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How to kill and maim but keep it eco-friendly
Brendan O’Neill: ‘Green warfare’ reveals the warped priorities of the environmental movement
Can a bullet, a bomb or a hand grenade ever be 'friendly'? Environmentalists seem to think so. Having 'greened' their homes, their eating habits and their fashion choices, eco-campaigners now want to 'green' warfare too.
They want to make the military obliteration of human life, the destruction of families, homes and towns through fire and fury, a more eco-friendly pursuit one which will still kill and maim people, of course, but which won't cause too much damage to the surrounding soil or trees.
Last week, the 10:10 campaign group welcomed MBDA Missile Systems into its fold.
Founded by eco-filmmaker Franny Armstrong and backed by the Guardian, 10:10 is about encouraging individuals and organisations to reduce their carbon emissions by 10 per cent in 2010.
Schools, museums and football teams have signed up, and now so has one of the world's largest missile manufacturers, which has an average annual turnover of $2.7bn, makes more than 3,000 missiles a year, and deals with around 90 military forces around the globe.
The 10:10 organisers say they had a long and tortured debate about whether to accept MBDA. In the end they decided that they should, because the important thing is that MBDA "reduce their emissions by 10 per cent... What they do with the rest of their time is a different matter, on which we couldn't possibly comment."
In other words? All we're interested in is reducing emissions. You can make deadly weaponry; you can ship it around the world; you can sell it in war zones where it will be used to blow up things and people just make sure you do it in an eco-responsible fashion. Destroy human life, by all means, but please do it sustainably.
MDBA Missiles Systems isn't alone. Over the past few years there has been a far-reaching debate about how to make war more eco-friendly.
In the US, the Pentagon is pumping millions of dollars into developing environmentally-friendly lead-free bullets that have a core of tungsten composite, tin or nylon, so that when they're fired, whether on the training range or the battlefield, no lead will seep into the soil or infect water supplies.
A spokesman for the Pentagon said the aim is to make a new kind of bullet "that can kill you or that you can shoot a target with, [but] which is not an environmental hazard".
Over here, BAE Systems, supported by the MoD, has developed greener bullets and rockets. Its aim is to move away from lead-based, toxic munitions that "harm the environment". It has made armoured vehicles with lower carbon emissions, weaponry with fewer "volatile organic compounds" in them, and explosives that can be turned into compost once they have been used. Well, the people whose village has just been destroyed by a BAE-made explosive will no doubt be very grateful for the compost left behind. They can grow carrots.
The MoD insists that the "concept of green munitions is not a contradiction in terms". In its Sustainable Development and Environment Manual, published in 2005, it argued that "any system, whatever its ultimate use, can be designed to minimise its impact [on the] environment".
The development of green warfare really reveals the warped priorities and inner misanthropy of the environmentalist movement.
They have elevated Gaia's supposed interests so firmly above people's interests that we now have a situation where it's accepted that people can be killed, just so long as no soil, water or insects are harmed in the process. Welcome to the era of green barbarism. ·
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Hmm..oil,most of the potable water in North America, and of course uranium. Canada has it all, and the United States would love to share it with us. Diana Mitchell is so right. Currently there is quiet invasion going on, through Ducks Unlimited.
I am so glad to log in to read and respond to the comments of well-informed people when issues such as these are discussed. My memory goes a long way back: it was Henry Kissinger who coined the phrase `the dysfunction of war' in the seventies. He said we one day would be fighting for possession of the last remaining among the earth's endowments (oil and other non-renewables) and hard-to-capture renewables: potable water for example. Conventional warfare would no longer be an option.
Extraordinat how O'Neill manages to brand the moral bankruptcy of arms manufacturers as that if 'environmentalists' on the basis of one organisation, minimally environmentalist anyway. The development of green warfare doesn't 'reveal the warped priorities and inner misanthropy of the environmentalist movement' at all, it reveals how arms manufacturers would like us to believe they are morally responsible. Considering the anti-war attitude of the vast majority of real environmentalists as opposed to managers fiddling with carbon targets, it's stretching facts too far even for O'Neill, whose anti-environment stance is well known and tiresome. The whole idea reads like a spoof anyway, since they have been stuffing bullets, shells and rockets with depleted uranium [DU] for decades, and pumping all our nuclear waste into Afghanistan and Iraq, to voice concern at this juncture over lead is hypocrisy indeed. A pity O'Neill didn't take this route and criticise the people who fund and arm wars, or even the politicians who make war, or the soldiers who willingly fight wars. But no, this doctrinaire journo chooses to blame 'environmentalists' in a complete abuse of argument my thirteen year old ghrandaughter would see through in an instant. Try harde Brendan, or get a job your talents equip you for.
Explosives into compost, swords into ploughshares - yeah, I can see that! ;-)
There is much sense in this. I'm not exactly sure what "sustainable" means in context, the universe is constantly evolving and one day it will look nothing like it does today, but one thing is sure; much of it....non-renewable resources... will last much longer if there are less people. I would prefer more condoms to more bombs. Please explain reality to the pope.
If it wasn't such a terrible subject (war, killing and destruction) I would havge laughed myself off my seat. This is the ultimate scenario in a very mixed-up world. One could, of course, argue that killing humans is the ultimate environmental action - humans being responsible for the destruction of the earth's environment