Patriarchy both creates the rage in boys and then contains it for later use, making it a resource to exploit later on as boys become men.
As a national product, this rage can be garnered to further imperialism, hatred, and oppression of women and men globally. This rage is needed if boys are to become men willing to travel around the world to fight wars.
From the biblical battle of Schechem to the proxy wars of the twenty-first century, human warfare has despoiled the land—ravaging crops, flattening forests, and spilling shrapnel, poisons, and blood over the Earth. Warfare has scorched and scarred the face of the natural world with wounds that have outlasted the reign of warrior kings and legions of common soldiers.
About 14,000 years ago, North American hunters developed the “Clovis spearpoint,” a deadly tool that gave our ancestors the ability to kill large predators, including mastodons and saber-tooth tigers. Hominids suddenly vaulted to the top of the food chain—a major step on the path to dominating the natural world.
But there is scant archaeological evidence that organized warfare existed among humans before 4,000 BC. Anthropological findings suggest that warfare is a social invention that first appeared around 6,000 years ago with the development of centralized states, patriarchy, and slavery. For most of the preceding 100,000 years, human history was free of large-scale violence.
In January 2016, however, this consensus was rocked by a grim discovery in the hard clay of the Nataruk archaeological site near Kenya’s Lake Turkana. The journal Nature reported that the buried bones of 27 men, women, and children killed 10,000 years ago bore clear evidence of a violent ambush. Ten of the victims died from crushing blows to the head and stab wounds. A stone arrowhead was still embedded in the skull of one victim. This finding marks the first evidence of prehistoric “warlike” violence among a hunter-gatherer community. Cambridge University researchers speculated that the victims may have developed the ability to fashion blades and pottery, giving rise to the possession of property that could have prompted the brutal attack.
Still, evolutionary science largely suggests that humans are not predisposed to violence: human behavior is marked by both aggression and compassion. Modern warfare is a highly organized form of learned behavior imposed to support “warrior cultures” (aka “dominator societies”) where men and boys are encouraged to dominate other males, to subjugate women, to compete in physical contests, and to view nature as a prize to be conquered and exploited.
Until quite recently, human combat was limited to the range of a clenched fist, the sweep of a sword, or the arc of a thrown spear. However, as the tools of deadly force continued to evolve, stones and sticks were supplanted by lances and maces, swords and trebuchets, machine guns and cluster bombs. The bow and arrow made it possible to kill at a distance. The invention of gunpowder further expanded the range of disembodied combat. The “honorable” convention of a two-man duel gave way to the mass slaughter of modern warfare with uniformed battalions ordered to run screaming into curtains of gunfire.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world’s oldest tales, recounts a Mesopotamian warrior’s quest to kill Humbaba—a monster who reigns over a sacred Cedar Forest—and seize the prized trees as plunder. But Humbaba was not only the protector of cedars, he was also the servant of Enlil, the god of earth, wind, and air. By killing this protector of Nature, Gilgamesh called down a curse upon his own head.
The Bible offers further tales of environmental war. Judges 15:4–5 relates the story of Samson’s unorthodox plan to attack the Philistines: “[H]e went out and caught three hundred foxes and tied them tail to tail in pairs. He then fastened a torch to every pair of tails, lit the torches, and let the foxes loose in the standing grain of the Philistines. He burned up the shocks and standing grain, together with the vineyards and olive groves.”
Judges 9:45 records how Abimelech conquered the city of Schechem and, after killing its people, “destroyed the city and scattered salt over it.” The salt-sowing tactic (an early use of chemical warfare) was famously employed during the Third Punic War, when Roman invaders salted the land around Carthage, leaving the soil infertile.
In 429 BC, during the Peloponnesian War, King Archidamus began his attack on Plataea by felling the fruit trees surrounding the fortified town. His attempt to destroy the city by launching bundles of pitch-and-sulfur-soaked wood over the walls was thwarted when nature intervened with a rainstorm that extinguished the flames.
Sometimes, the environmental damage from war is self-inflicted. In 480 BC, Pericles directed retreating Athenians to destroy their homes and land as they fled the Persians. During Genghis Khan’s advance through Asia and Eastern Europe in the thirteenth century, livestock and crops were preemptively destroyed lest they fall into the hands of the invading Mongols. When Genghis Khan reached Baghdad, one of his first targets was the ancient system of waterworks along the Tigris River—an engineering marvel that had provided the city with clean water for 2,000 years.
In 1346, Mongol Tartars laid siege to Caffa, a port city on the Black Sea. Caffa became the target of the earliest recorded incident of biological warfare when the attackers catapulted bodies of plague victims over the fortified walls. (The few survivors who escaped took the “Black Death” with them when they fled to Italy.)
Poisoning water supplies and destroying crops and livestock has always been an effective means of subduing a population. These “scorched-earth” strategies remain a preferred way of dealing with agrarian societies—as we have witnessed in numerous campaigns against people in the Global South, from Nicaragua and Haiti to the Philippines and Vietnam.
During the American Revolution, Gen. George Washington ordered Gen. John Sullivan to direct “scorched-earth” tactics against Native Americans who had allied themselves with British troops. The fruit orchards and corn crops of the Iroquois Nation were razed in hopes that their destruction would cause the Iroquois to perish over the harsh winter.
A century later, during the U.S. Army’s Indian Wars in Arizona, the Navajo peoples’ corn, orchards, sheep, and other livestock were destroyed by fire, ax, and buckshot. In 1869, Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman advised President Ulysses S. Grant: “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.”
In 1865, Gen. Philip Sheridan launched a genocidal war against the Plains Indians that involved the mass slaughter of the native bison that once numbered near 60 million. Ghastly photos from that era document the effectiveness of the Buffalo Holocaust. The black-and-white images record mile after long mile of dark hides stacked 8 to 10 feet high. By 1893, fewer than 400 bison remained. As Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow Nation lamented: “When the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground.”
The call to conquer both nature and Native people was given full voice by the great American poet Walt Whitman who, in 1865, provided this anthem for Western expansion:
Follow well in order,
Get your weapons ready;
Have you your pistols?
Have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O Pioneers!
Gen. Sherman’s “March through Georgia” and Gen. Sheridan’s campaign in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley were examples of “total war”—a scorched-earth approach aimed at destroying civilian crops, livestock, and property. Sherman’s army devastated an estimated 10 million acres of land in Georgia while causing an estimated $4 million in losses to Mississippi’s natural resources ($75 million in 2016 dollars). When then-general Ulysses S. Grant ordered Sheridan to turn the Shenandoah into a barren wasteland, Sheridan promised there would be little left “for man or beast.” Shenandoah’s farmlands were transformed into fire-blackened landscapes that shocked and demoralized the civilian population.
Ambrose Bierce vividly described the environmental impacts of the Civil War: “Riven and torn with cannon-shot, the trunks of the trees protruded bunches of splinters like hands, the fingers above the wound interlacing with those below. The bark of these trees, from the root upward to a height of 10 or 20 feet, was so thickly pierced with bullets and grape that one could not have laid a hand on it without covering several punctures.”
Fire was a particularly devastating by-product of war as fallen leaves, severed tree limbs, and wooden breastworks spread the flames. Massive entrenchments also left an enduring mark. The scars of battlements and trenches dug into the earth at North Carolina’s Bentonville Battlefield are still visible more than 150 years later.
During the many horrors of World War I, the greatest environmental impacts were seen in the fields of France. The Battle of the Somme (where 57,000 British soldiers died on the first day of battle) left the countryside disfigured by trenches that are evident a century later. In a single day, Thiepval Ridge was stripped of vegetation, and the once-verdant High Wood was left a burnt shambles of blasted, mangled trunks. Nearly 250,000 acres of farmland were ruined to the point that they had to be abandoned.
