Mox Alvarnaz, NEC Staff
The legacy of war includes toxic landscapes, land mines, and unexploded ordnance, posing persistent environmental and social threats. Military operations have become forever linked to global contamination… Military institutions, in the name of national security, have developed large-scale built and social infrastructures to sustain and support the coercive power of nations. In both times of peace and war, militarization is associated with environmental degradation.
– Clark and Jorgenson, “The Treadmill of Destruction and the Environmental Impacts of Militaries” (2012)
Cop City is a proposed $90 million+, state-of-the-art police training compound backed by the Atlanta Police Foundation and its corporate patrons like Cox, Coca-Cola, Delta, the Koch brothers, and Home Depot… slated to include a mock city where police will train with firearms, tear gas, helicopters, and explosive devices for protest and mass unrest like the 2020 George Floyd protests. Cop City will hyper-militarize law enforcement, equipping police with a site to train for the suppression of Atlanta’s diverse Black and working-class communities.
– From defendtheatlantaforest.org, current forest defense movement
Talk to many of the old heads of our movement, and they may tell you that their path to the environmental scene started in the realm of social resistance, fighting against the endless wars waged between nation states for ever greater cuts of the natural splendor of our home planet. The anti-war movement, valuing life beyond nationality, made an easy transition into a love for life of all sorts—a desire to protect all that surrounds us- human, plant, animal, earth, air, and water.
Tree huggers, peace loving hippies, the Black radical group MOVE, the American Indian Movement, and others were coalescing (though not always smoothly) toward a recognition of the US’s role in the world as a planetary threat.
We need only think of the continued effects of Agent Orange and other “rainbow herbicides” of the Vietnam War to see how acts of war on human beings are entwined with ecological toxification. Of course, the military’s ability to wreak social and environmental harm is not limited to overt acts of violence. Native Hawaiians complained for decades about the dangers of the Red Hill fuel storage near Pearl Harbor Naval Base. In 2021, due to negligence, around 20,000 gallons of fuel leaked, poisoning a major drinking aquifer (locals currently remain under “voluntary” water restrictions).
Whether it’s nuclear testing, dumping hazardous waste, biochemical warfare, or obliterating marine life with sonar—the United States military fights a constant war against the planet we live on. Alone, the military’s daily operations are a gruesome nightmare, but the full scope is even more horrific. The United States military is not some static guard that happens to be making a mess at his post; it. The US military exists to protect US “interests”—which we have known for decades are the interests of capitalists profiting off industrial extraction worldwide.
Environmental sociologists understand dual phenomena called the Treadmills of Production and Destruction. We live in an economy that “must” keep growing—we need to acquire raw materials, transport materials, manufacture goods, transport again, and sell to consumers (then chuck it in the ocean). The social order (including hundreds of millions of people forced to participate) relies on the system remaining in stable growth around this process; we cannot—will not—stop this process lest the entire structure fall to pieces. This is the Treadmill of Production. The Treadmill of Destruction describes how the US military secures and enforces our access to these resources and markets around the world while also leaving its own wake of social and environmental crisis.
And after all the carnage overseas, the raw materials used, the petrol burned, and all the toxic leaks from all the bases domestically and abroad? Well, it all comes back home. Threats to “national security” aren’t limited to far off places whose rare earth minerals we’ll use to “green” our ever-expanding economy. Instead, those who resist oppressive warmaking institutions and environmental extraction are reframed as the new greatest threats to “national security.” The brutal tactics and technologies employed by the military are actively used on forest defenders across the US.
In 2018, our own local scrappy defenders have faced off against Lear security thugs in the struggles against green-washed Humboldt Redwood Company. Lear hires ex-US Special Forces from US oil-grabs in the Middle East, arms them with abused dogs, tasers, surveillance drones, four-wheelers, night vision goggles, and AR-15s, and sends them after local tree sitters. Lear personnel destroyed food and water supplies to try to force sitters out, and used s. Sleep deprivation tactics, have includinged shining high-powered beams on sitters all night, while blasting heavy music to further disrupt rest and create increasingly dangerous scenarios during 24-hour paramilitary sieges on tree sits.
Across the country, in Atlanta, forest defenders are fighting to stop a massive clear-cutting operation: It’s not just the trees that are up for grabs—it’s our very freedom to protest the destruction of the Earth and the daily, systematic oppression of our own lives. Cop City isn’t just for training the local Atlanta forces: police and militaries around the world will be able to utilize the facilities and programs, and Atlanta is just the first. Several other “Cop Cities” in different US regions are already being planned.
Movement repression in Atlanta has been shocking— 42 people have been charged (not indicted) under Georgia State Domestic Terror Laws; 61 people have been charged under RICO laws for things as minor as purchasing glue or handing out fliers. The RICO indictment describes the 42 conspirators asof operating under similar beliefs of “mutualism/mutual aid,” “collectivism,” “anti-corporate” sentiment, the belief that the US is an unequal, oppressive state, and an “ideology” for “protection of the environment at all costs.” Under RICO laws, activists need not even know or ever have spoken to one another—merely seem to possess similar values and purchase glue for a craft night.
If a small security company from Mendocino can operate like a mini-Blackwater to protect THPs in Petrolia, what happens when forests are bulldozed for the purpose of building a fake city to practice counterinsurgency against protesters just as we all teeter on the brink of planetary collapse? What happens when the US military is effectively everywhere, at all times, in every town, and the top “threat” to “national interests” are the people fighting for the planet and all its life? It is not merely that the military needs to clean its act up—A holistic, deep ecological approach recognizes the need to end the existence of the US military before it ends the people it claims to protect.
Direct action forest defenders across the US correctly identify the unifying forces of violence around the globe. They understand better than most environmentalists in the mainstream that the military/prison-industrial complex is designed to continue the ravaging of our home planet in perpetuity and to stop us from effectively fighting back.
Resistance to the military-industrial-complex is deeply woven in our movement history. Capitalism and the twin Treadmills of Production and Destruction guarantee the same resistance in our future.
A world that wants to make peace with the environment cannot continue to fight wars or to sacrifice human health and the earth’s ecosystems preparing for them.
— Michael Renner, “Assessing the Military’s War on the Environment” (1991)