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'Peace won’t cost the earth' but it might save the environment

By John Tomlinson - posted Wednesday, 19 November 2008


It is not only the combatants and civilians of invaded countries who become the casualties of war. Many members of the invading forces return home disfigured, drug addicted, poisoned by chemicals, mentally scarred and physically disabled. In some ways the soldiers who get killed are the lucky ones in the inglorious situation where countries send their troops off around the world to wage war.

The homes, hospitals, sewerage treatment works, schools, factories and commercial buildings that get destroyed during wars all have to be replaced after the strife subsides, requiring further impositions on the environment. The families whose child, mother, father, or other relative is killed are not as easily rebuilt. As Warner (1996) says (in T H White’s The Once and Future King in an “Afterword”):

War was a ruinous dementia. It silenced law, it killed poets, it exalted the proud, filled the greedy with good things, and oppressed the humble and meek; no good could come of it, it was hopelessly out of date. Nobody wanted it. (Unfortunately, no one had passionately wanted the League of Nations either.)

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While countries are spending vast sums on defence equipment there are more socially or environmentally useful expenditures which are foregone. This money could have been used to improve civic amenities in the home country or provided as foreign aid to help build a more peaceful world. The time wasted training troops to maim and kill could be better spent by employing them engage in some socially or environmentally useful tasks at home or abroad.

Apart from the overt environmental destructive nature of war, there is the environmental cost of just keeping the defence forces mobile. In 2007 Sohbet Karbuz noted in the Energy Bulletin that:

As of September 30, 2005 the US Air Force had 5,986 aircraft in service. At the beginning of 2006 the US Navy had 285 combat and support ships, and around 4,000 operational aircraft (planes and helicopters). At the end of 2005, the US Army had a combat vehicle fleet of approximately 28,000 armored vehicles (tracked vehicles such as Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles). Besides those the Army and the Marine corps have tactical wheeled vehicles such as 140,000 High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles. The US Army has also over 4,000 combat helicopters and several hundred fixed wing aircraft. Add all those also 187,493 fleet vehicles (passenger cars, busses, light trucks etc) the US Department of Defense (DOD) uses. The issue is that except for 80 nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, almost all military fleet (including the ones that will be joining in the next decade) run on oil.

He went on to point out that (excluding fuel obtained overseas at no cost, used by contractors, or used in rented or leased vehicles) the Pentagon still managed to use 320,000 barrels of oil per day in 2006.

If we want to keep the world environmentally healthy then we certainly can no longer afford such profligate military consumption of carbon products. We just need to convince our fellow citizens that it is better to have a world at peace rather than one in pieces, because as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “the real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.”

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About the Author

Dr John Tomlison is a visiting scholar at QUT.

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