The battle zone encompassed 1.5 million acres of French forests and destroyed an estimated 494,000 acres. (The forests had not yet recovered when World War II erupted twenty-one years later.) In Poland, German troops leveled forests to provide timber for military construction and, in the process, destroyed the habitat of the endangered wisent (European buffalo). Deprived of shelter, the small population of surviving wisents was quickly cut down by the rifles of hungry German soldiers.
In 1918, a German officer who survived “the Great War” described the battlefield as a landscape of “dumb, black stumps of shattered trees which still stick up where there used to be villages. Flayed by splinters of bursting shells, they stand like corpses upright. Not a blade of grass anywhere. Just miles of flat, empty, broken, and tumbled stone.” World War I’s bloody battles claimed the lives of soldiers, civilians, domestic animals, and wildlife. A century after the carnage, Belgian farmers were still unearthing the bones of soldiers who bled to death in Flanders Fields.
During World War I, Great Britain enlisted 571,000 pack animals to move its men and weapons (more than 68,000 horses and mules were killed in that war). It took forty pounds of fodder and eight gallons of water to support each horse for one day. Not surprisingly, British ships wound up hauling 5.4 million tons of hay and oats to France—outweighing shipments of ammunition.
World War I dramatically demonstrated how fighting wars abroad can have serious repercussions at home. In her 1939 book, America Begins Again, Katherine Glover revealed how World War I inflicted historically unprecedented damage on the U.S. environment when the struggle in the battlefields of Europe “spread to the cotton fields of the South, the cornfields of the Middle West, and the wheat fields of the Great Plains.” In order to feed the war effort, 40 million acres of land were rushed into cultivation. But this acreage was largely unsuited for agriculture. Across the Northwest, lakes, reservoirs, and wetlands were drained to create farmland. In the Southwest, native grasses were uprooted to make space for wheat fields. In Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, entire forests were clear-cut to serve wartime needs. In the South, extensive overplanting of cotton led to depleted soils that eventually succumbed to drought and erosion.
The oil-fueled mechanization of war further transformed—and expanded—the battlefield. Instead of relying on horses and mules, modern armies now rely on trucks, armored tanks, and aircraft. The U.S. Army’s first use of a truck occurred during a 1916 invasion of Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa. By the end of World War I, the General Motors Corporation had built 8,512 military vehicles and earned a tidy profit. Modern mechanized armies are no longer dependent on oats and hay. The “blood” that fuels the world’s ships, tanks, choppers, and bombers is petroleum.
Air power was another historic game-changer because it enabled generals and admirals to order bombs to be dropped at great distances and permitted pilots to search the terrain for signs of the “enemy” from a platform of relative safety. But because woodlands and forests sometimes provide cover for insurgents on the ground, forests also became military targets requiring the “scorched earth” treatment—whether by bomb blast, napalm, or chemical spray.
With the outbreak of World War II, the European countryside suffered a renewed onslaught. As the German army marched into The Netherlands, the Dutch population blocked its advance by opening dikes and irrigation gates to flood the country’s roads with seawater. (In 1672, the Dutch used the same ploy to quench the invasion plans of French king Louis XIV.) Holland’s lowlands suffered even worse damage after German troops captured the floodgates and attempted to starve the Dutch resistance by covering 17 percent of the country’s farmland with saltwater.
The Germans weren’t alone in using water as a weapon of war. In May 1943, Allied bombers took out two large dams in Germany’s Ruhr Valley. An estimated 34.3 billion gallons poured from the Möhne Dam, and another 52.8 billion gallons burst from the Eder Dam. Nearly 7,500 acres of German farmland were submerged, along with more than 6,500 cattle, pigs, and other livestock.
The Germans occupied Norway from 1942 to 1945, but when they began to lose ground to the advancing Allies, Hitler’s retreating troops set about destroying everything of potential value. They devastated 15 million acres, methodically eradicating buildings, roads, crops, forests, water supplies, and wildlife. Fifty percent of Norway’s 95,000 reindeer were killed.
During Germany’s occupation of France, nearly one million acres of forest were laid waste by bombs, shells, and bullets. As many as 247,000 acres of forest went up in flames while bomb blasts and shrapnel stripped vegetation from slopes, triggering erosion on a massive scale.
Fifty years after the end of World War II, millions of bombs, artillery shells, and underwater mines had been recovered from the fields and waterways of France. A century later, millions of acres remain off-limits and the “Iron Harvest” of buried ordnance still claims an occasional victim.
Many of the South Pacific’s islands—isolated outposts of untouched wilderness with delicately balanced ecosystems—suffered mightily during World War II. During the Battle of Corregidor, a dense and thriving jungle was blasted into a graveyard of bodies, seared and broken trees, obscured by dust storms and palls of acrid smoke rising from smoldering palms and grassfires.
The Pentagon employed the same approach for each island attacked. First, a naval blockade followed by artillery shelling. Next, extended bombing by aircraft. Finally, troops would be ordered ashore. Landing craft would sweep in over coral reefs to secure the beachhead. U.S. soldiers would torch suspected hideouts with flamethrowers as bulldozers cleared the land.
To make way for the construction of airfields, topsoil and trees were removed. The most conveniently available material for building runways was coral—preferably live coral harvested from beneath the waves and crushed. On some South Pacific islands, the coral never recovered.
South Pacific wildlife took a major hit during World War II, with nesting places destroyed, migration patterns interrupted, birds killed, and eggs smashed by the thousands. Many species were eradicated during the Pacific War—mainly through habitat loss. An unknown number of whales were killed by naval gunners who mistook the cetaceans for enemy subs. Oil spills, following the bombing and sinking of supply tankers, caused uncounted losses of marine life. It is estimated that 300 tankers exploded, ruptured, spilled, or sank during the World War II.
World War II’s most destructive event took place with the detonation of two nuclear bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The fireball and blast was followed by a “black rain” that pelted the survivors for days, peeling away the scorched soil and leaving behind an invisible mist of radiation that seeped into the water that people sipped and infiltrated the air they breathed. This ghostly pall of radiation left a ghastly legacy—cancer spikes and mutations in plants, animals, and children.
During its 2003 military invasion of Iraq, the United States rained more than 1,000 tons of depleted uranium over the land. These weapons left a legacy of cancers, stillborn babies, and a generation of horrifically deformed children in Fallujah and other cities—a devastating blow for a country that also lost a million children to starvation and disease caused by U.S.-imposed sanctions.
In 1991, an apocalyptic shroud of smoke from Kuwait’s burning oil fields turned day to night and released vast plumes of contaminated soot that blackened snows in the Himalayas. In 1999, NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia led to the bombing of a petrochemical plant in Panĉevo, which sent clouds of toxic chemicals into the air and spilled tons of pollution into nearby rivers.
From 1992 to 2007, U.S. bombing and illegal logging (committed by desperate Afghan refugees and U.S.-backed warlords) destroyed 38 percent of Afghanistan’s forest habitat, triggering an 85 percent drop in the number of birds visiting the region.
In Africa, the Rwandan war drove nearly 750,000 people into the forests of Virunga National Park. Desperate refugees were soon clearing around 1,000 tons of wood from the park—every day. By the time the war ended, Worldwatch Institute reported, 105 square miles had been ransacked and 35 square miles were “stripped bare.”
In Sudan, desperate soldiers and civilians spilled into Garamba National Park, decimating the animal population. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, armed conflict caused the resident elephant population to plummet from 22,000 to 5,000. In 2006, Mai-Mai rebel fighters in the DRC killed every last hippopotamus occupying the country’s two major rivers in just two months.
