The War on Terra

We're rightly focused on the human casualities of war--the needless deaths of individuals, the rending of families and of communities, most obvious at the moment in Iraq and Darfur. We mention then the economic costs, to the countries devastated by warfare, and to the generations of Americans who will pay for the billions of dollars burned every year, every month, every week. But those billions pay to burn more than bridges or even people. These wars are wars on the earth itself.

This was perhaps most evident last summer in Lebanon, when the New York Times reported that: Spilled and burning oil, along with forest fires, toxic waste flows and growing garbage heaps have gone from nuisances to threats to people and wildlife, they say, marring a country traditionally known for its clean air and scenic greenery. Many of Lebanon’s once pristine beaches and much of its coastline have been coated with a thick sludge that threatens marine life.

That was July. A month or so later the dimensions of the catastrophe were still growing, as oil slicks threatened the major food supply of fish, and required a year of cleanup costing hundreds of millions of dollars. But even that is short-term. War places a double whammy on the earth, by destroying and polluting, and also destroying the ability of the human population to even try to fix it. And some things just can't be fixed. If ecosystems are damaged enough, or at a vulnerable point, the damage and destruction ripples out, ultimately getting worse.

Some ecosystems never come back. Forests are the prime example. Entire forests were cut down across Europe and the Middle East for fuel but also for warfare--for ships and fortifications and to deny enemies cover. Many of those forests never returned. In some places, other factors combined to turn once green areas into desert. Parts of Lebanon escaped the fate of other areas there. But maybe not this time. The cedars of Lebanon, already endangered, may soon become nothing more than an empty symbol.

The range of environmental construction caused by war and warmaking is just beginning to be counted and studied. But the war on Terra goes beyond war, of course. And we are doing now to the endless oceans what we have done to the endless forests that once covered the land of this planet. We may fight this war until we run out of ammunition, and water, and the variety of food that sustains us, until we are the last primates, the last mammals, on the planet. Then the war will be over, and both sides will have lost.

The earth as the battlefield which will heal itself, and poppies grow where young men stood, may have been true to some extent for some wars in the past. But our weapons are way too destructive now, as are the raw materials needed and the processes of creating them. Now we devastate heedlessly, we poison, we irradiate, and we walk away. War is not always an apt metaphor for our civilization but in this it is. Heedless consumption as well as heedless destruction, and the greed of a few (a factor in war as in the war on Terra) or of many, has opened up a continent-size hole in the ozone layer, and the Climate Crisis moves in our us, to hit us right between our denying eyes.

If civilization survives much longer, the consequences for the environment as well as the seventh generation to come will be a factor in every major decision, because that's simply a tautology. Unless we end the heedless war on Terra, that war will end us.