of most obviously referred back to the rhetoric of land entitlement, settler colonial land entitlement, lots of references to Jefferson, but specifically those elements of Jefferson that were really interested in the idea of taking and working on land in particular ways to render one the appropriate subject, not just of that land, but of The United States as a nation. Right? And this kind of like element of the birthplace of American liberalism, right? And that really kind of comes through in Brand's project.
Alexander Menrisky:And it really kind of extends into this work by other writers. One of my big touches on this Ernest Kallenbach in his novel Ecotopia, really taking that idea a step further to not only living self sufficiently on the land, but specifically being a privileged subject of the land and the earth as a whole, because one has done the proper consuming of the proper tools in the proper marketplace, according to this tradition of American liberalism.
April Anson:Yeah, I think that's really helpful. And your reading of Ecotopia, I felt very alive, the specter of Michael Schellenberger. Thinking about Paul Ehrlich driving out into the Redwoods and beginning population bomb with this speculative future he's imagining, right, where he can't even get out there because it's too crowded. And of course, Weston in Ecotopia. And then we have the very real figure of Michael Schellenberger, who came to prominence as a supposed environmental activist and now is a fear mongering right wing figure for the homelessness problem.
April Anson:And all that to say is I think that your reading of Ecotopia, really does allow us to kind of anticipate rather than be shocked by a figure like Schellenberger because he is really right in line with this kind of storytelling pattern that you're following.
Kyle Boggs:I think also, I mean, the chapter on Contagion, and you you talk about when you reference it in the beginning in the introduction. I feel like when reflecting on COVID, you know, for example, like, that feels really recent for a lot of readers. And I know, April, you've written about that too, about quotes during that time of, like, humans are the virus and the world would be better, you know, without humans. You know, you recall Ken Josie's talking about it as a lazy, lazy ecofascism. I think that's really poignant because it's like a rhetorical trick that's done unintentionally there when the like a human, right, is kind of stand in for the systems that produce the inequality.
Kyle Boggs:It's lazy because, you know, humans in this context refers to capitalism or other supremacist systems that wreak havoc on the planet. And it's lazy because, you know, this analysis naturalizes those systems as a given. They're sort of naturalized in that framework. I just think the contagion example is really useful. That idea of the contagion, the contaminant, it comes out throughout the book in various ways through like invasive sort of population, and you bring it up in the land chapter.
Kyle Boggs:The land is sort of preserved in a in a kind of pristine way. It speaks to that idea of the fetishization of purity and this association with whiteness as natural and everything else is not how you weave all of those together. It's really well done.
Alexander Menrisky:I appreciate that, Kyle. And I do think I am gonna bounce the question to April at first, because so much of that chapter I built on a lot of April's observations. And I took it in the direction of kind of anti vaccination rhetoric. And I'd like to talk about that, but I actually wonder if April can talk first a little bit about the COVID-nineteen pandemic, because I think that really sets the stage for a lot of it.
April Anson:Oh, gosh. Well, thank you both. I kind of had this similar moment of recognition, maybe that as to what you describe, Alex, in your early grad student paper, is that when COVID had first hit, or at least hit on a global scale, and we were seeing all these memes, it may be a product of growing up in Eugene, Oregon, or Kalapuya Land, that my social media feeds were filled with people sharing these memes. And then, you know, tuning into podcasts, and I hear people like Donna Haraway saying climate change is Earth's revenge. And I just it triggered such a deep rage, if I'm being really honest.
Kyle Boggs:The memes you're talking about, like dolphins in Venice Venice canals and stuff like those kind of produced images.
April Anson:Yes. Thank you. Yes. Air air pollution. Nature is healing.
Kyle Boggs:Clear up.
Alexander Menrisky:Yeah. Humans are the virus. Yeah.
April Anson:Yes. We're the virus. Thank you for asking for clarification on that. Yeah. And they, you know, there were all different iterations of it, but they really cohered around this exactly as you explain, Alex, this obfuscation, acquittal, absolution.
April Anson:It felt like such a, yeah, to return to Kit and Joshi's term, like a lazy way to describe what we were all experiencing. And a way that felt like just a, it was a disconnector, right? In this moment where we all were, what I was feeling like this collective desire and real need for connection. To have all these people in my social media feeds and philosophers that I had up until that point really admired share this, it was circulating in a way that made me feel like it was making just a it was triggering a sort of common sense for audiences. It just felt like such a precise example of this overlap that I have been really dedicated to studying for a very long time of, you know, this is not a right wing phenomenon.
