Let’s Trade Militarism for Environmentalism and Clean Up Our Act

Last week I wrote briefly about the Pentagon’s decision to include climate change assessment in its next Defense Review. I further touched upon some major steps that different branches of the Armed Forces have taken to curb their environmental impact – the Army’s assorted solar installations, the Navy’s short-term plans to curb GHG emissions, etc. But none of those steps can truly reverse the incredible havoc wreaked on the environment by military actions. If we really want to “green up” the military, we need to build renewable bases and bring troops home, putting them to work cleaning up the military’s long history of devastation.

According to the Centre for Research on Globalization, the US military, in 2002, had bases in some 63 countries, accounting for a total 737 bases in foreign lands and more than 250,000 military personnel deployed abroad. Within US borders, the military is the largest single source of environmental pollution. Worldwide, militaries are responsible for more than two-thirds of the global emission of the ozone-damaging chlorofluorocarbon, CFC-113.

According to the International Peace Bureau, direct effects of war on the physical environment include:

• Pollution of air, land and water in peacetime
• The immediate and long-term environmental effects of armed conflict
• Militarization of outer space
• Nuclear weapons development and production
• Land use

For some perspective, consider that between 1945 and 1982, war-torn Vietnam lost over 80 percent of its original forest cover, leaving a landscape deformed by 2.5 million craters. During the first Gulf War alone, 4 to 8 million barrels of oil were spilled into the sea, damaging 460 miles of coastline and leaving the delicate ecosystem in dire straits over the long term.

These are just a few examples of the degradation caused by war and the world’s militaries. The correlation between the rapid worsening of our domestic and global environments and the rise to corporate and bureaucratic dominance of the military industrial complex is too eerie to ignore. While it is truly wonderful to see the Army, Navy and Air Force using renewable energy and trying to clean up their act, funds spent on renewable energy installations pale in comparison to the astounding number of dollars spent each second fighting wars.

In 2002, the cost to clean up military-related toxic sites in America was estimated at more than $500 billion. That sounds like a hefty price tag – and it is – but it too pales in comparison to the nearly $1 trillion and counting the US has spent in just 9 years fighting its two primary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Anyone who says we can’t afford the massive cleanup of polluted military sites must also then admit that we can’t keep fighting these wars.

Scaling down an undeniably empirical military presence around the world, including private military contractors, is an environmental must. I know we are mired in a very complex, thick soup of a war (or two) in the Middle East, but can at least start to clean up our messes abroad, bring those troops home and put them to work cleaning up our own toxic sites. Then, we could put some of these young servicemen and women to work assembling or installing solar panels, maintaining wind turbines or building geothermal power plants.

The greenest thing about militaries are the uniforms (for pre-desert wars). Again, I’m happy about the Army’s solar installations and I’m pleased that the Department of Defense is including environmental impact in its internal reviews, but all shirk the real truth. In order to solve a problem, we must first stop creating that problem, and as far as environmental problems go, the military is the biggest.

There are some 300,000 young, able-bodied, would-be solar installers stationed around the globe, many in harm’s way. And regardless of what one thinks of current wars or the global US military presence, who can deny that turning our swords into solar panels wouldn’t be fighting the good fight? Just imagine it.

Photo Credit: ScrapeTV, THANHNIEN News, & Military.com

Posted on February 10th in Solar Politics by Dan.