We live in interesting times indeed. The two hot-button issues of the week are the escalation of the war in Afghanistan and the international climate change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark.
These two topics are not independent of each other. They are, in fact, inextricably linked to one another.
The world's largest single polluter is the U.S. Department of Defense.
The United States has 11 million Anti-Personnel Landmines stockpiled, the third largest mine arsenal in the world, and refuses to halt production. U.S.-made and supplied APLs have been found in 32 countries, including Afghanistan.
In the last 15 years, the U.S. has used cluster bombs in civilian populated areas of the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. The cluster bombs the U.S. dropped 40 years ago in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam are still killing people today.
A study released in October documented the enhanced cancer risk to Baby Boomers from fallout from nuclear testing in the 1950s and 60s.
Depleted Uranium has been used in both Iraq Wars, the Balkans, and there is evidence of its use Afghanistan.
The logistics of running a war half way around the world tell of a a staggering abuse of energy. Transporting troops, equipment and vehicles leaves a massive carbon footprint. In the early 1970s, the US Military sprayed 20 million gallons of the carcinogenic herbicide dubbed Agent Orange on the jungles of Southeast Asia. The effects of the use of this and other chemicals is still felt today in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
The death of every soldier, civilian, and militant insurgent is an offense to the Earth.
The only way we are going to defeat the problem of 'loose nukes' is to work towards global nuclear disarmament.
There are no two ways about it. We cannot have eternal war without a complete destruction of our environment. To be an environmentalist is to be anti-war.
Even now, while world leaders meet to discuss how to tackle climate change, their navies are expanding operations into the dwindling Arctic Ocean.
As discussions begin in Copenhagen, I would ask that everyone keep in mind the horrible toll that war takes on the environment, and the need to stop this senseless brutality which will only lead to our eventual annihilation.
And perhaps the great day will come when a people, distinguished by wars and victories and by the highest development of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices for these things, will exclaim of its own free will, "We break the sword", and will smash its entire military establishment down to its lowest foundations. Rendering oneself unarmed when one had been the best-armed, out of a height of feeling - that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on peace of mind; whereas the so-called armed peace, as it now exists in all countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one's neighbor and, half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared - this must someday become the maxim for every commonwealth too... The tree of war-glory can only be destroyed all at once, by a stroke of lightning: but lightning, as indeed you know, comes from a cloud - and from up high.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow ca. 1880