A film about the environmental cost of war
This blog entry was written by Helen Triolo and posted on Nov 17, 2008
Alice and Lincoln Day's Scarred Lands and Wounded Lives was, in some parts, as depressing as I expected it would be. It's a well-documented and beautifully presented look at the myriad ways and times in which we humans so unquestioningly focus on destroying other humans that we fail to see the awful consequences we create for ourselves. Fortunately, it also offers a suggestion of how we might turn things around.
Some of war's environmental consequences are already widely known, like the harm caused then and now, to "them" and to us, from the use of agent orange and other chemical defoliants in Vietnam. The film sears this into memory with footage of the massive aerial chemical bombardment of the countryside, painful images of the effects on both Vietnamese children (still) and US soldiers, and a discussion of how this destruction of the land is a particular affront to a culture which so values the interconnection of land and people.
The fear and human tragedy caused by leftover unexploded landmines is also well-known, and driven home by photos of row after row of amputees in rudimentary hospitals, hopeless victims of post-conflict landmine and cluster bomblet explosions. The environmental consequence is perhaps even more widely threatening to the affected society though: the film states that the presence of even one unexploded landmine in an acre of farmland can make that entire acre unusable. David Jensen of the UN Environment Programme talks about how in Afghanistan this has contributed to the mass deforestation of the economically important pistachio woodlands, as that is turned into farmland to replace the land lost to mines. That deforestation has led not only to a drastic loss of income from pistachio exports, but to increased erosion and subsequent loss of land fertility.
Other issues are less well-known: massive continuing oil leaks from ships sunk in the attack on Pearl Harbor, destruction from bombed oil refineries and petrochemical plants in Serbia from which "it will take the ecosystems decades to recover," ditto for Israel's bombing of Lebanon in 2006, destroyed coral reefs and whole islands in the Pacific from nuclear testing and waste disposal, the enormous cost of dealing with chemical weapons stockpiles here and in the former Soviet Union. More examples and details can be seen in the video excerpts on this page, and of course in the film itself, which is an emotion- and fact-packed 65 minutes long.
The most pressing threat of all, of course, is from climate change. The military machine contributes mightily to the carbon output that is the primary cause, being the largest consumer of petroleum in the US. It takes the same fuel to power an F-16 for one hour as the average American uses in a year. An Abrams tank uses two gallons of fuel to go one mile. In the film, these facts are juxtaposed, as they should be, with dramatic pictures of collapsing icebergs and a polar bear struggling and failing to find solid ice to pull itself onto.
The film-makers also collected an impressive amount of archival footage giving examples of our history of taking an ever optimistic and almost cavalier approach to war and war-planning, noting that in fact "the greater and more durable impacts come from preparation for war rather than combat itself" (see an excerpt of Georgetown professor John McNeill talking about the legacy of the nuclear buildup). JFK is shown speaking at the groundbreaking of the Hanford nuclear generating plant in 1963, proclaiming "I think it is very appropriate that we come here where so much has been done to build the military strength of the United States and to find a chance to strike a blow for peace... this is a great national asset here. I can assure you it will be maintained."
Following are scenes of Keep Out signs at Hanford and mention of the true legacy of Hanford’s plutonium production operations: 55 million gallons of nuclear waste stored in 177 underground tanks, a third of which have already leaked at least one million gallons of radioactive waste into the soil and the groundwater that feeds into the Columbia River. So much for that blow for peace.
That was the depressing part. Fortunately for our sanity, two individuals offered a ray of hope at the end. One was Professor Saleem Ali from the University of Vermont talking about how cooperation increases when there is a "common aversion" -- as when two cars come to an intersection and act in concert because neither wants the common aversion of an accident. He suggests that the monstrous threat posed by climate change should serve as that common aversion, taking precedence over any external human enemy.
Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute followed that to its logical conclusion, proposing (in his Plan B, 3.0) a global budget to stabilize population and restore the earth. Brown estimates the annual cost of the Plan B budget to be $161 billion – approximately one third of the annual US military budget:
“If you ask the question, objectively, could we reduce the US military budget by a third and shift those expenditures into eradicating poverty, stabilizing population, [and] earth restoration, I think it's clear that we would do far more to ensure our future than if we just stay with a half a trillion dollars of US taxpayer money going to military purposes...
