Tony Juniper - Given at the First mfp conference 3rd April 2004
Speech Given at the First mfp conference 3rd April 2004
By Tony Juniper - Executive Director, Friends of the Earth
During 2003, the world's attention became focussed on the conflict in Iraq. The pros and cons of war were furiously debated, including on whether there really were links between the Iraqi regime and international terrorism, the presence or not of weapons of mass destruction, the role of the UN, Saddam's human rights record, the political ramifications of the conflict and the possible impacts on civilians. Very much in the margins was a low profile discussion about what environmental consequences would likely emerge from the conflict. It was never a prominent aspect of the mainstream debate, even though the environment is always the ultimate theatre in which war is conducted.
Even though the environment is often an afterthought, today, the potential environmental impacts of war are in some ways depressingly familiar. Perhaps the most dramatic images of environmental damage occurring because of conflict come from the first Gulf war and Saddam Hussein's torching of Kuwaiti oil and gas fields, and the discharge of crude oil into the Persian Gulf.
A sea coated with crude oil, with struggling birds dying in the slicks, became iconic of how war can impact on the environment. So did great towering columns of smoke that blotted out the sun to the point where normal temperatures were dramatically lowered and health threatening pollution affected many thousands of people over a huge area. Saddam Hussein, in his long running campaign against the Marsh Arabs of the Tigris and Euphrates delta, also caused ecological mayhem in his wholesale drainage of the marshes where these people still live. An internationally important wetland for biodiversity, as well as an utterly unique historic cultural landscape and ecosystem, Saddam Hussein tried to destroy it with drainage as part of his campaign against people inside his own country, who like the Kurds who he gassed in Northern Iraq, he saw as enemies within. These environmental impacts were not only a result of conflict - in these cases, deliberate environmental damage was used as a weapon itself.
Of course it is not only brutal dictators who cause environmental mayhem as a consequence of conflicts they choose to engage with, the bombing of factories and other targets by whom we are led to believe are the forces of good can and does cause terrible pollution too.
During the NATO attacks on Serb targets during the Kosovo campaign, According to one estimate, a total of 81 civilian industrial facilities, including oil refineries, petrochemical plants and chemical fertilizer factories, were attacked or destroyed. Power stations hit by bombs leaked toxic oils into the ground and pharmaceutical and chemical companies deliberately released poisonous chemicals into air and water as a`precautionary means to avoid explosions caused by attack. Tens of thousands of people were exposed to deadly pollution, while gross pollution of the vast Danube river took place, leading to damage to internationally important wetlands, as well as the Black Sea. Whether this pollution was factored into the NATO equation of risks and benefits was never clear. A letter on this subject to Tony Blair from Friends of the Earth never got a reply.
We also never got a reply to questions we asked on the use of depleted uranium munitions that were in wide use during the Kosovo campaign - as well of course during the first Gulf War and the recent invasion of Iraq. This material is now routinely used by American and British forces in projectiles designed to penetrate armoured vehicles and other tough targets, such as concrete bunkers. Both toxic and radioactive, DU is believed to pose a serious health risk if breathed as dust - which presumably it is by many people when used widely (as it was in both Iraq and Kosovo). The threat posed by these weapons to people's health is certainly one of the major uncalculated environmental costs of modern war. Perhaps the great rash of cancers and other illnesses over southern Iraq that followed the first Gulf War, where DU was widely used, gives some clues.
And while modern war, with its high technology weaponary and so-called smart bombs, is often claimed to be more discerning of civilian impacts, the deliberate destruction of infrastructure, such as power, water, sewerage and road and rail communications, certainly leads to great hardship and death from, for example, disease, failure of medical and emergency services, water pollution and shortage and hunger. How many people died or suffered from these environmental impacts during the recent invasion of Iraq has not, as far as I know, been systematically calculated. Certainly it has not dominated the headlines in the way that the killing of American and British soldiers has (tragic those these deaths are).
The politicians and media tend to focus on the immediate casualties arising from particular bombs and to ignore the less dramatic impacts of conflict: thus the longer term legacies of conflict remain poorly understood. Land mines blight the lives of millions of people worldwide, and for years after war has ended - so can the bomblets dropped in cluster munitions. These weapons make large swathes of the environment dangerous and unusable. Longer term still, the pollution contained in marine wrecks sunk during the Second World War is only now beginning to contribute a widespread environmental hazard as ships on the seabed in the Atlantic and Pacific leech deadly substances into ocean ecosystems.
