US fighter jets patrol Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm, 1991. PHOTO: WIKIPEDIA.
We know that the White Man does not understand our way of life….
The Earth is not his brother but his enemy and
when he has conquered it, he moves on….
He treats his Mother the Earth and his Brother the Sky like merchandise.
His hunger will eat the Earth bare and leave only a desert.
Our ancestors once coexisted with the natural world. Over the centuries, however, our human tribes learned to compete with nature, brandishing ever-sturdier tools and sharper weapons to wage increasingly savage wars—for land, water, crops, forests, minerals, and buried fuels.
The planet’s biodiversity has been targeted on two fronts. On the one hand, there is an overt war mounted by tanks, warships, and supersonic bombers. On the other, there is a covert war driven by industry, whose weapons include bulldozers, logging machines, deep-sea drilling rigs, and explosives designed to blow the tops off coal-rich mountains.
Armies commanded by generals target the Earth’s land and seas for control. At the same time, the armies of capital stalk the globe in search of plunder and profit. Frequently, these two armies join forces—the generals competing to seize portions of the biosphere that can be exploited and “developed” to enrich politically powerful corporations. Nature is besieged by the Military-Industrial Complex.
Industrial societies expand at the expense of nature. Cities rise and sprawl as forests and wetlands shrink. Biodiverse wildlands are transformed into chemically addicted monocultures. Oil burned to warm and cool homes, to propel aircraft, vessels, and vehicles, is exhausted into the atmosphere. As the air and oceans grow hotter, submerged nations of primordial coral blacken into extinction and polar ice fields—once stable, massive, and magnificent—shrink, crumble, and collapse.
Today, the destruction of local biomes and global systems by rapacious industry and destructive warfare has reached a tipping point. Growth-atall-cost economies are not sustainable on a planet with finite resources.
Climate change has created an unprecedented crisis of “environmental refugees,” with drought-caused crop failures and the deaths of livestock contributing to the unrest behind both the surge of Arab Spring uprisings and the growth of Nigeria’s Boko Haram insurgency. A December 2015 report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences similarly traced the outbreak of the 2011 civil war in Syria to an extreme drought that ravaged the country from 2006 to 2009 and drove as many as 1.5 million desperate people into Syria’s crowded cities.
The year 2016 was the hottest on record, according to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. (A troubling statistic, given that each of the two previous years had also been the “hottest on record.”) At the end of 2016, Arctic sea ice had retreated to record lows (a 30 percent loss over the previous 25 years) while temperatures above the North Pole rose 30 to 50°F above normal. Speaking to the Guardian, atmospheric scientist Jennifer Francis warned: “This is all headed in the same direction and picking up speed.”
On December 1, 2016, top military officials from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Bangladesh issued a “call to arms” on climate change during a Chatham House conference hosted by London’s Royal Institute of International Affairs. Brigadier-General Stephen Cheney, CEO of the American Security Project, warned that “climate change could lead to a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions,” triggering crop failures, water scarcity, and devastating storms, while British rear admiral Neil Morisetti called climate change “a strategic security threat that sits alongside others like terrorism and state-on-state conflict.”
When the U.S. electoral college selected Donald Trump to serve in the Oval Office, many senior military and national security officials started closing ranks to deal with a commander-in-chief who has ignored the evidence for climate change (a “hoax created by and for the Chinese”) and has called for creating “many millions of high-paid jobs” by rolling back pollution regulations, attacking the historic 2016 Paris Climate Accord, and reviving the “Smokestack Economy”—with increased reliance on coal, oil, and fracking.
Meanwhile, with entire hemispheres at risk, the hammer-blows of war continue to fall, in large measure, on ecosystems, villages, and cities. This is the initial focus of Part II, Terracide—The War on Nature.
Nature in the Crosshairs offers a short survey of “scorched earth” warfare and visits conflict zones on several continents. These essays—many written by activists who were eyewitnesses to the destruction they describe—range from Afghanistan to Africa, from Central America to the Middle East, from distant Pacific islands to the chemically poisoned valleys of Vietnam.
Collateral Damage examines war’s impacts on the “urban battle-scape”—in Baghdad, Ukraine, and Syria—and considers the nameless victims of conflict, from refugees and survivors to the ocean’s largest marine mammals.
A Field Guide to Militarism chronicles how war has metastasized beyond the traditional battlefield, expanding to threaten native lands, deserts, oceans, islands, the Arctic, and even the vastness of outer space.
The Machinery of Mayhem exposes the environmental impacts of military operations and weaponry, including tanks, warships, jet aircraft, cluster bombs, landmines, weather modification, and nuclear war.