The postwar decades gave rise to a quiet escalation of environmental damage as the Cold War unleashed an unchecked competition for newer and deadlier weapons. Foremost among them, nuclear bombs. Before the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963, 1,352 underground nuclear blasts, 520 atmospheric detonations, and eight sub-sea explosions had jolted the planet and its oceans. The blasts totaled 535 megatons—equal to 36,400 Hiroshima-sized detonations.
In 2002, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Centers for Disease Control reported that everyone on Earth had been exposed to radiation released by open-air nuclear testing. According to the NCI’s 2002 estimate, nuclear fallout killed more than 15,000 Americans and caused “at least 80,000 cancers.”
The impact is on a scale with global warming, but the signs of radioactive “global harming” are subtle and cellular—less visible than droughts, firestorms, hurricanes, and rising seas. This lethal legacy of the Cold War remains a persistent and personal reminder that war’s impacts on the environment profoundly inhabit the fate of every living creature on Earth today.
The invention and deployment of armed drones as weapons of war marked a new achievement in the annals of technology and cowardice. Armed with devastating air-to-ground missiles, U.S. Predator and Reaper drones began to patrol African and Middle Eastern skies guided by “warriors” sitting in front of computer screens, twiddling joysticks in air-conditioned “arcades” safely ensconced in the Nevada desert, thirty-five miles from Las Vegas.
The United States first deployed its fleet of winged robots during the 1994 Balkans War. The CIA conducted its first “drone assassination” on February 4, 2001, when, in an attempt to kill Osama bin Laden, a drone opened fire on a gathering in Afghanistan’s Paktia Province. The CIA acted after identifying “a tall man” in the crowd. The victims turned out to be a group of innocent civilians out collecting scrap metal.
Drone attacks and “signature strikes” (assassination attempts personally authorized by the president) have killed hundreds of innocent civilians in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia—and driven thousands of angry survivors into the ranks of anti-U.S. militias. The civilian toll has been alarming. According to the Bureau of Investigative Reporting, between January 2005 and April 2017, 2,215 “confirmed” U.S. drone strikes were responsible for 6,206 to 8,906 deaths—including 736 to 1,391 civilians and 242 to 307 children.
In addition to robots in the skies, the Pentagon also is preparing to deploy robot boots on the ground. In 2007, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) field-tested a new Goliath-like weapon in Iraq. The Special Weapons Observation Remote Direct Action System (SWORDS) was a ground-based, radio-controlled killer droid fitted with video eyeballs, tank treads, and an M249 light machine gun. Three SWORDS units were deployed to Iraq in 2007, but they failed to meet expectations. According to Foster-Miller, the manufacturer, the SWORDS units suffered “some technical issues” and, as of this writing, the program has not been refunded.
While a Predator drone is about the size of a school bus, the newest members of the Pentagon’s arsenal include small-scale “war-bots.” Some are designed to look like and fly like birds while others crawl like insects. Sandia National Laboratory has built a remote-controlled fly-bot weighing one ounce and smaller than a dime. This mini-bot comes equipped with a TV scanner, microphone, and a chemical microsensor. Spy-bots, another form of micro-weaponry, can be released in swarms to covertly infiltrate entire neighborhoods. They can follow targets down streets and slip through open windows and doors. Some can even quietly hover behind a victim’s head before triggering a lethal explosion.
Boston Dynamics has created the Big Dog—a four-legged, gas-powered metallic horse that can navigate mountainsides and frozen lakes while carrying 400 pounds of weapons and supplies (four times more than a human soldier can carry). Meanwhile, a UC Berkeley research team has created a “force multiplier” called the Human Universal Load Carrier (aka “the HULC”), a mechanical exoskeleton that can be strapped to the human body to endow the wearer with superhuman strength.
In South Korea, Samsung robots have replaced human guards along the border with North Korea. When these robots detect the approach of a human, they demand a password. If they don’t hear the correct answer, they automatically open fire.
DARPA’s ultimate goal is to “take the ‘man’ out of ‘unmanned’ warfare” by building war-bots with the capacity to make their own decisions about who to kill and when. A U.S. Joint Forces Command study predicts deployment of fully autonomous battlefield robots by 2025. These super-strong, super-smart war-bots will inevitably make mistakes and kill innocent civilians but, unlike humans, they won’t experience guilt or suffer PTSD.
On November 21, 2012, the Pentagon issued a fifteen-page directive describing an autonomous weapons system that “once activated, can select and engage targets” without human supervision. The Pentagon has envisioned a $130 billion Robot Army. The Future Combat Systems program—one of the largest military contracts on record—would replace human soldiers with mechanical Terminators that could be deployed at one-tenth the cost of a flesh-and-bones warrior. Eliminating humans from the combat workforce would save billions in combat pay and veterans benefits.
There is resistance. In 2009, the International Committee for Robot Arms Control announced the launch of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. In May 2013, a UN report called for a ban to prevent a robot arms race, noting that “tireless war machines, ready for deployment at the push of a button, pose the danger of permanent armed conflict.”
From the War of Independence through 2006, U.S. Navy historians have recorded 234 cases in which the United States has used its armed forces abroad “in situations of conflict or potential conflict or for other than normal peacetime operations.” Between 1945 and 2014, the United States was responsible for launching 201 out of 248 significant world conflicts. Since the Pentagon’s retreat from Vietnam in 1973, the United States has attacked, invaded, waged covert wars against, or attempted to overthrow governments in Afghanistan, Angola, Argentina, Bosnia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Grenada, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Kosovo, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, the Philippines, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, and the former Yugoslavia. None of these countries were transformed into democracies as a result of U.S. intervention.
In early 2017, instead of abolishing national stockpiles of nuclear weapons, President Donald Trump called for moving funds from disarmament and military cleanup programs to fund the renovation of America’s nuclear arsenal. (Trump was not breaking with tradition. In August 2015, on the seventieth anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama called for spending nearly $1 trillion on a new generation of “modernized” nuclear weapons.)
In a June 2015 essay for The American Conservative, Jon Bosil Utley noted that America no longer actually aims to “win” its wars, “because winning a war is secondary to other goals in our war-making. Winning or losing has little immediate consequence for the United States because the wars we start—wars of choice—are not of vital national interest; losing doesn’t mean getting invaded or our cities being destroyed.”
As former congressperson Ron Paul has pointed out: “Every dollar or euro spent on a contrived threat is a dollar or euro taken out of the real economy and wasted on military Keynesianism. Such spending benefits a thin layer of well-connected and well-paid elites. It diverts scarce resources from meeting the needs and desires of the population and channels them into manufacturing tools of destruction.” It’s not war that frightens these corporations, Paul says. “The elites are terrified that peace may finally break out, which will be bad for their profits.”
According to a study by the Worldwatch Institute, redirecting just 15 percent of the money spent on weapons globally could eradicate most of the immediate causes of war and environmental destruction.
Despite a growing litany of despoliation, damage, and dangers, Planet Earth might still escape the looming fate of Terracide—but only if we act on Dave Brower’s 1982 call to defend “the trees and plants, the isles, the air and water, and … the land itself.” To do this, we need to dismantle the smoking, oil-fueled engines of Permawar.
(With thanks to Susan D. Lanier-Graham.)
Wars against the Earth and violence against women are related. They have the same roots in a violent patriarchal worldview where economic creation and production favor the violent conquest of nature and subjugation of women; where everything is transformed into an object of exploitation. Once fundamental holistic connections are broken, separation and fragmentation become the basis of knowledge. In such a world, the violent destruction of nature and nature-based cultures is justified as human “progress.”
History, as dictated by male scholars, recounts a succession of wars won and treats violence as something intrinsic to human nature—rather than as a trait intentionally cultivated by patriarchy. Women archaeologists, on the other hand, have shown that through most of human history society has been women-centered, nature-centered, and nonviolent. In countries where women enjoy greater equality and freedom, the general welfare is enriched for everyone—and nature blossoms as well. The focus shifts to sustainability and stability, to compassion and nurturing.