Then there is the deliberate use of chemicals to advance military ends. In Vietnam, the use of 2-4-D, or Agent Orange as it came to be popularly known, by the US forces and brought to us by those environmental champions at the Monsanto Corporation, caused massive damage to forests that we now know to be among the most diverse and unique on the face of the planet. This substance, a so-called defoliant, really a very powerful poison, was used to render the North Vietnamese army visible to US helicopters.
So little known were these incredible forests, that new species are being found there all the time, including in the early 1980s a species of cattle new to science, the Kouprey. Presumably many plants and animals went extinct as a result of this conflict, but the issue of environmental damage was barely mentioned. And as for the people who came into contact with these chemicals, mainly innocent civilians, grotesque consequences ensued, and those consequences endure to this day as birth abnormalities linked to the use of 2-4-D continue as a result of war chemicals used more than three decades ago.
Similarly in Colombia, where the war on drugs involves the use of powerful herbicides sprayed from the air over the Andean ecosystems where coca plants are cultivated in order to produce cocaine. The Andes Mountain range is another place where nature has excelled itself in generating diversity and uniqueness of true planetary importance - again imperilled by the use of chemicals in conflict. While the use of the chemicals might be justified to protect public health from illegal drugs in the West, the health of the people who contract the effect of these chemicals is at best an afterthought.
These and other environmental impacts of war are real and serious, and have vast economic and humanitarian implications. War causes environmental damage, and at the same time contributes to and exacerbates deep injustice, that is for sure. But perhaps rather too neglected in these discussions is the impact of the environment on war and the potential for continuing environmental decline to generate conflict in the future.
Friends of the Earth is not the only place where people wonder if conflict will emerge because of environmental degradation and change. The UN Weapon's Inspector Hans Blix said that he was more worried about the state of the environment than he was weapons of mass destruction. While even the man who to many is seen as an arch warmonger of our times has analysed the situation in a similar vein. Tony Blair says that longer term climate change is the major threat that we face, while his Chief Scientist, Professor David King has said it is more of a threat than global terrorism.
One reason why these different public figures suggest that global warming in particular poses such a risk is because of the potential for this phenomenon to provoke the kind of profound ecological change that will generate the conditions where conflict will result. Global climate change, if we continue to pollute as we do now, is expected to lead to between nearly 2 and over 5 degrees centigrade average global temperature increase over the next century. Even if global average temperatures increase by the middle of this range of projected change, then billions will face water shortages, while diminished rainfall and prolonged drought will lead to impacts on agriculture. With serious disruptions to food and water supplies looming as major possible consequences of pollution being generated now, climate change has the potential to threaten our most basic needs. And the threat will be most acute in the southern developing countries, where the poorest people are the most vulnerable to the impacts, and least responsible for causing them. To this extent, climate change might well emerge in the coming decades as a source of future tension and conflict.
Even in the USA, where there is deep official scepticism about the reality of global warming, let alone any appetite to do anything about it, a recent analysis prepared by the Pentagon demonstrated the real global threat posed by greenhouse gas pollution, including that coming from the USA itself. The Pentagon speaks of looming global insecurity that could include military conflict following dramatic shifts in climate, with direct impacts on human societies. And the future security of the world is also linked fundamentally to one of the principles sources of the climate change threat. Oil and gas.
Undoubtedly, one of the motivations for the invasion of Iraq related to US energy policy. With a growing gap between domestic US supply and US demand, an increasing reliance on imported oil poses a clear national security issue for the United States. As global demand for oil rises as well, and as major new finds of oil become more and more rare, a squeeze will one day occur: and that squeeze could be quite soon. Who will have the oil, or who has the means to blackmail the USA with oil is an ever more pressing issue - especially at a time when it seems that the world's largest oil companies have been less than frank about the state of the reserves they hold below ground.
With these pressures in mind, there is clearly a choice to be made now in shaping and managing future sources of conflict. One way is to build military capacity so as to ensure access to oil reserves, as was the case with the invasion of Iraq. And that kind of thinking certainly informed the advice of the Pentagon on global warming. It did not advocate reducing pollution and moves to clean and sustainable energy sources, but instead to build up defence capability and ensuring the means to fight and overcome those who suffer the consequences of rapid global environmental change.
For there to be any basis for long term security, there must be a re-evaluation of western energy and environmental priorities. We can't fight our way past the environmental limits that will become ever more obvious in the decades ahead. The peaceful route to the future is based on clean and renewable energy and on restraint on the consumerist culture of the western nations. Our world is simply not big or productive enough to supply nine billion consumers with the lifestyles presently adopted by the one billion who live in the West today.
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