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Writers Articles And Opinions |
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17 October 2010 By Martha Duenas
The US military is responsible for the
most egregious and widespread pollution of the planet,
yet this information and accompanying documentation
goes almost entirely unreported. In spite of the
evidence, the environmental impact of the US military
goes largely unaddressed by environmental
organizations and was not the focus of any discussions
or proposed restrictions at the recent UN Climate
Change Conference in Copenhagen. This impact includes
uninhibited use of fossil fuels, massive creation of
greenhouse gases, and extensive release of radioactive
and chemical contaminants into the air, water, and
soil.
The extensive global operations of the
US military (wars, interventions, and secret
operations on over one thousand bases around the world
and six thousand facilities in the United States) are
not counted against US greenhouse gas limits. Sara
Flounders writes, “By every measure, the Pentagon is
the largest institutional user of petroleum products
and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket
exemption in all international climate agreements.”
While official accounts put US military usage at
320,000 barrels of oil a day, that does not include
fuel consumed by contractors, in leased or private
facilities, or in the production of weapons. The US
military is a major contributor of carbon dioxide, a
greenhouse gas that most scientists believe is to
blame for climate change. Steve Kretzmann, director of
Oil Change International, reports, “The Iraq war was
responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of
carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) from March 2003
through December 2007. . . . That war emits
more than 60 percent that of all countries. . . .
This information is not readily available . . .
because military emissions abroad are exempt from
national reporting requirements under US law and the
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.”
According to Barry Sanders, author of The Green
Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism,
“the greatest single assault on the environment,
on all of us around the globe, comes from one agency
. . . the Armed Forces of the United States.”
Throughout the long history of military
preparations, actions, and wars, the US military has
not been held responsible for the effects of its
activities upon environments, peoples, or animals.
During the Kyoto Accords negotiations in December
1997, the US demanded as a provision of signing that
any and all of its military operations worldwide,
including operations in participation with the UN and
NATO, be exempted from measurement or reductions.
After attaining this concession, the Bush
administration then refused to sign the accords and
the US Congress passed an explicit provision
guaranteeing the US military exemption from any energy
reduction or measurement.
Environmental journalist Johanna Peace reports that
military activities will continue to be exempt based
on an executive order signed by President Barack Obama
that calls for other federal agencies to reduce their
greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. Peace states, “The
military accounts for a full 80 percent of the federal
government’s energy demand.”
As it stands, the Department of
Defense is the largest polluter in the world,
producing more hazardous waste than the five largest
US chemical companies combined. Depleted uranium,
petroleum, oil, pesticides, defoliant agents such as
Agent Orange, and lead, along with vast amounts of
radiation from weaponry produced, tested, and used,
are just some of the pollutants with which the US
military is contaminating the environment. Flounders
identifies key examples:
- Depleted uranium: Tens of thousands of pounds of
microparticles of radioactive and highly toxic waste
contaminate the Middle East, Central Asia, and the
Balkans.
- US-made land mines and cluster bombs spread over
wide areas of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the
Middle East continue to spread death and destruction
even after wars have ceased.
- Thirty-five years after the Vietnam War, dioxin
contamination is three hundred to four hundred times
higher than “safe” levels, resulting in severe birth
defects and cancers into the third generation of
those affected.
- US military policies and wars in Iraq have
created severe desertification of 90 percent of the
land, changing Iraq from a food exporter into a
country that imports 80 percent of its food.
- In the US, military bases top the Superfund list
of the most polluted places, as perchlorate and
trichloroethylene seep into the drinking water,
aquifers, and soil.
- Nuclear weapons testing in the American
Southwest and the South Pacific Islands has
contaminated millions of acres of land and water
with radiation, while uranium tailings defile Navajo
reservations.
Rusting barrels of chemicals and solvents and
millions of rounds of ammunition are criminally
abandoned by the Pentagon in bases around the world.
The United States is planning an
enormous $15 billion military buildup on the Pacific
island of Guam. The project would turn the
thirty-mile-long island into a major hub for US
military operations in the Pacific. It has been
described as the largest military buildup in recent
history and could bring as many as fifty thousand
people to the tiny island. Chamoru civil rights
attorney Julian Aguon warns that this military
operation will bring irreversible social and
environmental consequences to Guam. As an
unincorporated territory, or colony, and of the US,
the people of Guam have no right to
self-determination, and no governmental means to
oppose an unpopular and destructive occupation.