In The Civilization of the Goddess, Marija Gimbutas notes how, until around 6,500 years ago, Old Europe cultures were female-centered, peace-loving, communal agricultural societies in which women were respected, even revered. In these ancient cultures, the “goddess” was a divine force that honored the powers of nature, plants, animals, and humans. “With the inception of agriculture,” Gimbutas writes, humankind “began to observe the phenomena of the miraculous Earth more closely and more intensively…. A separate deity emerged, the Goddess of vegetation, a symbol of the sacral nature of the seed and the sown field, whose ties with the Great Goddess are intimate.” In these Old Europe societies, there was no polarizing division between female and male nor any subordination of female to male (a distinction that we subsequently have been taught to accept as “natural”).
In contrast to the narrative of “man: the hunter, gatherer, protector,” in these ancient societies, it was women who were the innovators and organizers. The main concerns in these Old Europe “goddess” societies were not war and conquest but the protection and regeneration of life. “War was not on any indigenous agenda,” Gimbutas explains, “since all human safety and well-being was dependent upon good social relations with one another and with neighbors.” Even today, there are forager communities and matriarchal societies in which war is unknown and violence is uncommon.
In the excavations of many ancient tombs and cities, no weapons of war have been found—no swords, no spears, no bows, no arrows. No weapons were found among the artifacts uncovered in the 4,500-year-old ruins of Mohenjo Daro, a “lost city” located in the floodplains of Pakistan. In these Neolithic settlements there were no fortifications to protect villagers from enemies; no signs of violent deaths; no oversized central buildings indicating a hierarchy or dominant ruler. Old Europe was, “in the main, peaceful, sedentary, matrifocal, matrilinear and sexegalitarian.”
The idea of being “civilized” necessarily implies that, if one is not “civilized,” then one must be “barbaric” or “primitive.” Conveniently, all earth-based cultures have been swept into the latter category while all earth-plundering cultures have been proclaimed “civilized.” Many peaceful and prosperous human societies that continue to thrive in balance with nature have been labeled “primitive.” Meanwhile, the myth of “progress”—implying radical change, transformation, production, and consumption—frees “civilized” nations to commit extraordinary violence in the name of “development,” “growth,” and “globalization.”
As French feminist Simone de Beauvoir has observed: “It is men that form armies and fight wars. It is men who build factories, smelt gold and fell forests. In a patriarchy, men dominate both women and nature. A patriarchal Warrior Culture treats Mother Nature the same way it treats any other female figure.”
The word “nature” is derived from the Latin verb nasci, “to be born.” So it follows that patriarchy objectifies both women and nature and defines the creativity inherent in both as inert and passive.
As Swiss anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen writes in Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: “The triumph of paternity brings with it the liberation of the spirit from the manifestations of nature…. Maternity pertains to the physical side of man, the only thing he shares with animals: the paternal spiritual principle belongs to him alone. Triumphant paternity partakes of the heavenly light, while child-bearing motherhood is bound up with the earth that bears all things.”
This patriarchal construction rests on three separations: the separation of mind and body; the separation of male activity as intellectual, spiritual, and creative; and the separation of female activity as “merely” biological. The separation of production from reproduction—and the characterization of the former as an economic force that creates “value” while the latter is simply biological—has served to institutionalize a false “creation boundary.” Today, patriarchal corporations invoke this creation boundary as a rationale to patent life, control seeds, clear-cut forests, strip-mine mountains, drill oil wells, and expropriate traditional knowledge under the claim of “intellectual property rights.”
Patriarchal men dominate women by raping them. Patriarchal men dominate nature in the same way. Rip it loose; tear it open; pull it down; bludgeon it; cut it; burn it; make a buck off of it and … move on to the next conquest. Modern industrial capitalism has no regard or reverence for nature. Patriarchies view nature as little more than an exhaustible mine of raw materials or a dumping ground for industrial waste. Before the Industrial Revolution, “resources” meant “that which resurges and renews.” After the Industrial Revolution, the word was conveniently redefined to mean “raw materials.”
Patriarchal science, which arose during the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth century, helped lay the intellectual foundations of the Industrial Revolution, which further diminished the primacy of nature and women. The violence, the fragmentation, the mechanistic thought, the obsession with uniformity and groupthink, and the will to control that characterize industrial society are all rooted in a patriarchal scientific paradigm. In the words of Sir Francis Bacon (commonly referred to as the “father of modern science”) the mechanical inventions that flow from scientific research do not “merely exert a gentle guidance over nature’s course; they have the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.” Bacon went further in Temporis Partus Masculus (The Masculine Birth of Time), when he promised to create “a blessed race of heroes and supermen” that would dominate both nature and society.
In 1664, Bacon’s philosophy inspired Henry Oldenburg, secretary of Britain’s Royal Society, to announce the organization’s intention to “raise a masculine philosophy … whereby the Mind of the Man may be ennobled with the knowledge of solid truths.” And cleric Joseph Glanvill proposed the masculine aim of science was to discover “the ways of captivating Nature, and making her subserve our purposes and designments,” thereby achieving the biblical goal of enforcing “the Empire of Man Over Nature.”
This was a far cry from the sustainable nature-centric systems we now refer to as the Sustenance Economy, the Subsistence Economy, the Caring Economy, or the Gift Economy. As Carolyn Merchant points out in The Death of Nature, this transformation of nature from a living, nurturing mother to inert, dead, and manipulable matter was eminently suited to the exploitation imperative of growing capitalism. After all, if the Earth is merely dead matter, then nothing is being killed. The image of a nurturing Mother Earth acted as a cultural constraint on the exploitation of nature, Merchant notes, since “one does not readily slay a mother, dig her entrails or mutilate her body.” But the domination images created by Bacon and the Scientific Revolution removed all restraint, opening the doors for the denudation of nature.
As Ronnie Lessem and Alexander Schieffer write in their book Integral Economics: “If the fathers of capitalist theory had chosen a mother rather than a single bourgeois male as the smallest economic unit for their theoretical constructions, they would not have been able to formulate the axiom of the selfish nature of human beings in the way they did.” On such false assumptions does the entire edifice of the dominant economic paradigm rest.
Today, who or what counts as a human being is changing. Beginning with the idea of a bourgeois male as the normative “human,” patriarchal economics now defines the “corporation” as a patriarchal “person.” Seeds, food, and agriculture—all traditional spheres of women’s knowledge and production—now are seen primarily as sources of mega-profits for privateering corporations.
Patriarchal science promotes patriarchal economics—profit-before-people systems that feed global corporations and marginalize women. Patriarchal economies exclude women’s work because it is undertaken for sustenance, not for profiteering. Women’s work in food and agriculture is discounted, even though it is fundamental to human survival. Under the patriarchal productivity calculus, the value of sustainable food systems—shaped by women to support their families, communities, and nature’s biodiversity—is reduced to zero.
The transformation of value into “cost,” labor into “idleness,” knowledge into “ignorance” is achieved by the patriarchal construct of the gross domestic product (which some commentators now call the “gross domestic problem.”) The GDP, a national accounting system used to calculate growth, is based on the assumption that if producers consume what they produce, they do not, in fact, produce anything at all. This assumption excludes all regenerative and renewable production cycles from the area of production. Hence, any work that supports families, children, community, and society is treated as “non-productive” and economically “inactive.” In short, economic self-sufficiency is perceived as economic deficiency. The devaluation of women’s work—and of work done in subsistence economies of the Global South—is the inevitable outcome of a capitalist patriarchy.
The patriarchal market economy ignores two vital forces that are essential to ecological and human survival—nature’s economy and the sustenance economy, where economic value is a measure of how human well-being and planetary health are protected. Its currency is life-giving processes, not cash or the market price. Denying women’s work and wealth creation only deepens the violence by displacing women from their livelihoods and the natural resources on which their livelihoods depend—land, forests, water, seeds, and nature’s biodiversity.