April Anson:This is not a left wing phenomenon. Why is it meeting in the center where I have my like libertarian or even like far right Christian folks in my social media feeds and my far left radical deep ecologists sharing the same sentiment just was so clearly an example of what Mark Rifkin calls settler common sense. It felt like the scaffolding in your language, Alex, has been laid since, you know, before the beginning of what's currently called America. In this idea that certain people are entitled to land, certain people are entitled to a kind of purification through land, that claim doing not only all the work of, a kind of speculative fiction of like claiming it as a future fact and then citing that future fact as justification for violence in the present, but also a way of completely obscuring the operations of that claim. It's a win win for settlers like me who want to disavow my responsibility, but also claim that I have a kind of higher order knowledge that you, I think, really beautifully explain, Alex.
April Anson:So that's sort of the background for the the COVID nineteen stuff that I have written. I found your chapter, Alex, so, so deeply satisfying because, of course, we're in this moment of make America healthy again and anti vax sentiment, all of which I think the discourse has been fairly attentive to the fact that these claims are emerging from the identification of real problems with big pharma, with global health, etc. But then taking that lazy shortcut that circumvents any responsibility or even systemic critique and blaming, you know, the people who are going to and have been suffering first and foremost. So yeah, thank you, Alex, for that that chapter and for obviously for your whole book, but that one was really that was a deep, deeply cathartic read for me.
Alexander Menrisky:Thank you. I love the way you just put that at the end, right? About the lazy shortcut to systemic critique. There's one way to kind of sum up the critical consensus in comparative fascist studies on the classical fascist regimes. That's kind of it.
Alexander Menrisky:It's sort of like fascism, it might just be a word for this kind of lazy scapegoating shortcut to paper over real kind of systemic social issues rather than actually addressing them. I see that in so much of anti vaxxer rhetoric. The one thing that I was really interested in in the anti vaxxer rhetoric is that anti vaxxers aren't really normally against inoculation itself. It's just they prefer what's called variolation, which is just exposure to a disease or to a virus or bacteria such that one contracts a disease and runs through it. And that's quote unquote natural immunity, right?
Alexander Menrisky:That's like a bodily purification thing and it's an avoidance of what one activist called toxic shots. And one thing that's kind of worth pointing out, right, is how much the anti vaxxer movement appropriates rhetoric from the environmental justice movement about industrial contamination. And that comes from very real pointed necessary critique. But that sort of appropriation often kind of really bastardizes it. And it covers up kind of the actual real environmental justice concerns from which they're taking the rhetoric, right?
Alexander Menrisky:Because so much of the lifestyles of folks who are statistically more likely to be anti vaxxers is based on the very sort of contamination of communities of color, working class communities, and native communities. So much of those lifestyles are based on those sorts of contaminations that kind of produced that environmental justice critique whose rhetoric anti vaxxers are sort of just bumming off of in ways that cover up their origins. Right? And you see it also on a more superficial level, like in interviews with anti vaxxers or in their social media posts, quite boldly kind of saying vaccines aren't for me. They're for quite literally they'll say things like they're for the more impure like blood of like other sorts of people.
Alexander Menrisky:Vaccines would only ruin my perfect body. There's a pretty prominent activist at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Emily Martin, this anthropologist who studies the way cultures approach disease or talk about disease. In the 90s when she was writing one book about the AIDS epidemic, she was really noticing what was calling like kind of like a new social Darwinism that was just based on this not just assumption that certain bodies were kind of like cleaner and stronger than others and able to withstand disease, but also this idea that was kind of emerging in the eighties of like training one's body to be resilient in the face of disease by like purposefully eating raw meat or contaminated foods or drinking from dirty streams. Like people were actually like suggesting this stuff and people suggest it today, right? As a way of training the body's immunity.
Alexander Menrisky:And so there's this kind of emphasis on consumption again, where people are consuming certain things in an effort to demonstrate their purity environmentally. That kind of logic is what you see running through the anti vaxxer movement. April and I talk about it all the time. I think a journalist coined the phrase the wellness to fascism pipeline, the ease with which people seem to be able to shuttle from like new age mysticism to that idea that their bodies are pure and worthy of survival at the expense of others. It's just such a clean motion.
Alexander Menrisky:And I guess not for nothing am I really interested in a lot of new age writers in the chapters on psychedelics and Contagion.
April Anson:And those New Age writers to all three of our attention to issues of settler colonialism. Once you see it, you can't unsee it with the New Age writers like Starhawk, etc. Or Gary Snyder even for that matter. The claims to indigeneity that are sort of the necessary preconditions or access to indigeneity that are necessary preconditions for them to make those claims of purity pertain throughout the century.
