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The old button from the Environmental Club days which I just happened to find on Earth Day! It is a little beat up (particularly the ends of the ribbon), but no worse for the wear, I think. And it is one of the few items that I have left from those days, so it carries a lot of great memories for me! Nothing Changes Until You Do!
"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's gred."
~Mahatma Gandhi
"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future."
~John F. Kennedy
One thing I never fully understood is why our society equates everything - almost literally everything - with war.
Really, it is perplexing to me, this fascination with the deadliest, and possibly, the most evil invention that humanity has ever come up with.
Yes, I know, sometimes war is necessary. So is pain. So is death. That does not mean that we have to look forward to it. As I understood it rowing up, war is something that, at least in theory, should be an absolute last resort.
Still, people are always fascinated with war, and things related to war. The military budget in the United States is offensively, perversely high. It has become precisely the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about.
Yet, we see reminders of war all over the place. Corporations and sports teams will retreat into their war room to think about a plan, perhaps a plan of attack. A particularly strong and unstoppable one means that someone is blazing a warpath. Also in sports, players are often referred to as the troops. A tough game or match will be considered outright a war, with both teams going back and forth. In football, a quarterback might avoid a blitz and throw a long bomb into the end zone for a touchdown. A particularly explosive offense has an aerial assault that will disarm opposing defenses.
Hell, I remember even seeing one hippie kind of guy being really in awe of a new Air Force jet that was a technological wonder, and just being fully in approval of this new weapon, which is designed for creating death and destruction.
It might seem that in some venues, there is a refreshing break from the militarism.
Increasingly, however, our American society is so fixated with militarism, that nothing is safe from it.
Environmentalists, by and large, used to be a refreshing change from all of this militancy.
However, now, we are speculating on how the military might be the solution, rather than a huge part of the problem, when it comes to environmental degradation.
Now, don't get me wrong. If the military, which is an out of control monster in the United States, becomes more environmentally friendly, I am all for it.
But it just seems odd to me that the military, which again at it's core is all about death and destruction, is seen as perhaps the solution, and not a huge part of the problem, as far as environmental issues are concerned, than we really have grown so fond of it, as to lose any semblance of balance and objectivity. Didn't Humvees come from there? Don't huge aircraft carriers, and enormous tanks and jets and destroyer ships and all sorts of other gas guzzling weaponry come from there, to say nothing of nukes and chemical weapons and all other sorts of "goodies"?
People seem to have a short memory. It was militancy that caused the most destructive war in all of history not really all that long ago. I was born not thirty years after the conclusion of World War II, where sixty million people lost their lives. My grandmother served during the war (not as a combatant), and to my understanding, my grandfather wanted to serve. Stories from World War II were still very much around during my childhood, although they have withered away as the "Greatest Generation" has begun to die off.
Then, we had Vietnam, where more bombs were dropped than during all of World War II. More recently, we saw oil fields burning in Kuwait.
We surely must understand the toll that all of this heavy weaponry must have on the Earth.
And still we look towards the military for solutions. We look towards militant minds to solve our problems, whether it is about the economy, or the "war on drugs", or the "war on poverty", or the "war on illiteracy", or all of the other areas which we equate with war, and in which we want to show zero tolerance for anything but what we wish.
Now, environmentalists are supposed to take up the mantra of war?
Environmentalism, or trying to better understand the Earth that we live on and the delicate system of life that needs to be sustained, is the polar opposite of war.
Let us not forget that, as far as any military is concerned, the primary means to meet a given objective is to destroy things. To disrupt and bring about chaos.
To my understanding, environmentalism is supposed to be about promoting balance with our Mother Earth, and to try and find a sustainable way of life. The military of every powerful, industrialized nation that has ever existed has represented everything that such a vision stands against.
I understand that having a powerful enough military is a necessity in the real world. However, among industrialized nations today, and in the United States in particular, far, far too much of the economy is tied, directly or indirectly, to the military. And the American military makes its presence felt literally around the world, at tremendous expense to the taxpayer, and also at a tremendous toll on the environmental health of the planet. Remember, the American military is where Hummers come from. Just imagine how much polluting oils come from all of those aircraft carriers and war ships and high tech jets and tanks and armored vehicles, as well as the missiles and bombs that are tested and used. When the American military knew that the enemy in an unjustified war were present, they would use napalm to burn down the whole area, killing a lot of forests in the process. Americans dropped more bombs during the Vietnam War than all of the bombs used during World War II.
That is not exactly what we need to try to restore balance in the world. That kind of absolutist action is not the kind of thinking or approach that has been beneficial to the world so far, let alone to the health of the planet.
Military strategy is tunnel vision. It takes nothing else into consideration, and that has led to the most horrendous crimes that humanity has seen throughout history.
We see military-style strategy now in the corporate world, where the human factor is increasingly not a factor, and only the bottom line of short term profits and meting goals matters, where taking over more and more wealth, obtaining more power, matters, at the expense of everything else.
Not to congratulate ourselves, but as environmentalists, we are supposed to be something different from that. A refreshing change from that, with very different values, more in tune with the community, and not quite so taken with ourselves, or with the assumption that we are superior, and entitled to do whatever the hell we want in this world, wherever the hell we want, whenever we want to do it, and using whatever means at our disposal that we so choose, without ramifications.
That is military thinking, but it is not reality. Reality is that this kind of mentality, fostered in the military and, increasingly, in the corporate world, is simply not sustainable. It has taken an unbelievable toll on the world, and we now live in a society that expects some kind of an apocalyptic event at some point.
If we are to have a chance at restoring some kind of sustainable balance with the world and the community of life to which we belong, we need to recognize, first and foremost, our limitations. That means that an absolutist vision, where we achieve our desires no matter what, come what may, simply cannot work. We cannot seriously continue to impose our will on the rest of the world without thinking that there will be some ramifications.
What is needed is a different approach, rather than the same old same old. The military approach has been the dominant way of doing things throughout history, and in a relative blink of an eye in terms of the real history of the world (meaning billions of years), and even the millions of years that humanity has been around, the fact that we appear, as Bob Dylan once sang, "on the brink of destruction" after only about ten thousand years since the agricultural revolution essentially created our global civilization. And that same tunnel vision that the military employs has been largely responsible for that. We have mass arsenals of weapons of mass destruction that could destroy the world several times over, as well as all other sorts of weaponry, including chemical weapons, whose sole purpose is to destroy.
I am arguing that environmentalism should be a refreshing and much needed change from that. It should be a truly peaceful and peace loving alternative. If we hope to have any chance at achieving some semblance of balance with the community of life (which, again, we belong to), then we need to do things differently than this global culture has done it before. That starts with the recognition that we are not exempt from the rules that govern all life on this planet, and that is something that those with a tunnel vision mentality have shown no capability of understanding, let alone complying with. That is why we cannot follow their example to fix our most serious and pressing problems, since these are closer to being part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.
Here is the article that got me on this topic to begin with. She raises some solid points, and indeed, I do hope that the military takes it's obligation towards improving the environment (which it could do by minimizing it's footprint on the world, much like the rest of us are trying to do). I am not opposed to this, and do wish them all the best, and will lend my support in these efforts. However, again, I refute the notion that a military approach will ever be part of the solution for the most serious problems that our global culture faces:
Could military strategy win the war on global warming? by Jennifer Horton
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