Economic programs based on the fiction of limitless growth in a limited world can only be maintained by the powerful grabbing the resources of the vulnerable. The resource grab that is essential for “growth” creates a culture of rape—of the Earth, of local self-reliant economies, of women. The only way in which such “growth” is “inclusive” is by its inclusion of ever-larger numbers in its circle of violence.
An economics of commodification creates a culture where everything has a price and nothing has value. Economic liberalism has unleashed a flood of commercial deregulation along with the privatization and commodification of seeds, food, land, water, men, women, and children. This has further degraded social values, deepened patriarchy, and intensified violence against women. The growing global scourge of aggressive, male-driven brutality is a social externality of an economics—and a culture—based on dominance, control, competition, and warfare. In short, a definition of “progress” that demands nothing less than the raping of the Earth and its people.
Industrial agriculture is rooted in the same patriarchal scientific paradigm that privileges violence, fragmentation, and mechanistic thought. Rooted in the ideologies and instruments of war, this paradigm promotes “monocultures of the mind” and monocultures on our land that deny the nature-rooted wisdom of agroecology and biodiversity. Herbicides used in industrial agriculture are also used as weapons of war. Chemicals used to kill people in World War II gas chambers were later developed into pesticides. Factories that used to make explosives for the military now make ammonium nitrate fertilizers (which can be used to make bombs, like the one that destroyed the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995).
While global corporations have used the foundations laid by masculine science to obscure women’s knowledge and productivity, a 1998 Food and Agriculture Organization report has documented how successfully “Women Feed the World.” Women are the biodiversity experts of the planet. In Nigeria, women routinely harvest eighteen to fifty-seven plant species in a single home garden. In sub-Saharan Africa, women cultivate as many as 120 different plants in the spaces left alongside the cash crops managed by men. In Guatemala, home gardeners grow more than ten tree and crop species on one-tenth of a hectare. A single African home garden can host more than sixty species of food-producing trees. In India, women are using 150 different species of plants for vegetables, fodder, and health care.
While women manage and protect biodiversity, the dominant paradigm of industrial agriculture promotes monoculture on the false assumption that single-crop farming produces more food. But monocultures do not produce more—they simply concentrate control and power in the hands of a few. Since women’s expertise is based on modeling agriculture on nature’s methods of renewability, the suppression of this knowledge has gone hand in hand with the ecological destruction of nature’s processes—and the destruction of people’s livelihoods and lives.
Since the mid-fourteenth century, the word “rape” has meant “the act of taking something by force, plundering.” Rape, in its original meaning, remains an accurate description of today’s globalized economy—a system based on plunder of resources through biopiracy, land grabs, water theft, seed patents, the creation of genetically engineered life-forms, and an intensified global war against the living Earth.
Could there be a connection between the growth of violent, undemocratically imposed, unjust, and unfair economic policies and the intensification of brutal crimes against women? I believe there is. As the rape of the Earth intensifies, so does violence against women. I am not suggesting that violence against women begins with neoliberal economics. I am deeply aware of the profound gender biases in our traditional cultures and social organizations. (I stand empowered today because my grandfather sacrificed his life for women’s equality and my mother was a feminist before the word existed.) However, it is clear that violence against women has taken on new and more vicious and brutal forms as traditional patriarchal structures have hybridized with the structures of capitalist patriarchy. We need to examine the connections between unjust, non-sustainable economic systems and the growing frequency and brutality of violence against women.
The ruling paradigm that falsely defines our economy as a “market” imposed on us in the name of “growth” fuels the intensity of crimes against women while ravaging the Earth and deepening social and economic inequality. Social and economic reforms can no longer be insulated from each other. We need to move beyond the violent economy shaped by capitalist patriarchy to new nonviolent, sustainable, and peaceful economies that give respect to women and the Earth.
On April 23, 2015, Barack Obama stood behind the presidential podium and apologized for inadvertently killing two Western hostages during a drone strike in Pakistan. “One of the things that sets America apart from many other nations—one of the things that makes us exceptional—is our willingness to confront squarely our imperfections and to learn from our mistakes,” he said.
In his 2015 State of the Union address, Obama again described America as “exceptional.” When he spoke to the United Nations General Assembly in 2013, he said, “Some may disagree, but I believe that America is exceptional.”
American exceptionalism reflects the belief that Americans are somehow better than everyone else. This view reared its head after the 2013 leak of a Justice Department white paper that describes circumstances under which the president can order the targeted killing of U.S. citizens. There had been little public concern in this country about drone strikes that killed people in other countries. But when it was revealed that U.S. citizens could be targeted, Americans were outraged. This motivated Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) to launch a thirteen-hour filibuster of John Brennan’s nomination to become the next CIA director.
It is this double standard that moved Nobel Peace Prize–winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu to write a letter to the editor of the New York Times, in which he asked, “Do the United States and its people really want to tell those of us who live in the rest of the world that our lives are not of the same value as yours?”
Obama insists that the CIA and the Pentagon are careful to avoid civilian casualties. In May 2013, he declared in a speech at the National Defense University: “Before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured—the highest standard we can set.”
Nevertheless, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s ongoing tally of drone casualties (as of August 2015), of the 5,403 people killed by drone strikes in Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen, 1,109 were reported to have been civilians and 234 were children. The Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), which examined nine drone strikes in Yemen, concluded that civilians were killed in every one. Amrit Singh, a senior legal officer at OSJI and primary author of the report, said: “We’ve found evidence that President Obama’s standard is not being met on the ground.”
In 2013, the administration released a fact sheet specifying that, in order to use lethal force, the target must pose a “continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.” But the leaked Justice Department white paper says that a U.S. citizen can be killed even when there is no “clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.”
There must also be “near certainty” that the terrorist target is present. Yet the CIA did not even know who it was slaying when it killed two hostages (an Italian and an American) in an attack on al-Qaeda in Pakistan in January 2015. This was a “signature strike” that targeted “suspicious compounds” in areas controlled by “militants.”
Most individuals killed are not on a kill list and the president does not know their names. So how can one determine with any certainty that a target is present when the CIA is not even targeting individuals?
Contrary to popular opinion, the use of drones does not result in fewer civilian casualties than manned bombers. A study based on classified military data, conducted by the Center for Naval Analyses and the Center for Civilians in Conflict, concluded that the use of drones in Afghanistan caused ten times more civilian deaths than manned fighter aircraft.
Moreover, a panel with experienced specialists from both the George W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations issued a 77-page report for the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan think tank, which found there was no indication that drone strikes had advanced “long-term U.S. security interests.”
Nevertheless, the Obama administration maintains a double standard for apologies to the families of drone victims. “The White House is setting a dangerous precedent—that if you are Western and hit by accident, we’ll say we are sorry,” said Reprieve attorney Alka Pradhan, “but we’ll put up a stone wall of silence if you are a Yemeni or Pakistani civilian who lost an innocent loved one. Inconsistencies like this are seen around the world as hypocritical, and do the United States’ image real harm.”
It is not just the U.S. image that is suffering. Drone strikes create more enemies of the United States. While Faisal Shahzad was pleading guilty to trying to detonate a bomb in Times Square, he told the judge, “When the drones hit, they don’t see children.”
In 2009, former CIA lawyer Vicki Divoll, who now teaches at the U.S. Naval Academy, told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer: “People are a lot more comfortable with a Predator [drone] strike that kills many people than with a throat-slitting that kills one.” But Americans don’t see the images of the drone victims or hear the stories of their survivors. If we did, we might be more sympathetic to the damage our drone bombs are wreaking in our name.