Between 1946 and 1958, the US dropped
more than sixty nuclear weapons on the people of the
Marshall Islands. The Chamoru people of Guam, being so
close and downwind, still experience an alarmingly
high rate of related cancer.
On Capitol Hill, the conversation has
been restricted to whether the jobs expected from the
military construction should go to mainland Americans,
foreign workers, or Guam residents. But we rarely hear
the voices and concerns of the indigenous people of
Guam, who constitute over a third of the island’s
population.
Meanwhile, as if the US military has
not contaminated enough of the world already, a new
five-year strategic plan by the US Navy outlines the
militarization of the Arctic to defend national
security, potential undersea riches, and other
maritime interests, anticipating the frozen Arctic
Ocean to be open waters by the year 2030. This plan
strategizes expanding fleet operations, resource
development, research, and tourism, and could possibly
reshape global transportation.
While the plan discusses “strong partnerships” with
other nations (Canada, Norway, Denmark, and Russia
have also made substantial investments in
Arctic-capable military armaments), it is quite
evident that the US is serious about increasing its
military presence and naval combat capabilities. The
US, in addition to planned naval rearmament, is
stationing thirty-six F-22 Raptor stealth fighter
jets, which is 20 percent of the F-22 fleet, in
Anchorage, Alaska.
Some of the action items in the US
Navy Arctic Roadmap document include:
- Assessing current and required capability to
execute undersea warfare, expeditionary warfare,
strike warfare, strategic sealift, and regional
security cooperation.
- Assessing current and predicted threats in order
to determine the most dangerous and most likely
threats in the Arctic region in 2010, 2015, and
2025.
- Focusing on threats to US national security,
although threats to maritime safety and security may
also be considered.
Behind the public façade of international Arctic
cooperation, Rob Heubert, associate director at the
Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the
University of Calgary, points out, “If you read the
document carefully you’ll see a dual language, one
where they’re saying, ‘We’ve got to start working
together’ . . . and [then] they start saying,
‘We have to get new instrumentation for our combat
officers.’ . . . They’re clearly
understanding that the future is not nearly as nice as
what all the public policy statements say.”
Beyond the concerns about human
conflicts in the Arctic, the consequences of
militarization on the Arctic environment are not even
being considered. Given the record of environmental
devastation that the US military has wrought, such a
silence is unacceptable.
Update by Mickey Z.
As I sit here, typing this “update,” the predator
drones are still flying over Afghanistan, Iraq, and
Pakistan, the oil is still gushing into the Gulf of
Mexico, and 53.3 percent of our tax money is still
being funneled to the US military. Simply put, hope
and change feels no different from shock and awe . . .
but the mainstream media continues to propagate the
two-party lie.
Linking the antiwar and environmental movements is
a much-needed step. As Cindy Sheehan recently told me,
“I think one of the best things that we can do is look
into economic conversion of the defense industry into
green industries, working on sustainable and renewable
forms of energy, and/or connect[ing] with indigenous
people who are trying to reclaim their lands from the
pollution of the military industrial complex. The best
thing to do would be to start on a very local level to
reclaim a planet healthy for life.”
It comes down to recognizing the
connections, recognizing how we are manipulated into
supporting wars and how those wars are killing our
ecosystem. We must also recognize our connection to
the natural world. For if we were to view all living
things, including ourselves, as part of one collective
soul, how could we not defend that collective soul by
any means necessary?
We are on the brink of economic,
social, and environmental collapse. In other words,
this is the best time ever to be an activist.
Update by Julian Aguon
In 2010, the people of Guam are bracing themselves
for a cataclysmic round of militarization with
virtually no parallel in recent history. Set to
formally begin this year, the military buildup comes
on the heels of a decision by the United States to
aggrandize its military posture in the Asia-Pacific
region. At the center of the US military realignment
schema is the hotly contested agreement between the
United States and Japan to relocate thousands of US
Marines from Okinawa to Guam. This portentous
development, which is linked to the United States’
perception of China as a security threat, bodes great
harm to the people and environment of Guam yet remains
virtually unknown to Americans and the rest of the
international community.
