Reuters has an article up titled
Oil spill adds ecological crisis to Lebanon's agony. Apparently the Israeli aerial bombardment of storage tanks south of Beirut caused 10-30,000 tons of oil to spill into the Mediterranean.
Lebanon's Environment Ministry says the oil flooded into the sea when Israeli jets hit storage tanks at the Jiyyeh plant south of Beirut on July 13 and 15, creating an ecological crisis that Lebanon's government has neither the money nor the expertise to deal with.
"We have never seen a spill like this in the history of Lebanon. It is a major catastrophe," Environment Minister Yacoub al-Sarraf told Reuters.
"The equipment we have is for minor spills. We use it once in a blue moon to clean a small spill of 50 tonnes or so. To clean this whole thing up we would need an armada ... The cost of a full clean-up could run as high as $40-50
million."
The Israeli air and sea blockade of Lebanon is impeding clean up.
The article also points out that the Hezbollah attack on the Israeli frigate may have led to the leaking of diesel fuel into the Mediterranean.
The immediate pain and suffering of the victims of wars on all sides is readily apparent. It is easy to lose sight of the longer term impacts of war on local environments. Vietnam and the US are still dealing with the human effects of Agent Orange, but Vietnam also has the environmental effects of Agent Orange to deal with. The impact of the Iraqi destruction of the Kuwaiti oil wells in the desert and the Red Sea is ongoing. And of course the potential long-term impact of depleted uranium weapons remains an open and contentious question, but increased concentrations of uranium certainly will have impacts in the Balkans, Iraq, and elsewhere. And unexploded ordinance is a major problem around the globe.
Of course, it is not just the use of weapons that causes environmental degradation. The Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington and the Savannah River facility in South Carolina are both massively contaminated from nuclear weapons production and will remain so on geological timescales.
War certainly kills swiftly, but just as certainly it kills on longer timescales and it leads to death and destruction not just of human communities but also the larger ecological communities of which they are a part. And our communities cannot be rebuilt on poisoned ground littered with unexploded bombs.