Sustainable violence is social war: against green militarism
This article is part of our "Short Primer on Militarism and the Climate Crisis", which you can find in full here: https://wri-irg.org/en/story/2024/new-resource-short-primer-militarism-and-climate-crisis
It’s actually a really funny joke. Unfortunately, the seriousness of this joke makes it impossible to laugh at. The greatest destroyers and toxic contaminators of all life – people, animals, water, forests, mountains, deserts, you name it – are rebranding themselves to save the planet! The level of ecocidal destruction resulting from war – the burning of villages and oil wells, napalming forests, ‘de- modernizing’ and ‘shock and awing’ countries into oblivion – is unfathomable. With these references to the Vietnam, Gulf and Iraq Wars, I must ask, do you remember in 1986 when the International Court of Justice upheld a verdict of the US violation for funding the Contra Death Squad and mining Nicaraguan harbours? This is worth remembering. Not to mention the Iran Contra Affair, or the numerous other death squads funded, governments overthrown and technologies of terror spread across the world by Military schools. There are, we must also remember, severe socioecological repercussions to these operations which are enthusiastic contributors to extreme weather and the climate altering conditions of the planet.
Do you remember when the US military first tested their Apache helicopters (AH- 64)? It was during the 1989/1990 invasion of Panama, the country between Costa Rica and Colombia. The prime justification of which was to take the CIA’s ex-drug dealer and dictator, General Manuel Noriega, out of power. The result, as the CSPAN-13 footage shows, was people fleeing burning cities and forests; crushed cars and infrastructure ruined as piped water was flooding out of fire hydrants. An enormous number of bombs were dropped – some say between 200-400 within the first hour of the invasion – leading to massacre and economic and socioecological devastation. All done, of course, unilaterally and a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This scorched-earth invasion set the tone for the invasions to come in the Middle East.
Besides these references to standard state terrorism, two years before the invasion of Panama, the idea of ‘Sustainable Development’ hit the international stage with the Brundtland Report. Two years later, US President George Bush Senior – the same president that authorised the invasion of Panama – declared at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit:
Twenty-years ago some spoke of the limits to growth. And today we realise that growth is the engine of change, and the friend of the environment.
Yes, this country – and so many others – while committing massacre, ecocide and war and celebrating an economy built on mass consumption, mineral and hydrocarbon extraction, chemical and plastic manufacturing, has the psychotic nerve to declare that economic growth is “the friend of the environment.” Nobody is safe from these governments, their solutions are traps and we must organise – develop a collective capacity – to protect ourselves and stop this madness by any means necessary; ‘in’ and ‘outside’ the so-called ‘system.’
While the focus has been on the US, the hegemon of the last 100 years, one should not cling to any empire and their imperial games of ecocide. There is, however, something peculiar about Western Militaries in their efforts – contrary to Russia – to take the ‘high-road’ by developing a whole discourse and apparatus to promoting ‘sustainability,’ ‘energy transition,’ ‘renewability’ and ‘clean energy.’ While the US resisted and embraced this trend, stalling strategically, we must remember there is no such thing as socioecological sustainability or renewable energy as we know it! Any economy – capitalist or socialist – unreflectively designed to expand, accumulate and grow will always fail the planet. We might recognize economic growth and unrestrained infrastructural expansion – culturally or militarily – as the true imperialism. This greening apparatus, and climate change mitigation imperative, has now led to the idea of “greening the military.”
The greening of the military is done in two principle ways. First, by ‘protecting nature’! Sadly, this often takes the form of protecting nature from Indigenous people – often embedded in and enriching that nature. This is done by calling them poachers because of their subsistence patterns. This, of course, ignores the ‘techno/urban-military/consumer-complex’. Likewise, policing Indigenous peoples serves as an excuse to displace people into the circuits of urban and capitalist life – meaning, the techno/urban-military/consumer-complex. There are, however, real commercial poachers with helicopters and assault rifles that justify enclosure and the militarization of lands often in the Global South. Those under attack, however, are typically the more vulnerable local actors who are displaced and cleared to allow easier poaching by commercial operations.
Second, the military attempts to ‘green’ itself! This is done by powering military facilities, weapons and, together, operations on lower-carbon infrastructures, such as solar panels, wind turbines, hydroelectric power and biofuels. This has been recognized as an attempt at powering “sustainable violence,” to operate domestic and overseas military operations on supposedly lower-carbon energy sources than fossil fuels. Lower-carbon power sources, however, as documented in Oaxaca, Mexico, also end with grabbing Zapotec and Ikoot lands to build wind turbines and solar farms to power US military operations overseas, such as in the Middle East. What’s more, sustainable violence has another layer to it: the use of military and police forces across countless rural lands and habitats to extract hydrocarbons and to mine the iron, copper, zinc, rare earth elements and other specialty metals to produce solar panels, wind turbines and digital technologies for ‘decarbonizing’ the military and consumer society. A de facto process of enforcing ecocide.
While the laboratories of terror and insanity are surely thinking up other projects, we should be prepared to resist the myths of ‘greening’ in general, but greening the military in particular. We should be ready to counter invasion in the name of grabbing minerals in the name of ‘saving the environment’ or ‘protecting the world from climate change.’ This is not all that different from the European Union’s Critical Raw Material Act (CRMA), organising the acquisition of ‘strategic’ minerals for the green transition, but which will in reality be used for expanding militarism and war technologies. The same could be said for emerging ‘ecocide law’ once it passes: we should be ready for the invasion of lands and peoples to be justified in the name of stopping ecocide. But you cannot stop ecocide by making more ecocide, nor can growing more extractivism, more consumerism and more military invasions ever be considered socioecologically friendly. Ending war, genocide and the funding and production of killing machines remains among the top ecological and climate priorities to date.
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