What does peace mean to you?

While both require planning, perseverance, and a steadfastness, peace stands in stark contrast to war. Peace preserves, accepts, and cherishes differences. War obliterates them.

I cannot say whether or not we are closer to living a life of peace or not, particularly when it comes down to the different cultures that make up this human world. Peace is likely not going to come from a compromise of our differences. Indeed, if even Americans cannot resolve their differences through compromise, then how can we expect the Western world to compromise on their differences with people in the East? Peace will come only when we accept the differences that exist. But acceptance is only a first step. We must cherish the differences, while at the same time making an intense effort at truly understanding why people would resort to flying planes into buildings. And so today, a decade on, how has peace influenced the debate on conflict resolution?

It amazes me that we think humans are the greatest thing in the world, but when it comes down to our differences, we will resort to violence to make sure that power stays concentrated with certain people. There is a clear discrepancy, it seems then, between doing all that we can to keep humanity alive, and then resorting to violence to kill humans when we don't agree. Of course, someone that has power might say then that it is in the interest of the broader humanity that their power is being used as violence against others, but that is unjustifiable.

Just as with many of the most complicated issues of our time, words have jumbled meanings. War can happen in the name of peace, and people convince themselves that this must be true. But what about this statement?

Since the Second World War, more than four fifths of the people killed in war have been civilians.

And despite the grief that comes with the loss of human life, there are many more dimensions that we don't think about when we think of war, and the environment is one of those things. How is the Earth's capacity for life changed when we war? Asked another way, what do our differences mean for the environment? Well, differences themselves are borne of the environment. Cultures are outcomes of environmental conditions, different ones, all over the world. This cannot be denied. And so when we resort to violence, we not only kill people, but we disturb and disrupt the ecosystems that build a culture.

There are many historical cases in which the ecological degradation has been used as a weapon to wipe people out, to oppress. In a prescient piece The environmental damage of war in Iraq from The Guardian, written eight years ago before the war, the potential ecologically degrading outcomes of war in Iraq were explored in the context of previous wars, both in the Balkans and in the Middle East:

During the 1991 war devastating damage was done to the oil industry in Kuwait. Iraqi forces destroyed more than seven hundred oil wells in Kuwait, spilling sixty million barrels of oil. Over ten million cubic metres of soil was still contaminated as late as 1998. A major groundwater aquifer, two fifths of Kuwait's entire freshwater reserve, remains contaminated to this day. Ten million barrels or oil were released into the Gulf, affecting coastline along 1500 km and costing more than $700 million to clean up. During the nine months that the wells burned, average air temperatures fell by 10 degrees C as a result of reduced light from the sun. The costs of environmental damage were estimated at $40 billion. Estimates of the numbers likely to die as a result of the air pollution effects were put at about a thousand. Since Iraq has the second largest proven oil reserves of any nation on earth, the potential environmental damage caused by destruction of oil facilities during a new war must be enormous.

Other environmental effects of the 1991 Gulf War included destruction of sewage treatment plants in Kuwait, resulting in the discharge of over 50,000 cubic metres of raw sewage every day into Kuwait Bay.

Secondly, specific weapons likely to be used against Iraq will also create environmental damage. Top of the list of concern are depleted uranium (DU) projectiles.

Guess what? Depleted uranium has wreaked havoc in Iraq. Surprised?

When it comes to "just war theory", both jus in bello and jus ad bellum, how do we hold warring factions to these customs that make attempts at doing "minimal damage to the environment"? Is it even possible? The government and corporations we patronise deal with the issues of defense and war on a day-to-day basis. They in fact make a huge profit from war. The tentacles of war have weaved their way into each and every one of our communities, in all fifty states, from manufacturing to financing to politics to constitutional amendments. So how can we think about peace when war pays the bills?

There is a lack of peace within us. In fact, being peaceful and thoughtful is made to seem passive and subservient. When we find it tasteful to use guns against other people, and use guns as a sign of power and control, we will no doubt find it tasteful to use bombs to blow tops off of mountains to reach for coal - indeed this is a sign of power and control, not over people in this case, but the environment. What may be hindering our cause to find harmony and peace with nature is the violence we are able to perpetrate against our own kind. Or maybe our ability and willingness to perpetrate violence against nature, beautiful and delicate, is standing in the way of finding peace with our own kind. In the end, if we cannot find peace within us, we cannot find peace without us. 

