WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #86, AUGUST 10, 2022
Barry
Sanders. The Green Zone. War v.
Planet.
Dick wrote the
following as a KPSQ weekly editorial, #18, Sat. Feb. 24, 2018. He presented them in 5 to 7 minutes from April 2017 to September 29, 2018 on the
weekly program “Folkus,” directed by Jim Lukens. My topic was the convergence
of US twentieth-and
twenty-first centuries capitalism, wars, climate catastrophe, and population
and consumption increase. (Convergence
with the corona virus pandemic, which has killed over a million of US populace,
didn’t begin until in 2019.)
War v. Environment. Barry Sanders, The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism (2009). (This little book published over a decade ago
remains one of the best accounts of the climate/militarism relationship.)
Title of my talk: The Military Bridge from Holocene to
Anthropocene
The Holocene epoch of stable climate,
that allowed our civilization, has ended.
Punctuated by the extraordinary human buildup of population, consumption
in affluent countries, capitalism/economic growth, wars, CO2/greenhouse gases,
warming/weather intensification, deforestation, acidification of the rising
oceans, and mass extinction of animals and plants, the Anthropocene epoch has begun.
Humans have forced evolution itself into a new, rapidly developing
trajectory.
Perhaps the single greatest institutional
contributor to warming, the largest single source of pollution in the world, is
US militarism; in particular, the military in its most
ferocious mode-- the US military at war, now ceaseless. The military produces enough
greenhouse gases to place the entire globe in danger. But ironically, war, that most destructive of
human behaviors, is commonly disregarded.
The private Information Clearing House, as of January 2009, counted Iraq War
civilian deaths at 1,297,997 since the invasion in 2003. But I have found no
record anywhere of the cows and chicken, dogs and cats, birds and snakes,
crickets or butterflies killed during those or any other years or wars, nor of
the destruction of soils or rivers or forests.
If humans who were seeking to avoid death
were so slaughtered, how enormous must have been the decimation of other
species and the sources of life from the shooting, firing, dropping, exploding,
and incinerating. The “Shock and Awe”
invasion of Iraq began at 10:15 the evening of March 19, 2003, when some 1,700
bombers and fighter planes flew some 1,400 sorties and fired 504 cruise
missiles directly into Baghdad. In the
first two days 800 cruise missiles were fired, one every four minutes, day and
night. Each missile weighed about 3,000
pounds, adding up to a total of 1,200 tons, or 2,400,000 pounds of
explosives.
When the US goes to war against a foreign
nation it is a war not only against people, but against the Earth, the soil and
animals and plants, in the most far-reaching, annihilating ways. The earth can no longer absorb the punishment
of war of the ferocity that the greatest superpower in history is capable of
inflicting.
Yet the US will not only not let go its will to dominate the
world; rather it is tightening its grip.
In its latest National Defense Strategy, the Pentagon declared a new Cold
War with both China and Russia and promised to wage the war around the
globe. That is, it is not a defense
strategy, but an aggressive attempt to justify a massively expensive military
buildup for global control, the effects of which on the environment and climate
are beyond imagination.
What the Pentagon offers us is the old,
ruinous, ostensible threat of Cold War adversaries. As Pentagon Secretary Jim Mattis expressed
it, “Great Power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of U.S.
national security.” To the Pentagon, primarily China and Russia threaten the
world, not warming and all its costs (of which the Pentagon is aware).
Resistance
You and I can make two
effective responses right now. We can
henceforth delete the word “Defense” from the Pentagon. It’s the War Department, just as it was
before President Truman and the Pentagon cunningly changed its name. And we can actively support anti-war,
anti-imperial organizations; such as Veterans for Peace, Peace Action,
AFSC/FCNL, ICAN, NAPF, and OMNI.
Then we can assist the nascent
international effort to connect war and
warming by urging the United Nations to report the full costs to species and
earth of US wars, and the Pentagon to keep full records of its slaughters.
And then we can laugh out loud at all
the greenwashing distracting us from these war and warming connections and
costs, many as absurd as Baghdad’s inner fortress named the “green zone.” (#18 , 624 words)
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