If people have been paying even a little attention to the media during these hard times and checking online sources for entertainment or informative purposes, then they’ve probably seen the images of the canals in Italy with the clear blue water, the pictures of swans returning to lakes without the tourists there to scare them away and the lack of pollution in L.A due to the local factories and shutting down. These images lead to an eco-fascist ideology that our country simply cannot handle right now in this time of hardship. 

Eco-fascism is the theoretical political model in which an authoritarian government would require individuals to sacrifice their own interests, health, or safety for the “organic whole of nature.” This, in relation to COVID-19, is basically saying that there is a group of people that is using propaganda through its online platforms to convince individuals that the virus is a good thing overall for the world to go through since a few of the outcomes can be considered healthy for the environment.

What these internet propagandists fail to realize is that killing off a portion of the population to prop up a poorly designed economy is not, and never will be, a solution. The economy is first and foremost for the people, and if those people are needed to be sacrificed in order to keep it up and running, then the economy has fundamentally failed.

There are a few arguments that I would like to make against the claims that humans are the pandemic and without us, the world would prosper and recover from the damage we, as a species, have inflicted upon it. In their claims with the ideology of eco-fascism, they homogenize humans as if we were all equally responsible for environmental degradation, which is not accurate; they presuppose that humans are separate from nature and that we don’t belong among the rest of earth’s ecosystem, as if we were placed here without Earth’s consent; and, they believe that COVID-19 is the reason for recent healthiness of the skies ad waterways.

People only see the fact that decreased emissions and clearer water have come from the situation we are in at the moment, but they fail to realize that it is not a result of the pandemic, but a result of the reduction of overconsumption and overwork that our current system of cronyism and unchecked capitalism demands. These eco fascists believe that the solution is to remove some of the humans so they can continue to continue consuming with less consequences.

In this time of need, the United States needs to band together to make it through, not split apart due to faulty ideologies.