Alexander Menrisky:It starts as like an identification of a real problem, right? You know, an anti vaccination movement is another thing that crosses conventional political borders, right? A lot of it stems from like noticing very real issues that deserve being untangled, like the pharmaceutical industry's control over a lot of this stuff, right? That's a very real kind of critique that's emerging from both the left and the right. What we're noticing here is the response ends up being this hyper individualistic claim to one's own bodily purity rather than an actual addressing of the social systemic issue of access, of oversight, of transparency, of input, and all the sort of things that like the environmental justice movement has been agitating for for going on fifty years.
Alexander Menrisky:But then you have this sort of lazy alternative, right? Where it just ends up being about this participating in this rhetorical project of shoring up one's own bodily purity.
Kyle Boggs:Yeah, that's a crucial point. Because I mean, we're all living in the same world, like we're all affected by the negative effects of capitalism, by the negative effects of our failing health and insurance and pharmaceutical company environment. And the way that we, in our own social and cultural bubbles, interpret that phenomenon and rationalize different kinds of solutions that are often easy or lazy, that's right and left for sure.
Alexander Menrisky:But it's also like a weird little, those kinds of moments do offer us little beacons of kind of hope despite apparently intractable political divisions of our time. Over and over again, you see these places where people are identifying the same problems, like across the spectrum. And that's heartening, right? Because it means that there can be more generative ways of addressing them because at the very least, more people than I think we realize recognize where there are issues. It's just the solutions that people are running with.
Alexander Menrisky:That's where these divergences are kind of happening.
April Anson:Yeah, and I think that we all wanted to discuss the contemporary political moment, which we have been getting at. But I think that what you're saying is really important for so many of us to engage in some critical self reflection about the ways that I'll just I'll just speak for myself. How about that? The ways that I interact or even respond to everyday eco fascist expressions. I'm very compelled and I think I do agree with the sentiment of like white folks get your people, right?
April Anson:That it's all three of our jobs to be doing some of that translation and outreach and engagement, and also recognizing that there's a real high emotional toll to that work as well. One of the many things that you offer us is a way to think about this as kind of antipurity work, right? We are all differently implicated and responsible for these messy systems that we're in, and we are not going to get anywhere if we just channel our rage at the systems towards people who are maybe seeing themselves as more frictionless with those systems. But ultimately, they're going be targets of those systems also. It's one emotional gift of your book is just to remind us that the purity fetish, like the primitivist fetish, etc, are all tools of disciplining us into these frictionless roles with violent systems.
Alexander Menrisky:Yeah, thank you for that. I think that's yeah, no purity politics. That would be like the brand of all of my work is this writing against purity politics. Because purity politics requires purity tests, where are those lines being drawn, who gets to draw them and to whose benefit and to what end. And this is why kind of environmentalism writ large has been particularly susceptible to these sorts of narrative patterns is because so central to environmentalism writ large in The United States for the past one hundred and fifty years has been ideas of nature with a capital N, this idea of purity.
Alexander Menrisky:And that's sort of what renders it especially vulnerable to particular storytelling patterns.
April Anson:And then of course, the irony that much of what settlers encountered on this continent was able to be understood as Eden and all these things because of the ongoing caretaking of indigenous peoples on this continent. It is just this delusion. But I think that that is the reason or a reason why literary analysis is so important is because the ways that the narrative precedes the kind of observation or over determines the observation.
Kyle Boggs:Yeah, in my book, I kind of use the term curate. Like all of the forces, philosophy, literature, art have percolated in our sort of collective imagination over generations. When we look at the quote unquote wilderness, we are seeing something that has sort of been produced. We're seeing something that's been curated for us in our minds that's very specific to American culture and the West in general through all of those associations. It's useful to be mindful of that.
Kyle Boggs:And this book definitely helps articulate those ideas as well.
Alexander Menrisky:So as we're winding down, I want to hear more about your two projects, Kyle, your forthcoming book in April, your manuscripts, and not necessarily just in terms of how they overlap with what we've been talking about. Although, of course, I think you're both here because they do, but I wanna hear more in general about what you've been working on.
Kyle Boggs:Yeah, so my book, Recreational Colonialism and the Rhetorical Landscapes of the Outdoors, I was a journalist in Northern Arizona. I covered extensively this issue involving a ski resort, Arizona Snowbowl. They wanted to use reclaimed wastewater to make artificial snow on the peaks, San Francisco Peaks. And that move was just completely unacceptable to the tribes who hold the peaks sacred in different ways. And I covered a lot of direct actions.
