War

From ACT GreenGuide

Is war environmentally friendly?

The answer is, of course, obvious. War is about destruction - defeating armies, overthrowing leaders, slaughtering thousands, millions, hundreds of millions of people. Along with the dead, cities are destroyed, ecosystems are gutted. Everything good becomes collateral damage. Proponents of various campaigns to overthrow dictatorships, or fight fantastical vanishing terrorists will wish to suggest that sometimes there is no choice, and so, for the sake of argument, we will need to think like a sustainability expert - need to discuss causes and effects of war like we’re thinking about the source and destination of our food scraps.

Like a lot of environmental issues, war is one time where we have to think about which is cheaper - prevention or cure? “Should we go to war now or not?” is not the most useful question to ask. It’s better to ask “How can we live now to stop wars in the future?” War is a self-perpetuating system. The best way to cause war is to have a war. When do violent people get into power? When do people learn to hate? When are unforgivable crimes committed that will take another war to right?

Here are some issues to do with the environment and war that might deserve thinking about:

• A nation defeated in a war can’t afford to look after its environment. Enforcing recycling legislation sounds pretty insignificant if your population are wounded and starving.
• Eco-wars are becoming more and more common, with oil spills, for example, being used as offensive weapons in recent disputes, such as the 1991 Gulf War, at an estimated environmental cost of 40 billion American dollars. (http://www.american.edu/projects/mandala/TED/ice/kuwait.htm)
• If you blow up a chemical factory to stop the manufacture of poisonous chemical weapons, where do all the poison gasses go? What happens to the people of the country when it never was a weapons factory, but a pharmaceuticals plant. What happens to the people? What happens to their environment?
• It’s not always the people who you think that end up using nuclear weapons. The US, for example, regularly uses depleted uranium bullets and shells, as in the Balkan Wars where they released at least 300 tonnes of the stuff into the environment (http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/dhap992.html). This is apart from the massive use of these weapons in the Gulf War against the retreating mostly-conscript Iraqi army. And now the threat to use ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to disarm...’weapons of mass destruction’

As we have more and more people being forced to share their decreasing supplies of fresh water, space, oil and other resources maybe it would be best to find out how to share and co-operate now, before it gets even more difficult?