Protecting people and the environment
War and the environment are two different scourges to inequality but instrinsically linked.
The day itself is an initiative of the United Nations. But like Pope Francis when he speaks of threats to human life, to peace or to our environment, the day speaks strongly and makes connections that we may have missed.
The naming of a day brings together war and the environment, two things that may seem to be unconnected. The Pope, too, would have gone on to link these different scourges to inequality, which feeds wars and junks the environment.
A little thought shows the close connection between military action and the destruction of the environment. We need only to remember the effects of the testing of nuclear weapons in South Australia and the Pacific, of the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam for killing forests, and of landmines in Cambodia.
In each case land was closed off for human use for many years, people suffered from birth defects and a high cancer rate, and rural children for 30 years afterwards have had arms and legs blown off by the sentinels that never sleep. In wars, too, the poor have always fought the poor, wealthy corporations have profited from selling arms to both sides, and fertile land has been poisoned.
EXPLOITATION OF PEOPLE
As Pope Francis has argued so strongly, too, the exploitation of our environment and the lack of respect for its ecologies and future always involve the exploitation of the people who depend on it for their living.
People who are driven off their land to allow private interests to profit from mining and whose fishing grounds and fields are poisoned by it naturally protest against this injustice. These protests are then put down violently. People treated as objects that need to removed for mines are then further made the objects of bombing, gassing, intimidation and other instruments of war. People and the natural world alike are seen as expendable pieces on a chessboard, not respected as persons in a world of interlocking relationships.
This is true also in more domestic ways. Children who are raised in poverty in areas left without services by governments are often exposed to domestic violence and grow up with little respect for the environment.
APPRECIATION OF THE ENVIRONMENT
We need to commend both peaceful ways of resolving frustration and an appreciation of the environment of which they are part.
One response to the destruction of the environment by armed conflict is to devise methods of warfare that are less damaging; to stop stockpiling weapons, selling them, reducing armed forces and making it more difficult for governments to go to war. That response is necessary and would certainly diminish the threat to the environment. It does not, however, go to the roots of the problem.
In all our policies we need to attend first to the people who are affected by armed conflict and damage to the environment: the soldiers who are killed and wounded, the veterans who return physically and mentally ill, their families whose lives are fogged in the sadness of war, and the civilians killed, terrorised, displaced, driven into refugee camps and excluded from the nations which benefited from their destruction.
THE WORLD WE LEAVE
We also need to attend to the environment of which we are part and to all its delicate relationships: the agricultural land made desert, the effect on oceans and climate by the emissions involved in the making of weapons and their use, and the illnesses incubated and spread in the slums where displaced persons must live.
We must keep in mind the world that we shall leave to our grandchildren and the ways in which they will live.
Image: The Landmine on the Angkor Wat, Cambodia