What is happening in Guam is inherently interesting
because while America trots its soldiers and its
citizenry off to war to the tune of “spreading
democracy” in its own proverbial backyard, an entire
civilization of so-called “Americans” watch with bated
breath as people thousands of miles away—people we
cannot vote for—make decisions for us at ethnocidal
costs. Although this military buildup marks the most
volatile demographic change in recent Guam history,
the people of Guam have never had an opportunity to
meaningfully participate in any discussion about the
buildup. To date, the scant coverage of the military
buildup has centered almost exclusively around the
United States and Japan. In fact, the story entitled
“Guam Residents Organize Against US Plans for $15B
Military Buildup on Pacific Island” on Democracy
Now! was the first bona fide US media coverage of
the military buildup since 2005 to consider, let alone
privilege, the people’s opposition.
The heart of this story is not so much
in the finer details of the military buildup as it is
in the larger political context of real-life
twenty-first-century colonialism. Under US domestic
law, Guam is an unincorporated territory. What this
means is that Guam is a territory that belongs to the
United States but is not a part of it. As an
unincorporated territory, the US Constitution does not
necessarily or automatically apply in Guam. Instead,
the US Congress has broad powers over the
unincorporated territories, including the power to
choose what portions of the Constitution apply to
them. In reality, Guam remains under the purview of
the Office of Insular Affairs in the US Department of
the Interior.
Under international law, Guam is a
non-self-governing territory, or UN-recognized colony
whose people have yet to exercise the fundamental
right to self-determination. Article 73 of the United
Nations Charter, which addresses the rights of peoples
in non-self-governing territories, commands states
administering them to “recognize the principle that
the interests of the inhabitants are paramount.” These
“administering powers” accept as a “sacred trust” the
obligation to develop self-government in the
territories, taking due account of the political
aspirations of the people. As a matter of
international treaty and customary law, the colonized
people of Guam have a right to self-determination
under international law that the United States, at
least in theory, recognizes.
The military buildup, however, reveals the United
States’ failure to fulfill its international legal
mandate. This is particularly troubling in light of
the fact that this very year, 2010, marks the formal
conclusion of not one but two UN-designated
international decades for the eradication of
colonialism. In 1990, the UN General Assembly
proclaimed 1990–2000 as the International Decade for
the Eradication of Colonialism. To this end, the
General Assembly adopted a detailed plan of action to
expedite the unqualified end of all forms of
colonialism. In 2001, citing a wholesale lack of
progress during the first decade, the General Assembly
proclaimed a second one to effect the same goal. The
second decade has come and all but gone with only
Timor-Leste, or East Timor, managing to attain
independence from Indonesia in 2002.
In November 2009—one month after “Guam Residents
Organize Against US Plans for $15B Military Buildup on
Pacific Island” aired—the US Department of Defense
released an unprecedented 11,000-page Draft
Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS), detailing for
the first time the true enormity of the contemplated
militarization of Guam. At its peak, the military
buildup will bring more than 80,000 new residents to
Guam, which includes more than 8,600 US Marines and
their 9,000 dependents; 7,000 so-called transient US
Navy personnel; 600 to 1,000 US Army personnel; and
20,000 foreign workers on military construction
contracts. This “human tsunami,” as it is being
called, represents a roughly 47 percent increase in
Guam’s total population in a four-to-six-year window.
Today, the total population of Guam is roughly 178,000
people, the indigenous Chamoru people making up only
37 percent of that number. We are looking at a
volatile and virtually overnight demographic change in
the makeup of the island that even the US military
admits will result in the political dispossession of
the Chamoru people. To put the pace of this ethnocide
in context, just prior to World War II, Chamorus
comprised more than 90 percent of Guam’s population.
At the center of the buildup are three major
proposed actions: 1) the construction of permanent
facilities and infrastructure to support the full
spectrum of warfare training for the thousands of
relocated Marines; 2) the construction of a new
deep-draft wharf in the island’s only harbor to
provide for the passage of nuclear-powered aircraft
carriers; and 3) the construction of an Army Missile
Defense Task Force modeled on the Marshall
Islands–based Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense
Test Site, for the practice of intercepting
intercontinental ballistic missiles.
In terms of adverse impact, these developments will
mean, among other things, the clearing of whole
limestone forests and the desecration of burial sites
some 3,500 years old; the restricting of access to
areas rich in plants necessary for indigenous
medicinal practice; the denying of access to places of
worship and traditional fishing grounds; the
destroying of seventy acres of thriving coral reef,
which currently serve as critical habitat for several
endangered species; and the over-tapping of Guam’s
water system to include the drilling of twenty-two
additional wells. In addition, the likelihood of
military-related accidents will greatly increase.