The guarantee of due process in the U.S. Constitution as well as in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights must be honored. That means arrest and fair trial, not summary execution.
What we really need is a complete reassessment of the “war on terror.” Until we overhaul our foreign policy and stop invading other countries, changing their regimes, occupying, torturing, and indefinitely detaining their people—and uncritically supporting other countries that illegally occupy other peoples’ lands—we will never be safe from terrorism.
Brace yourself. You may not be able to tell yet, but according to global experts and the U.S. intelligence community, the Earth is already shifting under you. Whether you know it or not, you’re on a new planet, a resource-shock world of a sort humanity has never before experienced.
Two nightmare scenarios—a global scarcity of vital resources and the onset of extreme climate change—are already beginning to converge and, in the coming decades, are likely to produce a tidal wave of unrest, rebellion, competition, and conflict. Just what this tsunami of disaster will look like may, as yet, be hard to discern, but experts warn of “water wars” over contested river systems, global food riots sparked by soaring prices for life’s basics, mass migrations of climate refugees (with resulting anti-migrant violence), and the breakdown of social order or the collapse of states. At first, such mayhem is likely to arise largely in Africa, Central Asia, and other areas of the underdeveloped South, but in time, all regions of the planet will be affected.
Start with one simple given: the prospect of future scarcities of vital natural resources, including energy, water, land, food, and critical minerals. This in itself would guarantee social unrest, geopolitical friction, and war.
It is important to note that absolute scarcity doesn’t have to be on the horizon in any given resource category for this scenario to kick in. A lack of adequate supplies to meet the needs of a growing, ever more urbanized and industrialized global population is enough. Given the wave of extinctions that scientists are recording, some resources—particular species of fish, animals, and trees, for example—will become less abundant in the decades to come and may even disappear altogether. But key materials for modern civilization like oil, uranium, and copper will simply prove harder and more costly to acquire.
Oil—the single most important commodity in the international economy—provides an apt example. In its 2011 World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency claimed that an anticipated global oil demand of 104 million barrels per day in 2035 will be satisfied, thanks, in large part, to additional supplies of “unconventional oil” (Canadian tar sands, shale oil, and so on), as well as 55 million barrels of new oil from fields “yet to be found.”
However, many analysts scoff at this optimistic assessment, arguing that rising production costs, environmental opposition, warfare, corruption, and other impediments will make it extremely difficult to achieve increases of this magnitude.
Water provides another potent example. On an annual basis, the supply of drinking water provided by natural precipitation remains more or less constant: about 40,000 cubic kilometers [9,597 cubic miles]. But much of this precipitation lands on Greenland, Antarctica, Siberia, and inner Amazonia, so the supply available to major concentrations of humanity is often surprisingly limited. In many regions with high population levels, water supplies are already relatively sparse. This is especially true of North Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East, where the demand for water continues to grow as a result of rising populations, urbanization, and the emergence of new water-intensive industries.
Wherever you look, the picture is roughly the same: supplies of critical resources may be rising or falling, but rarely do they appear to be outpacing demand, producing a sense of widespread and systemic scarcity. However generated, a perception of scarcity—or imminent scarcity—regularly leads to anxiety, resentment, hostility, and contentiousness. This pattern has been evident throughout human history. In his book Constant Battles, Steven LeBlanc, director of collections for Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, notes that many ancient civilizations experienced higher levels of warfare when faced with resource shortages brought about by population growth, crop failures, or drought. Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, has detected a similar pattern in Mayan civilization and the Anasazi culture of New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon. According to Lizzie Collingham, author of The Taste of War, concern over adequate food was a significant factor in Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and Germany’s invasions of Poland in 1939 and the Soviet Union in 1941.
Although the global supply of most basic commodities has grown enormously since the end of World War II, analysts see the persistence of resource-related conflict in areas where materials remain scarce or there is anxiety about the future reliability of supplies. Many experts believe, for example, that the fighting in Darfur and other war-ravaged areas of North Africa has been driven, at least in part, by competition among desert tribes for access to scarce water supplies, exacerbated in some cases by rising population levels.
“In Darfur,” says a 2009 report from the UN Environment Programme, “recurrent drought, increasing demographic pressures, and political marginalization are among the forces that have pushed the region into a spiral of lawlessness and violence that has led to 300,000 deaths and the displacement of more than two million people since 2003.”
Anxiety over future supplies is often also a factor in conflicts that break out over access to oil or control of contested undersea reserves of oil and natural gas. In 1979, for instance, when the Islamic Revolution in Iran overthrew the shah and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Washington began to fear that someday it might be denied access to Persian Gulf oil. In his 1980 State of the Union Address, President Jimmy Carter affirmed that any move to impede the flow of oil from the Gulf would be viewed as a threat to America’s “vital interests” and would be repelled by “any means necessary, including military force.”
In 1990, this “Carter Doctrine” was invoked by President George H. W. Bush to justify intervention in the first Persian Gulf War, just as his son would use it, in part, to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It remains the basis for U.S. plans to employ force to stop Iran from closing the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean through which about 35 percent of the world’s seaborne oil commerce passes.
Recently, a set of resource conflicts have been rising toward the boiling point between China and its neighbors in Southeast Asia when it comes to control of offshore oil and gas reserves in the South China Sea. A similar situation has also arisen in the East China Sea, where China and Japan are jousting for control over similarly valuable undersea reserves. Meanwhile, in the South Atlantic Ocean, Argentina and Britain are once again squabbling over the Falkland Islands (called Las Malvinas by Argentina) because oil has been discovered in surrounding waters.
By all accounts, resource-driven potential conflicts like these will only multiply in the years ahead as demand rises, supplies dwindle, and more of what remains will be found in disputed areas.
On this planet, a second major force has entered the equation in a significant way. With the growing reality of climate change, everything becomes a lot more terrifying.
Normally, when we consider the impact of climate change, we think primarily about the melting Arctic ice cap or Greenland ice shield, rising global sea levels, intensifying storms, expanding deserts, and endangered or disappearing species like the polar bear. But a growing number of experts are coming to realize that the most potent effects of climate change will be experienced by humans directly through the impairment or wholesale destruction of habitats upon which we rely for the basics of life—food, water, land, and energy.
We already know enough about the future effects of climate change to predict the following with reasonable confidence:
No one can predict how much food, land, water, and energy will be lost, but the cumulative effect will undoubtedly be staggering. In Resources Futures, Chatham House offers a particularly dire warning when it comes to the threat of diminished precipitation to rain-fed agriculture. “By 2020,” the report says, “yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent” in some areas. The highest rates of loss are expected in Africa, where reliance on rain-fed farming is greatest, but agriculture in China, India, Pakistan, and Central Asia is also likely to be severely affected.
Climate change will also reduce the flow of many vital rivers, diminishing water supplies for irrigation, hydroelectricity power, and nuclear reactors (which need massive amounts of water for cooling). The melting of glaciers, especially in the Andes in Latin America and the Himalayas in South Asia, will rob communities and cities of crucial water supplies. An expected increase in the frequency of hurricanes and typhoons will pose a growing threat to offshore oil rigs, coastal refineries, transmission lines, and other components of the global energy system. The melting of polar ice caps will open the Arctic to oil and gas exploration, but an increase in iceberg activity will make efforts to exploit the region’s resources perilous and exceedingly costly.
Longer growing seasons in the north, especially in Siberia and Canada’s northern provinces, might compensate to some degree for the desiccation of croplands in southerly latitudes. However, moving the global agricultural system (and the world’s farmers) northward from abandoned farmlands in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, India, China, Argentina, and Australia would be a daunting prospect.
