Pentti Linkola (b. 1932) is a Finnish writer, columnist and environmentalist. For the last thirty years he has worked as a fresh-water fisherman and has lived a simple life without modern conveniences. It is only recently that he has connected to the electricity supply.

Although Linkola has been regaling his countrymen with proposals for an ecologically sustainable future since at least the 1960s, he remains generally unknown outside Finland. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that his writings have never been translated, he has become one of the world’s ‘leading proponents’ of so-called ‘Deep Ecology’.

For the uninitiated, here is a summary of Linkola’s political philosophy.

Firstly, democracy has to go:

Democracy and the parliamentary system [are] the most mindless and desperate experiments of mankind… A political system based on desire is a fundamental, devastating error… Society has been organized on the basis of what the individual wants, not what is good for her…[It is in] democratic coutries that the destruction of nature has proceeded the furthest.

To be replaced by a totalitarian dictatorship:

Our only hope lies in strong central government and in uncompromising control of the individual citizen. Just as only one in a hundred thousand has the talent to be a fine mechanic or an acrobat, so only a few are truly capable of managing the matters of a nation or of Mankind.

Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be a dictator so incompetent that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people… the best dictatorship would be the one in which a lot of heads would roll and the government would prevent any economic growth.

Which point brings us neatly to Linkola’s economic prescriptions:

All major manufacturing capacity will be state-owned. Manufacturing will be allowed only for a few ‘well-argued’ needs, and its products will be ‘durable’: they will last for ‘generations’. Energy production will be reduced to the minimum: electricity will be allowed only for the ‘most necessary’ lighting and communications. Agriculture will move to small un-mechanized units, upon which human manure will be used as fertilizer. The human diet will include rats and invertebrate animals. Transportation will be mainly by bicycle and rowing boat (remember: he’s a Finnish fisherman). Private cars will be confiscated. Long-distance travel will be by way of limited mass transport. Trees will be planted on most roads.

It is human overpopulation that Linkola regards as the biggest threat to the environment:

That there are billions of people over sixty kilogrammes in weight on this planet is recklessness.

His proposed solution is characteristically blunt: compulsory birth control on the Chinese model; specifically, mandatory abortion for women who attempt to have more than two children. Childbearing should be licenced, Linkola argues, and ‘genetically or socially unfit’ households denied a licence, and hence offspring, so as to ‘enhance the quality’ of the population. The excess licences would then be granted to ‘families of quality’, who would thus be permitted to exceed the two-child limit.

Futhermore, in Linkola’s vision, marriages will last a lifetime, many generations will live in the same house, and every family will grow its own food. No domestic electric applicances will be permitted, except for lighting (Finland can get very dark), television and radio.

The latter two inventions survive because Linkola believes that they are necessary for deseminating information. However, the only programmes allowed will be public information broadcasts. Needless to say, advertisements will be forbidden.

Those children lucky (if that’s the word) enough to survive childbirth and infancy will, in general, receive a maximum of four years schooling. Their education will concentrate on ‘practical’ skills, and only ten or twenty percent will progress to anything further. Technological research will be reduced to the minimum, and much scientific knowledge, such as genetic engineering and nuclear physics, will be ‘forgotten’. Broadly, Linkola believes that "Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed."

The laws of Linkola’s new, ecologically sustainable, society will be upheld by the vigilance of the "Green Police", who will be “unencumbered by the syrup of ethics". Under their eye, only "a few million" people will work as farmers and fishermen. All mass immigration and most cross-border trade will stop, and foreign travel will be allowed only for small number of diplomats and correspondents.

Needless to say, this is a vision of a utopian society that is radically different from our own, and which is likely to be resisted by many. However, it’s author still hopes that these profound changes to the way we live will prove unnecessary:

I wish that the death of Mankind comes soon. So soon that Mankind will not have time to destroy nature’s potential for future evolution… If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating if it meant millions of people would die.

Linkola dedicated one of his books to the Baader-Meinhof gang and considers himself to be the sworn enemy of both the Pope and Amnesty International. Inevitably, the United States also attracts his ire:

The US symbolizes the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom.

as does, somewhat more surprisingly, the green movement, “in which human infantilism is seen at its worst”, for its disappointing belief that “tenderness, love and dandelion garlands will save the world”.

So, what to make of all this? My first instinct upon reading his strange philosophy was that it was a satire on some of the more outre fanatacisms of the environmentalists. But, it seems, some things are simply beyond satire. Linkola is for real: he a is a technophobe and thanatophile whose ideology might owe much to both Theodore ‘The Unabomber’ Kaczynski and Pol ‘Year Zero’ Pot, did he not predate them both, and his uncompromising Ecofascism really does have adherents, both in Finland and beyond.

The adherents themselves were a strangely disparate bunch. It was from their websites that I gathered the information to write this article.

One, a Finnish site in English, was distinctly apocalytic and millenarian in flavour, extolled both Linkola and Kaczynski, and was notable for its use of a mixture of violent Christian, New Age and Nazi imagery in crude cartoon strips.

Another was that of a 20 year old Finnish university student, also in English. Her site was also apolcalytic in character, contained both explicitly anti-Nazi imagery and an enthusiastic personal endorsement of the philosophy of Linkola, as well as a list of conventional left-liberal positions that she identified as her own.

A third site was explicitly Ecofascist in outlook, whilst a fourth, an American site, commended Linkola for ‘thinking the unthinkable’. A number of other American Deep Ecology sites also referenced Linkola, though not always favourably.

Of course, the vast majority of the sites listed by Google were in Finnish, so I was unable to gauge their content.

Nevertheless, it strikes me as odd that a man who is, one senses, the Finnish equivalent of the shambling obsessives who use megaphones to hector shoppers in Argyle Street on dry weekends, should have found an audience so readily. Perhaps his ideas simply seem less strange in Scandinavia, with its tradition of pagan nature-worship, eugenics and all-encompassing welfare-statism, than they do in the English speaking world - though it’s worth bearing in mind that the largest concentration of Deep Ecologists is to be found in the Pacific North West of the United States.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that if it wasn’t for that icon of mass-produced, industrial-era, globally-sourced high-technology - the Internet - neither you or I would have ever heard of this bizarre misanthrope.