Kyle Boggs:I covered a lot of protests and vigils and had conversations with folks, city council meetings and kitchen table conversations on the Navajo and Hopi reservation and just tried to really learn a lot about it and cover it because the local paper there, Arizona Daily Sun, was they would cover it, but they would only sort of write articles based on press releases and such. And there was an indigenous voice that was really missing from the topic. And I wrote about it for like a decade. There were three court cases and a lot of stuff, arrests and tree sits and hunger strikes and all kinds of stuff. For me, was like easy to be critical of the ski resort because I was a non skier.
Kyle Boggs:The history of skiing in this country is, you know, it's very elite, it's expensive, it's inaccessible for a lot of folks. And so it's kind of an easy for me, it's an easy sort of punching bag. Ethel Ham, a mountain biker, a trail runner, and I just started to see a larger story unfolding about how settler colonial tropes come out in discourses of outdoor recreation. The book uses the peaks as a primary animating example, but I have a chapter on ultra running, chapter on rock climbing, a chapter on bike packing. Outdoor recreation is just kind of seen as this sort of apolitical thing when it's anything but when you when you dig into it.
April Anson:Well, I just am putting the final touches on the first draft of the manuscript tentatively titled Ecofascism Literary Genre and Native American Environmental Justice. Alex and I joke often that my book is the part one of Alex's part two. So I look at nineteenth century texts and nineteenth century American environmental history to argue much like Alex's book that ecofascism is not far, it's not right, there's nothing new. That this kind of rise of ecofascism or climate fascism today builds on and relies on a very old and very American tradition where white violence is rendered natural, even necessary to a social order. I look at some really iconic figures in American environmental thought like Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and then later in the century, Frederick Jackson Turner.
April Anson:Some of those figures, Emerson and Turner explicitly had a very profound influence on what is often stated as the origins of eco fascism in Nazi Germany. But we can see a kind of American version of I think of eco fascism through their writings. At the same time as those writers, I also trace, an archive of nineteenth century native authors who are writing in the very same times, very same places, and with, the same literary genre. So kind of building on your work, Alex, attention to political genre, I'm really looking at the confines of literary genre as a tool in your terms to rectify the dissonances of a particular political moment. So Frederick Jackson Turner famously delivered his 1893 frontier thesis declaring that the frontier closed, even though at the time more land was settled after he wrote that and delivered it than before.
April Anson:And yet he figured as a kind of turning point of American environmental history well up until the 1990s in America, high school English history curriculum were following Turner's frontier thesis. I'm at once investigating the kind of stickiness or persistence of these notions of nature in the nineteenth century American kind of tradition and at the same time looking at Native writers who were writing at the same time. So like Turner's frontier thesis, Simon Pokhagen wrote Red Man's Rebuke at the very same time. Actually, he wrote it before Turner's thesis and then delivered it at the Chicago World's Fair after Turner's thesis. Looking at how these writers are writing at the same moment and the way that they're using literary genre or environmental storytelling really explodes the essentialism necessary to eco fascist ideas.
April Anson:They're not only, anticipating what the twenty twenty two IPCC report just told us that colonialism is the primary and ongoing driver of climate change. They, I think, very acutely anticipate that from more than a century and a half before. But they're also, I think, modeling versions of literary genres like apocalypse, the gothic, and allegory that can really inform our climate storytelling today. So as to avoid this kind of purity politics, the speculative fiction that projects settler structures into the future, We have lots of political models and storytelling models to draw on. So ultimately, goal is to argue that the rise of climate fascism today is not only not new, but it's not inevitable.
April Anson:It's an ongoing project that has been and this can be interrupted.
Alexander Menrisky:Yeah, it sounds like we all need to get together again once they're all out in the world. Also seems April like yours is more forward facing than mine, which is something I admittedly always struggle with in my writing. So I really appreciate that. You're sort of leapfrogging my period, right?
April Anson:Yes. I start where you start, but move backward and then come forward to climate. Yeah. Yeah. It's very good very sequel.
April Anson:Yeah. But I love the idea of a continued conversation with you three.
Kyle Boggs:Y'all are some of my favorites for sure in academia. It's rough out there, but I appreciate the camaraderie and friendship. Likewise.
April Anson:Same. Same.
Alexander Menrisky:Thank you both for being here today and being willing to talk to me about everyday ecofascism and allowing me to ask you too about your projects will keep this conversation going in the future.
April Anson:Thank you Alex and thank you Kyle.
Kyle Boggs:Yeah, thank you all.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Crisis and Consumption in American Literature by Alexander Menryski is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.