Making Gardening Great Again: urban agriculture as resistance in neo-fascist Trumpland

Abstract

With the protracted decay in US democracy resulting in the elevation of Donald Trump to the White House, the poisonous xenophobia that led to Brexit, and polls suggesting that Marine Le Pen’s Front National may take power in France next April amidst a broad resurgence of the far right in Europe, what does the global return of neofascism mean for the food movement in general and urban agriculture in particular? The food movement is fond of saying that ‘resistance is fertile’, but are sustainable gardening and food production (e.g. organics, biodynamics) always and everywhere necessarily politically progressive? By reference to literature that traces more than a passing connection between the German Nazis and modern environmentalism, this paper opens a political and philosophical can of worms as it explores what role the food movement can play in meeting the contemporary return of fascist ideology and politics.