What We Mean When We Say War Is Not Green
Aaron Kirshenbaum, CODEPINK's War is Not Green Campaigner
Every time I say my job title to a friend, family member, or comrade, I have to add a bit of extra explanation. When I tell them that I’m the “War Is Not Green” campaigner, most people respond, “Well, yeah, obviously it’s not green.”
And it is obvious. Anywhere that’s been occupied by the U.S. military, NATO, or another Western force is an environmental sacrifice zone. And when CODEPINK started around 23 years ago to stand against the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the toll on the natural environment would soon become clear: farmers unable to grow crops and babies with birth defects.
At the same time, a lot of people can make a lot of money by hiding reality. In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol, the precursor to the contemporary Paris Agreement, was ratified as an “agreement” for countries around the world to reduce their emissions. Of course, there was one glaring omission – the role of military emissions. This was intentional: an escape hatch pushed forward by the U.S. government to dodge accountability for the havoc it has been unleashing around the world for decades. This continued under the Paris Agreement in 2015, allowing shareholders of weapons companies, investment firms, oil, and even green energy companies to continue making money because of wars carried out to extract resources from the Earth.
In 2017, author and environmentalist Paul Hawken, released a book titled “Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming,” which included a list of solutions to carbon pollution and the climate crisis. If you’re following along, you can probably guess what was not included in this “Most Comprehensive Plan Ever”: war and militarism. And so, CODEPINK cofounder Jodie Evans spoke with Hawken, who explained that there was a lack of research on the U.S. military’s impact on climate. Out of this conversation came another with the Cost of War Project at Brown University, led by Dr. Neta Crawford, who later produced a study that uncovered the numbers intentionally hidden from the public. The Pentagon was revealed as the #1 institutional polluter in the world. If it were a country, it would be the 47th largest emitter in the world. The fossil-fuel-driven “war on terror” emitted more than 1.2 billion metric tons of CO2 in U.S. military operations and installations alone. This, of course, does not capture the true scale of destruction and emissions from manufacturing, contracted shipping, infrastructure accidents, toxic waste dumps, contamination from bases, and the operations of NATO countries and others that buy U.S. arms.
To address what is often the Elephant in the Room in climate spaces, CODEPINK brought these numbers to the UN Climate Conference four years ago in Glasgow, COP26. And when Jodie asked people if they knew that the Pentagon was the world’s largest institutional polluter, this was completely new information. But it was also only giving numbers to something that was already clear to anyone paying attention. These are numbers that should beg the question of why there is such a lack of unity in climate spaces when it comes to the Pentagon’s environmental terror. How can we confront climate change without ending wars and occupations? How can we sidestep the need to urgently end sanctions and combat regime change talking points in countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and the Alliance of Sahel States when they try to survive these sanctions by using their resources to benefit their own people instead of exploiting them with never-ending, careless extraction? Or ending the blockade on Cuba that suffocates it and disrupts its robust plans for a green transition?
The War Is Not Green campaign is a campaign for survival and for life. It recognizes the interrelated nature of our struggle for liberation from imperialism, the war economy, capitalism, and the struggle for life on the planet. It is a movement-building tool that recognizes that our local and global survival depends on a united front against war and imperialism.
23 years after the inception of this campaign, we’re two years into one of the most well-documented genocides in history, and 77 years into a settler-colonial project that carried this same genocidal character from its inception. We’re seeing the same impacts that we saw in Iraq: birth defects, a rise in miscarriages. Almost all of Gaza’s vegetation is destroyed, and the land will not be suitable for agriculture for decades. Water wells over Gaza’s natural aquifer have been contaminated. And this ecocide has been used as a tactic of genocide, combined with a total blockade on aid, and massacre after massacre at aid distribution sites. The Israeli state recognizes the value of the land to the extent that it has assassinated those trying to create seed banks to attempt to maintain the ability to survive. And the U.S. has backed this project since its inception so that it can continue to profit from oil and weapons.
There’s growing awareness of this in the world of environmental organizing. Over 100 organizations have signed onto our open letter spotlighting the connection, stating that war fuels the climate crisis. The international Draw the Line days of action for climate and environmental justice, led by some of the largest climate organizational networks in the world, made demilitarization a key part of their narrative. Led by the global struggle for Palestinian liberation, we’re moving in the direction of understanding that we must confront militarism in order to save the planet.
This growing united front means that we need to take stock of where more education is needed and understand where and why redlines exist. That’s why we’ve launched the Elephant in the Room campaign. We’re asking 12 of the largest and most influential climate organizations in the country to include the cost of militarism in their work. We are urging them to start talking about it and inviting them to take on campaigns against joint targets such as logistics companies, investment firms, military installations – all of which we spotlighted in our recent mini-summit. We’re starting with this invitation to the Sierra Club, one of the largest and most influential environmental organizations in the country, because it is a membership-driven organization with thousands of members already doing this work. Imagine what we could build and expose if we combined the resources of an already well-organized climate movement that rakes in over $4 billion a year, with a grassroots anti-war movement already shutting down ports globally to stop arms transfers for genocide.
We can’t afford to be siloed into separate movements. Out of the U.S. military’s more than 800 bases (that we know of) across 80 countries, accounting for 90% of foreign bases around the world, each one carries its own stories of environmental catastrophe, violations of sovereignty, and destruction of life-sustaining natural environments.
Successful evictions of these bases, like in Vieques, off the coast of Puerto Rico, have brought together environmentalists, fishers, and organizers globally. The struggle to shut down the Red Hill military facility in Hawai’i has involved organizers, including Sierra Club Hawai’i. The Filipino struggle against militarism has been an agro-ecological struggle due to the impact of militarizing the Asia-Pacific for war on China and North Korea.
We can follow their lead of this, break down our movement silos, and fight for the people and planet. That starts with recognizing and learning about the issue to begin with, and understanding the red lines that exist. It moves forward by organizing at the nodes where environmental and imperial catastrophe meet: shipments, billionaire investment firms, warmongering politicians, and the bases acting as tiny pieces of U.S. territory globally. And it ends by breaking down the war economy and creating peace through liberation.
This article is apart of our War is Not Green Campaign Action Weeks! RSVP Now!
Aaron is CODEPINK’s War is Not Green Campaigner and East Coast Regional Organizer.
Aaron (they or he) is based in, and originally from Brooklyn, NY and holds an M.A. in Community Development and Planning from Clark University. They also hold a B.A. in Human-Environmental and Urban-Economic Geography from Clark.
During their time in school, Aaron worked on internationalist climate justice organizing and educational program development, as well as Palestine, tenant, and abolitionist organizing. They also worked on creating anti-Zionist Jewish communal spaces like those he grew up in, both on his campus and beyond. They continue to do this work nationally to combat militarized university repression and to try to produce new modes of solidarity.