Seven crashes occurred during military training from
August 2007 to July 2008, the most recent of which
involved a crash of a B-52 bomber that killed the
entire crew. The increased presence of US military
forces in Guam also increases the island’s visibility
as a target for enemies of the United States.
Finally, an issue that has sparked some of the
sharpest debate in Guam has been the Department of
Defense’s announcement that it will, if needed,
forcibly condemn an additional 2,200 acres of land in
Guam to support the construction of new military
facilities. This potential new land grab has been met
with mounting protest by island residents, mainly due
to the fact that the US military already owns close to
one-third of the small island, the majority of which
was illegally taken after World War II.
In February 2010, upon review of the DEIS, the US
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rated it
“insufficient” and “environmentally unsatisfactory,”
giving it the lowest possible rating for a DEIS. Among
other things, the EPA’s findings suggest that Guam’s
water infrastructure cannot handle the population boom
and that the island’s fresh water resources will be at
high risk for contamination. The EPA predicts that
without infrastructural upgrades to the water system,
the population outside the bases will experience a
13.1 million gallons of water shortage per day in
2014. The agency stated that the Pentagon’s massive
buildup plans for Guam “should not proceed as
proposed.” The people of Guam were given a mere ninety
days to read through the voluminous 11,000-page
document and make comments about its contents. The
ninety-day comment period ended on February 17, 2010.
The final EIS is scheduled for release in August 2010,
with the record of decision to follow immediately
thereafter.
The response to this story from the mainstream US
media has been deafening silence. Since the military
buildup was first announced in 2005, it was more than
three years before any US media outlet picked up on
the story. In fact, the October 2009 Democracy
Now! interview was the first substantive national
news coverage of the military buildup.
For more information on the
military buildup:
We Are Guahan, http://www.weareguahan.com
Draft Environmental Impact Study
Guam & Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands
Military Relocation, www.guambuildupeis.us
Center for Biological Diversity
Response to DEIS, www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/
center/articles/2010/los-angeles-times-02-24-2010.html
EPA Response to Guam DEIS,
www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=68298
For more information on Guam’s
movement to resist militarization and unresolved
colonialism:
http://www.iacenter.org/o/world/climatesummit_pentagon121809.
Mickey Z., “Can You Identify the
Worst Polluter on the Planet? Here’s a Hint: Shock and
Awe,” Planet Green, August 10, 2009,
http://planetgreen.discovery.com/tech-transport/identify-worst-polluter-planet.html.
Julian Aguon, “Guam Residents
Organize Against US Plans for $15B Military Buildup on
Pacific Island,” Democracy Now!,
October 9, 2009, http://www.democracynow.org/
2009/10/9/guam_residents_organize_against_us_plans.
Ian Macleod, “U.S. Plots Arctic
Push,” Ottawa Citizen, November 28,
2009, http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/navy+plots+Arctic+push/2278324/story.html.
Nick Turse, “Vietnam Still in
Shambles after American War,” In These Times,
May 2009, http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4363/casualties_continue_in_vietnam.
Jalal Ghazi, “Cancer—The Deadly
Legacy of the Invasion of Iraq,” New America
Media, January 6, 2010, http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article
_id=80e260b3839daf2084fdeb0965ad31ab.
Student Researchers:
Dimitrina Semova, Joan Pedro, and
Luis Luján (Complutense University of Madrid)
Ashley Jackson-Lesti, Ryan Stevens,
Chris Marten, and Kristy Nelson (Sonoma State
University)
Christopher Lue (Indian River State
College)
Cassie Barthel (St. Cloud State
University)
Faculty Evaluators:
Ana I. Segovia (Complutense
University of Madrid)
Julie Flohr and Mryna Goodman
(Sonoma State University)
Elliot D. Cohen (Indian River State
College)
Julie Andrzejewski (St. Cloud State
University)
The Guahan Coalition for Peace and
Justice: Lisa Linda Natividad, lisanati@yahoo.com;
Hope Cristobal, ecris64@teleguam.net; Julian Aguon,
julianaguon@gmail.com; Michael Lujan Bevacqua,
mlbasquiat@hotmail.com; Victoria-Lola Leon Guerrero,
victoria.lola@gmail.com
We Are Guahan—We Are Guahan Public
Forum: www.weareguahan.com
Famoksaiyan: Martha Duenas,
martduenas@yahoo.com; famoksaiyanwc.wordpress.com
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