Gerald Sloan. “Assisted Suicide.”
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Dick. From Holocene to Anthropocene: the Military Bridge.
ASSISTED SUICIDE
By Gerald H. Sloan
Superpowers are playing chicken
with nuclear weapons
while we try to teach our children
how to be better persons.
Where’s the contradiction here
when words like “shark attack”
inspire more fear
than “nuclear winter?”
No words in any language
can span the yawning
chasm, no system link
such epic doublethink.
How to explain to the next
generation this abrogation
on so vast a scale, no calculus
by which our overseers do not fail?
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War v. Environment.
Title: The Military Bridge from Holocene to Anthropocene. The Militarism Bridge from Conventional to Nuclear War.
What are your favorite ironies today? Let me suggest two more. One: The fortress at the center of Baghdad is called the “Green Zone.” Two: In 2008, while the Burj Dubai tower was being built (twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was saying Farewell to the Holocene, Hello Anthropocene!
The Holocene epoch of stable climate that allowed our civilization has ended. Because of (causes) the extraordinary human buildup of population, consumption in affluent countries, capitalism, economic growth, and (consequences) CO2/greenhouse gases, warming, weather instability, deforestation, acidification of the oceans, and mass destruction 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 of extinction.
The scale of environmental damage over the last half century is unprecedented. Falling water tables, shrinking forest cover, declining species diversity all presage ecosystems in distress. These trends are now widely acknowledged as emanating from forces of humanity’s own making; ironically however, war, that most destructive of human behaviors, is commonly bypassed.
The disregard that all wars engender for all living things, especially for ostensible enemies, is so common as to be unremarked, and the Pentagon keeps no record of numbers of enemy combatants or civilians killed. The private Information Clearing House, as of January 2009, counted Iraq War civilian deaths at 1,297,997 since the invasion in 2003. I have found no record of the cows and chicken, dogs and cats, birds and snakes, crickets or butterflies killed during those or any other years or wars.
If humans who were seeking to avoid death were so slaughtered, how enormous must have been the decimation of other species 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 we need is an International Rescue Strategy against the consequences of the onrushing climate catastrophe that includes not only coastal city adaptations to rising seas but relief for global economic inequality within and among nations, and millions of displaced refugees. Instead, the Pentagon offers us 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, China and Russia threaten the world, not warming, hurricanes, drought, extinctions, or rising oceans.
Resistance
You and I can make two effective responses right now. We can stop saying Department of Defense. Put an X or a slash over Defense. It’s the War Department, just as it was before President Truman and the Pentagon cunningly changed its name. And we can support anti-war, anti-imperial organizations; such as Veterans for Peace, Peace Action, AFSC/FCNL, ICAN, NAPF, OMNI. Want to expand your antiwar footprint? Join an antiwar organization.
And then we can join the United Nations in estimating the environmental and climatic destruction of US wars before and afterward, toward pushing Congress to force the Pentagon to declare the true costs of its wars. This is a feasible and even familiar practice. For example, a 2010 study found that 3,000 companies were responsible for $ 2.15 trillion worth of environmental damage in 2008. Let’s get the damage data and let’s name the perps.
And then we can laugh out loud at all the green-washing–many as absurd as Baghdad’s “green zone”– distracting us from calamitous planetary war and warming.
References, KPSQ talk #18 on War and Environment Sat. Feb. 24, 2018. (800 words, I cut this for the radio editorial to around 650 to be under 7 minutes).
Barry Sanders, The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism. 2009. Over a decade old but still cutting-edge, so little attention to the destruction has been paid.Mike Davis, “Foreword,” to The Green Zone, “ Living on the Ice Shelf: Humanity’s Melt Down” (2008).
“Putting a price on global environmental damage .“ Trucost. https://www.trucost.com/trucost-news/putting-price-global-environmental-damage/ Oct 5, 2010.
Robert Borosage. “Trump’s Forever Wars.” The Nation (Feb. 26, 2018).
Alice and Lincoln Day, Producers. Scarred Lands & Wounded Lives: The Environmental Footprint of War. The effects of war and war preparations on the environment, while profound, have been largely overlooked. In 2011OMNI brought Alice and Lincoln here to show their excellent film.