Pentagon's Environmental Impact

Channel One: Constant, urgent reports of catastrophic storms of unprecedented ferocity ravaging communities throughout the world; frequent stories of ominously rising sea levels from melting icecaps; rapidly rising ocean temperatures generating ever more powerful tropical cyclones and endangering marine life and resultant food supplies; billions of tons of plastic waste polluting the oceans as well as fresh water sources; more frequent air quality alerts caused by raging wildfires and vehicle emissions. Channel Two: Frequent reports of our military-industrial complex set to burn through a bloated annual defense budget nearing $1Trillion, adding to our growing budget deficit; Pentagon management so out of control that it has never passed a financial audit; congressional armed services committees approving expenditures on weapons and materiel which military leaders have not even requested; huge fleets of vehicles, including automobiles, trucks, tracked vehicles, ships, and aircraft, mostly powered by fossil fuels. Switching between channels, one might be tempted to treat these two stories as unrelated, but it is clear upon reflection that one of the major causes of environmental degradation and outright destruction is the environmental pollution resulting from militarism and war-making. We simply can no longer refuse to acknowledge the cause-and-effect relationship between the burning of fossil fuels, which our armed forces continue to do even when not engaged in a shooting war, and the irrevocable environmental damage we are witnessing every day. We are literally burning up our world and making it increasingly uninhabitable. The Pentagon has established impressive-sounding programs and initiatives that may sound like they are becoming “green”, but these actions are mere window dressing, since we have yet to see any substantial reductions in the size of our military or the number of far-flung bases throughout the world or in large-scale conversion of the massive vehicular fleet to EV’s. Until our legislative and executive branch leaders honestly address these burning issues, instead of cowardly hiding behind hot-button culture war and other partisan squabbles, we now face an existential threat to the very future of our nation and of the entire world.