It is safe to assume that climate change, especially when combined with growing supply shortages, will result in a significant reduction in the planet’s vital resources, augmenting the kinds of pressures that have historically led to conflict, even under better circumstances. According to the Chatham House report, climate change is best understood as a “threat multiplier … a key factor exacerbating existing resource vulnerability” in states already prone to such disorders. “Increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events, such as droughts, heat waves and floods, will also result in much larger and frequent local harvest shocks around the world…. These shocks will affect global food prices whenever key centers of agricultural production area are hit—further amplifying global food price volatility.” This, in turn, will increase the likelihood of civil unrest.
When, for instance, a brutal heat wave decimated Russia’s wheat crop during the summer of 2010, the global price of wheat (and of that staple of life, bread) began an inexorable upward climb, reaching particularly high levels in North Africa and the Middle East. Anger over impossible-toafford food merged with resentment toward autocratic regimes to trigger the massive popular outburst we know as the Arab Spring.
In March 2013, for the first time, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper listed “competition and scarcity involving natural resources” as a national security threat on a par with global terrorism, cyberwar, and nuclear proliferation.
There was a new phrase embedded in his comments: “resource shocks.” It catches something of the world we’re barreling toward, and the language is striking for an intelligence community that, like the government it serves, has largely played down or ignored the dangers of climate change. For the first time, senior government analysts may be coming to appreciate what energy experts, resource analysts, and scientists have long been warning about: the unbridled consumption of the world’s natural resources, combined with the advent of extreme climate change, could produce a global explosion of human chaos and conflict. We are now heading directly into a resource-shock world.
Is war a biological necessity, a sociological inevitability, or just a bad invention? Those who argue for the first view endow man with such pugnacious instincts that some outlet in aggressive behavior is necessary if man is to reach full human stature. It was this point of view, which lay behind William James’s famous essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” in which he tried to retain the warlike virtues and channel them in new directions.
A basic, competitive, aggressive, warring human nature is assumed, and those who wish to outlaw war or outlaw competitiveness merely try to find new and less socially destructive ways in which these biologically given aspects of man’s nature can find expression.
Then there are those who take the second view: warfare is the inevitable concomitant of the development of the state, the struggle for land and natural resources, of class societies springing not from the nature of man, but from the nature of history. War is nevertheless inevitable unless we change our social system and outlaw classes, the struggle for power, and possessions; and in the event of our success, warfare would disappear, as a symptom vanishes when the disease is cured.
One may hold a sort of compromise position between these two extremes; one may claim that all aggression springs from the frustration of man’s biologically determined drives and that, since all forms of culture are frustrating, it is certain each new generation will be aggressive and the aggression will find its natural and inevitable expression in race war, class war, nationalistic war, and so on. All three of these positions are very popular today among those who think seriously about the problems of war and its possible prevention, but I wish to urge another point of view, less defeatist, perhaps, than the first and third and more accurate than the second: that is, that warfare—by which I mean recognized conflict between two groups as groups, in which each group puts an army (even if the army is only fifteen pygmies) into the field to fight and kill, if possible, some of the members of the army of the other group—is an invention like any other of the inventions in terms of which we order our lives, such as writing, marriage, cooking our food instead of eating it raw, trial by jury, or burial of the dead, and so on.
Whenever a way of doing things is found universally, such as the use of fire or the practice of some form of marriage, we tend to think at once that it is not an invention at all but an attribute of humanity itself. And yet, even such universals as marriage and the use of fire are inventions like the rest, very basic ones, inventions which were, perhaps, necessary if human history was to take the turn that it has taken, but nevertheless inventions. At some point in his social development, man was undoubtedly without the institution of marriage or the knowledge of the use of fire.
The case for warfare is much clearer because there are peoples even today who have no warfare. Of these, the Eskimos are perhaps the most conspicuous examples, but the Lepchas of Sikkim are as good. Neither of these peoples understands war, not even defensive warfare. The idea of warfare is lacking, and this idea is as essential to really carrying on war as an alphabet or a syllabary is to writing.
But, whereas the Lepchas are a gentle, unquarrelsome people, the Eskimo case gives no such possibility of interpretation. The Eskimos are not a mild and meek people; many of them are turbulent and troublesome. Fights, theft of wives, murder, cannibalism occur among them—all outbursts of passionate men goaded by desire or intolerable circumstance. Here are men faced with hunger, men faced with loss of their wives, men faced with the threat of extermination by other men, and here are orphan children, growing up miserably with no one to care for them, mocked and neglected by those about them.
The personality necessary for war, the circumstances necessary to goad men to desperation are present, but there is no war. When a traveling Eskimo entered a settlement, he might have to fight the strongest man in the settlement to establish his position among them, but this was a test of strength and bravery, not war. The idea of warfare, of one group organizing against another group to maim and wound and kill them, was absent. And, without that idea, passions might rage, but there was no war.
But, it may be argued, is not this because the Eskimos have such a low and undeveloped form of social organization? They own no land, they move from place to place, camping, it is true, season after season on the same site, but this is not something to fight for as the modern nations of the world fight for land and raw materials. They have no permanent possessions that can be looted, no towns that can be burned. They have no social classes to produce stress and strains within the society, which might force it to go to war outside. Does not the absence of war among the Eskimos, while disproving the biological necessity of war, just go to confirm the point that it is the state of development of the society that accounts for war and nothing else?
We find the answer among the pygmy peoples of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. The Andamans also represent an exceedingly low level of society; they are a hunting and food-gathering people; they live in tiny hordes without any class stratification; their houses are simpler than the snow houses of the Eskimo. But they knew about warfare. The army might contain only fifteen determined pygmies marching in a straight line, but it was the real thing nonetheless. Tiny army met tiny army in open battle, blows were exchanged, casualties suffered, and the state of warfare could only be concluded by a peacemaking ceremony.
Similarly, among the Australian aborigines, who built no permanent dwellings but wandered from water hole to water hole over their almost desert country, warfare—and rules of “international law”—were highly developed. The student of social evolution will seek in vain for his obvious causes of war, struggle for lands, struggle for power of one group over another, expansion of population, need to divert the minds of a populace restive under tyranny, or even the ambition of a successful leader to enhance his own prestige. All are absent, but warfare as a practice remained, and men engaged in it and killed one another in the course of a war because killing is what is done in wars.
From instances like these, it becomes apparent that an inquiry into the causes of war misses the fundamental point as completely as does an insistence upon the biological necessity of war. If a people have an idea of going to war and the idea that war is the way in which certain situations, defined within their society, are to be handled, they will sometimes go to war. If they are a mild and unaggressive people, like the Pueblo Indians, they may limit themselves to defensive warfare, but they will be forced to think in terms of war because there are peoples near them who have warfare as a pattern, and offensive, raiding, pillaging warfare at that.
So simple peoples and civilized peoples, mild peoples and violent, assertive peoples will all go to war if they have the invention, just as those peoples who have the custom of dueling will have duels and peoples who have the pattern of vendetta will indulge in vendetta. And, conversely, peoples who do not know of dueling will not fight duels, even though their wives are seduced and their daughters ravished; they may, on occasion, commit murder but they will not fight duels. Cultures which lack the idea of the vendetta will not meet every quarrel in this way.
A people can use only the forms it has. So the Balinese have their special way of dealing with a quarrel between two individuals: if the two feel that the causes of quarrel are heavy, they may go and register their quarrel in the temple before the gods, and, making offerings, they may swear never to have anything to do with each other again.
Yet, if it be granted that warfare is, after all, an invention, it may nevertheless be an invention that lends itself to certain types of personality, to the exigent needs of autocrats, to the expansionist desires of crowded peoples, to the desire for plunder and rape and loot which is engendered by a dull and frustrating life.
There are tribes who go to war merely for glory, having no quarrel with the enemy, suffering from no tyrant within their boundaries, anxious neither for land nor loot nor women, but merely anxious to win prestige which within that tribe has been declared obtainable only by war and without which no young man can hope to win his sweetheart’s smile of approval. But if, as was the case with the Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana, it is artistic ability which is necessary to win a girl’s approval, the same young man would have to be carving rather than going out on a war party.