When people look at the questions of earth restoration, people say, ‘Can we afford that?’ That's not the question. The question is, ‘Can we afford not to do that?’ And the answer is certainly no. What we are talking about is protecting the economy's environmental support systems; if those support systems continue to disintegrate, the economy will eventually itself disintegrate. The economy does not exist in a vacuum, it is entirely dependent on the earth's natural systems and resources, and if we damage and destroy those systems and resources then the economy will eventually decline and one day collapse.”
I'll be sure to include any future viewings of this film on the calendar here. Thanks to Naomi Bloch and Sylvia Diss of Democracy for Montgomery County for bringing Scarred Lands and Wounded Lives to the Rockville library yesterday (and for the chance to meet Lincoln and Alice Day afterwards).
The extent of the problem
Some of war's environmental consequences are already widely known, like the harm caused then and now, to "them" and to us, from the use of agent orange and other chemical defoliants in Vietnam. The film sears this into memory with footage of the massive aerial chemical bombardment of the countryside, painful images of the effects on both Vietnamese children (still) and US soldiers, and a discussion of how this destruction of the land is a particular affront to a culture which so values the interconnection of land and people.
The fear and human tragedy caused by leftover unexploded landmines is also well-known, and driven home by photos of row after row of amputees in rudimentary hospitals, hopeless victims of post-conflict landmine and cluster bomblet explosions. The environmental consequence is perhaps even more widely threatening to the affected society though: the film states that the presence of even one unexploded landmine in an acre of farmland can make that entire acre unusable. David Jensen of the UN Environment Programme talks about how in Afghanistan this has contributed to the mass deforestation of the economically important pistachio woodlands, as that is turned into farmland to replace the land lost to mines. That deforestation has led not only to a drastic loss of income from pistachio exports, but to increased erosion and subsequent loss of land fertility.
The most pressing threat of all, of course, is from climate change. The military machine contributes mightily to the carbon output that is the primary cause, being the largest consumer of petroleum in the US. It takes the same fuel to power an F-16 for one hour as the average American uses in a year. An Abrams tank uses two gallons of fuel to go one mile. In the film, these facts are juxtaposed, as they should be, with dramatic pictures of collapsing icebergs and a polar bear struggling and failing to find solid ice to pull itself onto.
The film-makers also collected an impressive amount of archival footage giving examples of our history of taking an ever optimistic and almost cavalier approach to war and war-planning, noting that in fact "the greater and more durable impacts come from preparation for war rather than combat itself" (see an excerpt of Georgetown professor John McNeill talking about the legacy of the nuclear buildup). JFK is shown speaking at the groundbreaking of the Hanford nuclear generating plant in 1963, proclaiming "I think it is very appropriate that we come here where so much has been done to build the military strength of the United States and to find a chance to strike a blow for peace... this is a great national asset here. I can assure you it will be maintained."
JFK speaking at groundbreaking of Hanford nuclear generating plant in 1963
What to do
That was the depressing part. Fortunately for our sanity, two individuals offered a ray of hope at the end. One was Professor Saleem Ali from the University of Vermont talking about how cooperation increases when there is a "common aversion" -- as when two cars come to an intersection and act in concert because neither wants the common aversion of an accident. He suggests that the monstrous threat posed by climate change should serve as that common aversion, taking precedence over any external human enemy.
Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute followed that to its logical conclusion, proposing (in his Plan B, 3.0) a global budget to stabilize population and restore the earth. Brown estimates the annual cost of the Plan B budget to be $161 billion – approximately one third of the annual US military budget:
“If you ask the question, objectively, could we reduce the US military budget by a third and shift those expenditures into eradicating poverty, stabilizing population, [and] earth restoration, I think it's clear that we would do far more to ensure our future than if we just stay with a half a trillion dollars of US taxpayer money going to military purposes...
When people look at the questions of earth restoration, people say, ‘Can we afford that?’ That's not the question. The question is, ‘Can we afford not to do that?’ And the answer is certainly no. What we are talking about is protecting the economy's environmental support systems; if those support systems continue to disintegrate, the economy will eventually itself disintegrate. The economy does not exist in a vacuum, it is entirely dependent on the earth's natural systems and resources, and if we damage and destroy those systems and resources then the economy will eventually decline and one day collapse.”
I'll be sure to include any future viewings of this film on the calendar here. Thanks to Naomi Bloch and Sylvia Diss of Democracy for Montgomery County for bringing Scarred Lands and Wounded Lives to the Rockville library yesterday (and for the chance to meet Lincoln and Alice Day afterwards).
