The War and Environment Reader

Just World Publishing, LLC

Contents

Part I

PERMAWAR — HUMAN NATURE and WARFARE

I knew Man was doomed when I realized that his strongest inclination was toward ever-increasing homogeneity — which goes completely against Nature. Nature moves toward ever-increasing diversity. Diversity is Nature's strength. Nature loves diversity.

— Yvon Chouinard, founder of the outdoor-gear company Patagonia

In the Hebrew Bible, in Genesis 6:7, the first "war on nature" is launched by an angry God who destroys his Creation — animals, birds, insects, fish, forests, mountains, and meadows — because of the "wickedness" of humans. But God came to regret the destruction, as recorded in Genesis 8:21–22: "I will never again curse the ground because of man. ... Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. For all the days of the Earth, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease."

Unfortunately, humankind failed to make a similar pledge.

Permawar — Human Nature and War explores the interaction between human nature and the war on nature by asking, "Are there innate forces in the human spirit — or social and cultural influences — that predispose individuals and groups to choose killing over cooperation?"

In a darkly prescient 2006 essay posted on OpEdNews, University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen raised an intriguing question: "Can a nation have a coherent character?" When he searched the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for a clue to "America's national character," one category jumped out: "Narcissistic Personality Disorder." NPD's signature traits include "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy." So perhaps it is no surprise that, ten years after Jensen's diagnosis, Donald Trump bellowed his way into the Oval Office, boastful and belligerent, and set about gutting environmental protections and financial regulations to unleash the forces of carbon-fueled capitalism.

According to Politifact, the United States spends more on its military than the next eight militarized countries combined. Yet, despite massive increases in military spending, the United States has not won a war since 1945, nor has it managed to bring democracy or freedom to any of the many nations it has attacked or occupied over the past seven decades. Instead of drawing useful conclusions from this sorry history, Republicans and Democrats alike have asked Americans to accept a future of "generational" wars. "Disaster capitalism" has turned combat into a form of commerce. Wars are no longer avoided, they are provoked — often through fictitious "false flag" incidents designed to mislead and stampede the public. Meanwhile, a small, powerful elite reaps massive dividends by investing in armaments — including nuclear weapons.

In a January 2017 report titled An Economy for the 99%, Oxfam revealed that eight super-rich men controlled $438 billion — as much wealth as 3.6 billion of the world's poorest people. At the same time, the Pentagon's FY 2016 budget was $521.7 billion. Redistributing that wealth could make every homeless person in the United States a millionaire, concluded Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani of ThinkProgress in a May 2016 article. The $400 billion tab for Lockheed Martin's underperforming F-35 Joint Strike Fighter could have allowed the National School Lunch Program to feed 31 million American children — for 24 years. And yet, with one-fifth of America's children malnourished, both political parties continue to prioritize the feeding of Pentagon contractors — including $1 trillion to create "a new generation" of nuclear bombs over the next thirty years.

Mapping the Terrain

The Roots of War examines foundational forces that underlie the militaristic mindset — including patriarchy, machismo, and misogyny. Other factors include: linear thinking that divorces the human mind from nature's rhythms; a celebration of competition and combative sports; and a torrent of Hollywood blockbusters that promote fists and firearms as problem-solving tools. And whenever force rules the day, Nature takes the hits.

As the United Nations Environment Programme has noted over the past sixty years, nearly half of all internal conflicts involved battles for control of natural resources. Millions of people have perished in bloody skirmishes over diamonds, timber, oil, and gold. Now, as global temperatures and tensions rise, drought, floods, hurricanes, and disease are driving new "resource wars."

The Business of War examines militarism as an economic force. As America's most decorated Marine once revealed, "War is a racket"— a system that is ruinously expensive to the people who shoulder the costs but incredibly remunerative to the hidden few who reap incredible fortunes despite never having to shoulder a rifle.

With the global economy staggering under burdens of unpayable debt, war has become an economic stimulus program. Despite a towering federal debt topping $14 trillion (according to a September 2016 Congressional Budget Office estimate), Donald Trump, in his first week in office, called on Washington to lavish even more money on "our depleted military." (A September 2016 study by Brown University's Watson Institute predicted interest on the US debt could top $1 trillion by 2023 and exceed $7.9 trillion by 2053.)

Meanwhile, the War Economy keeps its eye on the future — cultivating the next generation of soldiers by putting toy guns and violent videogames into the hands of children.

The Aftermath of War tracks outcomes that can be grim and long lasting. Ten percent of the 2.7 million tons of Allied bombs dropped on Europe during World War II failed to detonate and continue to threaten modern towns and villages. Blasted metal skeletons of ships and planes litter bays and beaches across the South Pacific. Exposure to toxic burn pits, radioactive debris, and chemical agents have claimed the lives of thousands of military men and women while civilians fight to survive the cancers caused by fallout carried downwind from America's atomic playground at the Nevada Test Site. On South Pacific islands exposed to fallout from U.S. nuclear tests, horrified mothers gave birth to "jellyfish babies." In the crowded hospitals of Iraq, women from Fallujah and other cities blasted by U.S. depleted uranium weapons continue to deliver deformed babies — children born with the wrong number of fingers, legs, arms, eyes, and heads. Combat veterans struggle with PTSD, trying to block the grotesque memories of violent deaths while considering the relief of suicide.

Fortunately, nature is resilient — despite wounds to the land that can outlast decades. One of the best examples of nature's ability to heal is found in the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas. Since 1953, land-mines, barricades, and armed sentries have prevented human encroachment inside the DMZ's 400 square miles. Protected from human presence, the DMZ has become a "new Eden," one of the most flourishing and biodiverse wilderness areas on the planet.

The success of this Korean no-man's-land brings to mind Rainer Maria Rilke's wistful observation: "If we surrendered to Earth's intelligence, we could rise up rooted, like trees."

THE ROOTS OF WAR

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.

— bell hooks, American author, feminist, and social activist

Stones to Drones: A History of War on Earth

Gar Smith, Environmentalists Against War (2017)

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.

Ancient Tales of Blood and Conquest

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.

America's Indian Wars

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:

Come, my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order,
Get your weapons ready;
Have you your pistols?
Have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O Pioneers!

The American Civil War

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.