In many parts of the world, war is a game in which the individual can win counters—counters which bring him prestige in the eyes of his own sex or of the opposite sex; he plays for these counters as he might, in our society, strive for a tennis championship.
Warfare is a frame for such prestige-seeking merely because it calls for the display of certain skills and certain virtues; all of these skills—riding straight, shooting straight, dodging the missiles of the enemy and sending one’s own straight to the mark—can be equally well exercised in some other framework and, equally, the virtues endurance, bravery, loyalty, steadfastness can be displayed in other contexts.
The tie-up between proving oneself a man and proving this by a success in organized killing is due to a definition which many societies have made of manliness. Warfare is just an invention known to the majority of human societies by which they permit their young men either to accumulate prestige or avenge their honor or acquire loot or wives or slaves or sago lands or cattle or appease the bloodlust of their gods or the restless souls of the recently dead. It is just an invention, older and more widespread than the jury system, but nonetheless an invention.
But, once we have said this, have we said anything at all? Grant that war is an invention—that it is not a biological necessity nor the outcome of certain special types of social forms—still, once the invention is made, what are we to do about it? Once an invention is known and accepted, men do not easily relinquish it. The skilled workers may smash the first steam looms which they feel are to be their undoing, but they accept them in the end, and no movement which has insisted upon the mere abandonment of usable inventions has ever had much success.
Warfare is here, as part of our thought: the deeds of warriors are immortalized in the words of our poets; the toys of our children are modeled upon the weapons of the soldier; the frame of reference within which our statesmen and our diplomats work always contains war. If we know that it is not inevitable, that it is due to historical accident that warfare is one of the ways in which we think of behaving, are we given any hope by that? What hope is there of persuading nations to abandon war, nations so thoroughly imbued with the idea that resort to war is, if not actually desirable and noble, at least inevitable whenever certain defined circumstances arise?
In answer to this question, I think we might turn to the history of other social inventions and inventions, which must once have seemed as finally entrenched as warfare. Take the methods of trial, which preceded the jury system: ordeal and trial by combat. Unfair, capricious, alien as they are to our feeling today, they were once the only methods open to individuals accused of some offense. The invention of trial by jury gradually replaced these methods until only witches, and finally not even witches, had to resort to the ordeal. The ordeal did not go out because people thought it unjust or wrong; it went out because a method more congruent with the institutions and feelings of the period was invented. And, if we despair over the way in which war seems such an ingrained habit of most of the human race, we can take comfort from the fact that a poor invention will usually give place to a better invention.
For this, two conditions, at least, are necessary. The people must recognize the defects of the old invention, and someone must make a new one. Propaganda against warfare, documentation of its terrible cost in human suffering and social waste, these prepare the ground by teaching people to feel that warfare is a defective social institution. There is further needed a belief that social invention is possible and the invention of new methods which will render warfare as out-of-date as the tractor is making the plow, or the motorcar the horse and buggy. A form of behavior becomes out of date only when something else takes its place, and, in order to invent forms of behavior, which will make war obsolete, it is a first requirement to believe that an invention is possible.
Deep in the heart of the Congo, legends linger about an elusive, “almost human” shadow—a mysterious ape, shrouded from the allure accorded its cousins, the chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. The bonobo (Pan paniscus) is the great ape most closely related to humans, sharing 98.4 percent of our DNA and displaying many qualities that we humans need to emulate to ensure our own survival, and that of our planet.
Bonobos were the last great ape to be studied by modern scientists and, unless protections are enforced immediately, they could be the first to go extinct. These rare apes inhabit the central Congo Basin—home to the world’s second-largest rainforest and the area of greatest biodiversity in Africa. Found only in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a resource-rich region ravaged by civil war and foreign occupation, bonobos face an ironic fate. Distinguished by their peaceful, loving nature, bonobos have become victims of human violence.
Unlike their close relatives, the chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)—who engage in a competitive, male-dominated society and wage territorial wars against each other—bonobos have a matriarchal culture, bound by cooperation, sharing, and the creative use of sex. Bonobos live in large groups where peaceful coexistence is the norm. Females carry the highest rank and the sons of ranking females are the leaders among males. Alliances among females are the central unifying force.
Bonobos show how a complex society can be ordered successfully by cooperation rather than competition. When neighboring groups of bonobos meet in the forest, they greet one another sexually and share food instead of fighting. Dubbed the “hippie chimps,” bonobos exemplify the 1960s credo, “Make love, not war.” Sex transcends reproduction in bonobos (as it does in humans). Bonobos are bisexual or, as psychologist Frans de Waal contends, “pansexual.” Sex permeates almost all aspects of daily life. Encounters, both with the same and the opposite sex, serve as a way of bonding, sharing, and keeping the peace. Unlike other apes, bonobos frequently copulate face to face, looking into each other’s eyes.
Bonobo anatomy is strikingly similar to that of our early human ancestor, Australopithecus. Bonobos walk bipedally more easily and more often than other apes. The uncommon social structure, sexual behavior, and intellectual capacity of bonobos reveal compelling clues about the roots of human nature. Highly compassionate and conscious beings, bonobos blur the line between animal and human.
Much of what we know about the bonobo mind and emotion we owe to Kanzi and his sister Panbanisha, who currently live at the Georgia State University Language Research Center near Atlanta. Under the tutelage of Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, these bonobos have learned to understand spoken English and can communicate using sign language. The bonobos “speak” by pointing to lexigrams or symbols on a keyboard that correspond to words.
Kanzi and Panbanisha have been my best teachers, and they have inspired my work for bonobo conservation. The first day I had direct contact with Panbanisha several years ago, we went for a walk in the forest surrounding the lab. When we stopped to rest and have a snack, Panbanisha began to groom me, combing my hair with her fingers, inspecting the contours of my face.
When she discovered a cut on my wrist, she pointed to it, furrowed her brow and made soft “whu” sounds with a doctorly air of concern. Then she said “hurt” on her keyboard. Once she was convinced that this “hurt” was not “bad,” she proceeded to bite my fingernails! Quite the manicurist, Panbanisha peeled a twig, making a sharp point that she used to clean under what remained of my nails, carefully attending to each finger, one by one. This is bonding, bonobo-style. I was honored to be accepted by Panbanisha and as happy as she was to have made a new friend.
In the wild, it is clear that bonobos have a complex communication system, which they use to coordinate their movements through the forest, breaking into small groups for foraging during the day and regrouping at night. When bonobos gather in the trees to make their night nests, they fill the twilight with a symphony of high-pitched soprano squeals that sound like the cries of exotic birds—and quite unlike the guttural hoots of chimpanzees. The Indigenous Mongandu people who live among bonobos still use a “whistle language” to communicate that is eerily reminiscent of bonobo calls.
Unfortunately, owing to the outbreak of regional warfare, bonobos increasingly are being hunted throughout their habitat and little is being done to protect them. The population, small to begin with, is fragmented and decreasing. No one knows how many bonobos survive. Estimates range between 5,000 and 20,000. We do know that bonobos have disappeared from several areas where they formerly lived.
Traditional taboos, which once protected bonobos, are breaking down in the face of economic desperation and human population pressure. More and more bonobos are being killed, both for sustenance and for profit in the commercial bushmeat trade, which is ravaging central Africa.
Our survival as a species may pivot on whether we behave more like chimpanzees or bonobos. Thankfully, there is hope. After years of civil war, the peace process is finally moving forward in the DRC. It is now possible to resume conservation work. As the Congo War abates, concerted efforts can begin to protect bonobos and their habitat and to recognize the apes as a national treasure and icons of peace.