 Ah, nature, wildlife's returning, air pollution's clearing up. Maybe humanity was the real virus all along. Maybe COVID-19 is the vaccine. Okay, so that extinction rebellion tweet might have been the result of a white supremacist imposter account. But there have been enough people showing their asses on the internet during this pandemic and not in a good wholesome-only-fans kind of way that it's worth reminding ourselves just why eco-fascism is bad, actually. So what makes somebody an eco-fascist? It's not just the aggressive evangelising of the benefits of tofu, or even spending your weekends busting animals out of testing facilities. No, eco-fascism is an extreme right-wing ideology, which holds that the solution to ecological catastrophe is population control. This idea has its origins way before climate change was even a glint in a Koch brother's eye. Back in the late 18th century, Thomas Malthus argued that poverty, disease and hunger wasn't caused by things like living in squalor or exploitation by capitalists. No, it was the working class having the temerity to have too many babies. And this flawed basis for understanding what constitutes the health of a society leads on to the justification of genocidal means in order to protect it. It's probably best summed up by the lifeboat ethics of eco-fascist and deep ecologist Pente Linkala. As he puts it, when the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try and load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship's axe and sever the extra hands to the sides. And that's what's so poisonous about eco-fascist ideology. Rather than our capacity for mutual aid being a defining characteristic of what it means to be human, it's seen as encouraging forms of social parasitism. If you're marginalised for any reason, perhaps you're a refugee or you're disabled or maybe you're merely poor, that's a reason to be excluded from the body politic rather than being helped by it. OK, so being happy that you saw a robin in your garden during lockdown doesn't make you Hitler's cousin. But when you say stuff like humanity's the real virus or maybe COVID-19's the actual vaccine, what you're saying is that the people who are most affected by this virus, the elderly, the disabled, people on low incomes who have to go out there and work, deserve to die. Humanity isn't an overcrowded lifeboat, but if it was, we'd chuck eco-fascism overboard first.