Description
The ‘space billionaires’ who now argue that there is a moral imperative for humanity to expand into outer space and make use of its resources are heavily influenced by the works of Gerard K. O’Neill and Robert Zubrin. O’Neill and Zubrin wrote in response to the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth Report – rejecting the notion that there are any ‘planetary limits’ to growth as the resources of the solar system are vast, even limitless.
Much of space expansionist thought is posited as a response to the ‘limits’ thesis, often explicitly, and is in general aligned with a rejection of the perceived ‘declinism’ of the response to the Oil Crises, continuing today, similarly rejecting the supposed ‘doomerism’ of climate movements. A core element of space expansionist thought is that the resources of the solar system mean that there is no need to make any changes to the model of American/Western capitalism and this is a view that continues in the face of the climate crises.
This paper will consider the prospect of a fusion of this strand of space expansionist thought with the ‘MAGA’ movement spearheaded by Donald Trump to give rise to an Ecofascism who’s ‘far right ecologism’ would extend to outer space. This is particularly salient in the context of the prospect of great power competition between the United States and China in which space activities and critical minerals form symbolic and very real focus points of strategic competition creating a geopolitical and ‘civilizational’ conflict over ‘scarcity’ that is core to fascist nature politics.