I believe that if we find peace within ourselves and where we are, we can radically redefine notions of "progress" and "community." When I say peace, I in no way mean complacency. When I say peace, I mean that we recognise, understand and internalise our place in the world, our place in our communities, our place within our families, and our place in our own minds and bodies. Being at peace doesn't necessarily mean being satisfied with where we are ethically and morally; clearly, given our increasingly complex world, much of the complexity of which is man-made, there are ways in which we need to be redefining what it means to interact with each other, what it means to be a good citizen and a good steward. As a society as a whole, we are far from the ethical, moral and spiritual heights we need to be at to fully understand our impact on other humans, as well as the environment. There is no way we can envision a sustainable future when we find peace in violence. But if we can find peace in where we are materially and in physical place, we will have reached some level of peaceableness with the environment. Peace with the environment allows us the time to think and appreciate about its marvels, of which humans are one. Such a peace will not allow us to use violent force against any aspect of our environment, humans included. 

What does peace mean to you?

War and the Environment - Just War Theory

I want to state clearly that I am resolutely against violence of all kinds - towards all living and non-living beings. Provoked by a discussion with Professor Richard Tucker, I will be writing for the next few days on the environmental impacts of war. (When I say "war," I mean the use of violent force.) I will be writing about environmental considerations during war, the environmental impacts of the military during non-war times, the environment as a non-combatant, the use of nuclear materials in war, the waste of life and environment because of enriched nuclear materials, as well as the current use of nuclear waste in Iraq as munitions. I believe this has several connections to waste and trash, which I hope to address implicitly and explicitly over the next few days. I start off in this series by writing a bit about what is called "Just War Theory," (JWT) which is a body of thought that has been built over many centuries, and how the environment can be considered in this. This post is based off of the writing of Mark Woods, "The Nature of War and Peace: Just War Thinking, Environmental Ethics and Environmental Justice."

JWT talks about circumstances in which the use of war is "justified," and how so. There are two important sets of considerations that have been elaborated on now for a long time. The first is jus ad bellum, which lists a set of considerations that must be taken into account before engaging in war - just cause, proper authority, right intention, reasonable hope for success, proportionality, last resort. The second set of considerations is jus in bello, which lists a set of considerations that must be taken into account while engaging in war. This involves asking questions like "What will do the least harm to X if I need to accomplish Y, given that I am already in the war?" It is important to note that many of these traditions and considerations come from customary international law, as well as international treaties (although these treaties have "very little legal bite," as Woods notes). Woods notes that these traditions and treaties attempt to regulate the conduct of war through outside enforcement, which of course, is close to impossible. Further, these theories and treaties have never been invoked to protect the environment before, during, or after war, even though the Geneva Conventions as well as ENMOD expressly prohibit means of warfare intended or expected to "cause widespread, long-term and sever damage to the natural environment." In fact, such actions are viewed as war crimes. Woods extends JWT to incorporate the environment. Woods argues that since "the jus in bello criteria of discrimination and proportionality can be used to regulate military force against civilian targets, it seems possible to regulate the use of military force against environmental targets." In fact, it would be extremely useful and powerful to think of the environment as a non-combatant. He makes a very interesting observation by noting that many military conflicts have been started because of mistreatment of unarmed, non-violent communities and groups of people. If JWT holds, is it justifiable to have armed environmental interventions to protect the Amazon rainforest from deforestation?

My thoughts on this are the following: I do not think it is possible to "expend all other possibilities and options," which is a reason why states may go to war. But if they do, it is close to impossible to regulate conduct during war. (This can be clearly seen by the use of white phosphorous by the Israeli forces during its recent war with Gaza.) The environment is always degraded during war, and whether we like it or not, people's lives and their outcomes are based on the fact that we live on the land, we drink water, and we breathe air. Modern chemical warfare necessarily degrades these things - no nation has ever gone to war to beautify the nature of the enemy territory. Destruction of structure, man-made and natural, is an incontrovertible outcome of war. It is absolutely not possible to understand the lasting consequences of chemical warfare on the environment. Furthermore, the preparation for war itself necessarily degrades the environment. More thoughts on this next time.