Environmental concerns—from nature conservation to air and water quality—are often associated with progressive politics. But under Fascisms past and present, ecological ideas have also animated authoritarian projects. This speaker series examines how dictatorships mobilize nature as both metaphor and material resource. As a metaphor, agrarianism evokes Fascism’s foundational mythos: the dictator will restore the country’s glorious national past. To live a rural, old-fashioned lifestyle was to be a more patriotic citizen. “Italy must be ruralized!” proclaimed Benito Mussolini in 1927. As a material resource, nature is often put to use in service of eugenics and racial hygiene.

Our speakers will examine the professional biographies of the scientists, industrialists, and entrepreneurs hired by Fascist regimes to determine the limits of biological possibility. Case studies from empire and the colonies will investigate the Fascist programs for experimental plant nurseries, animal breeding, and chemical trials. Rather than treating eco-fascism as a contradiction in terms, our speakers will situate it within longer histories of environmental planning, population management, and technocratic governance. They will explain how dictatorships use the tools of authoritarian governance to modify the environment in their pursuit of more Fascist futures.

Please join us for these illuminating discussions.

Talk details:

Bread from Air: Nitrogen Capture and the Atmospheric Imagination in Fascist Italy

Speaker: Prof. Rebecca Falkoff, University of Texas, Austin

At the end of the nineteenth century, nitrogen, the seventh most abundant element in the galaxy, became the focus of a discourse of scarcity. Essential to the material composition of all life, nitrogen came to seem scarce as demand increased for two classes of compounds that fueled modern life: fertilizers and explosives. The nitrogen problem, as it came to be known, seemed to have an obvious solution: a limitless supply of nitrogen would be available if the nitrogen gas (N₂) that composes roughly 78% of the atmosphere could be "captured" and "fixed" to other elements. Although that solution posed a scientific challenge, since nitrogen gas is unreactive, the very possibility—and then its realization—transformed the sky into a new frontier, promising agricultural and industrial productivity and military power. Nitrogen capture engendered fantasies of economic revival and social and cultural renewal.

In her talk, Falkoff will show how these fantasies, and the nitrogen-capture industry that grew alongside them, became central to fascist ideology—animating the belief that Italian genius could transform scarcity into abundance, and shaping initiatives from the Battle for Wheat to the Battle for Births, economic autarky, and imperial expansion. Charting nitrogen discourse across speeches, advertising, technical writing, and futurist works in paint, ceramic, and prose—from Montecatini's campaigns to the essays of novelist-engineer Carlo Emilio Gadda—she traces how nitrogen staged the tensions central to Italian fascism: between materialism and vitalism, global circulation and national appropriation, the organic and the inorganic, labor and magic, intervention in natural cycles and creation ex nihilo.

For more information, please contact Prof. Diana Garvin, dgarvin@uoregon.edu.

Supported by: Department of Romance Languages, Italian Sector.