In their most recent documentary, “Earth’s Greatest Enemy”, Abby Martin and Mike Prysner examine the US military as not only the world’s biggest consumer of fossil fuels, but also the world’s biggest perpetrator of ecological devastation and a driver of both increasing carbon emissions and militarization in other countries.
Earth’s Greatest Enemy, the second feature film project by Abby Martin, documents how the Pentagon, the world’s single largest institutional polluter, spews carbon, contaminates water and spreads toxins across vast landscapes while being exempt from climate agreements. A full transcript is included below.
Chris Hedges speaks about the new film and why it is an important tool in the global struggle against imperialism with Abby Martin in this episode of The Chris Hedges Report.
On top of the US military’s direct carbon emissions from powering warships, bombers, tanks, the vast web of foreign bases and more, in the feature length film, Martin exposes the amount of indirect carbon emissions generated by the military industrial supply chain, from the extraction of raw materials in Global South countries to the factories that manufacture weapons and equipment. Martin also discusses the toxic footprint of the US military both at home and abroad, which poisons the land and water leaving a legacy of disease and death, and the Pentagon’s efforts to deny responsibility and prevent compensation for the suffering it causes. She states, “Every base is a story of toxic dumping with the soldiers as the lab rats.”
Hedges and Martin speak about the US military as the enforcement arm for global capital, especially for fossil fuel corporations and Big Agriculture, which “imposes the dictates of global capitalism around the world at the barrel of a nuclear armed gun.” They describe the ‘collective suicide’ of an unsustainable system that uses fossil fuels to protect the interests of and expand the fossil fuel industry. And they explain the imperial boomerang effect of “a global military empire that acts as a for-profit corporation,” which supplies surplus weapons “to entities like ISIS or the Taliban or to local police forces here in the US, which in turn brutalizes and subjugates its respective population.”
The interview concludes with a discussion of what can be done to change course. Hedges and Martin agree that a major obstacle is the lack of an opposition party in power. Even the most progressive Democrats are unwilling to take on the Military Industrial Complex. But Martin finds hope in the rising support for socialism and growing realization that “Gaza is actually the connective tissue to our liberation all over the world.” She adds, “I do have revolutionary optimism in the fact that people are putting their careers on the line…. We need to be militant. We need to be proud and confident about our anti-imperialism.”
RELATED
Militarism, Climate Chaos, and the New Fascism: A Conversation with Abby Martin and Robert Scheer
Transcript
Margaret Flowers
Chris Hedges: Earth’s Greatest Enemy, the second feature film project by Abby Martin, documents how the Pentagon, the world’s single largest institutional polluter, spews carbon, contaminates water and spreads toxins across vast landscapes while being exempt from climate agreements. The film focuses on an often unexamined aspect of the war industry, which not only eliminates human lives through violence, but also through ecological devastation. The US military is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet at 270,000 barrels of oil a day. This amounts to 55 million metric tons of CO2 annually, more than 150 countries. The United States is the only country which has some 1,000 installations and bases dotted throughout the globe. Russia has nine, China has one.
These military outposts are equipped with thousands of vehicles and aircraft. The US Air Force alone is larger than the next five biggest air powers combined. It would take the average American driver over 40 years to burn as much fuel as a single flight of a Boeing Pegasus. The US flies more than 600 of these tankers, triple the rest of the world combined. The direct emissions from warships, vehicles, warplanes, tanks, and military bases do not include the indirect emissions emitted by weapons manufacturers, suppliers for the military, and the machinery that extracts raw materials in countries such as the Congo that are vital to the military machine. If these indirect emissions are factored into the carbon footprint, the pentagon’s CO2 output is at least three times higher, over 165 million metric tons a year.
Joining me to discuss her film, “Earth’s Greatest Enemy”, is Abby Martin. It’s a great film and we’ve got to make sure we tell viewers how to link to it, but what is it that propelled you to look at the military from this angle?
Abby Martin: I think for a lot of us who have been witnessing the ecocidal nature of U.S. imperialism and the destruction that it brings around the world, it’s been so obvious for so long that when you destroy landscapes, when you mass murder people, those toxins, the carcinogens that are unleashed from the constant bombing, the pulverization of concrete, this carbon-dense material that we’ve seen in Gaza, it’s so obvious, Chris. You know, I’ve always been an environmentalist and so as an anti-imperialist journalist, it’s always just been such an obvious link. And I was always so curious why no one had synthesized this material and not just the emissions, but the totality of this gargantuan subject, because it’s not just emissions. It’s really everything. Every base is a story of not only legacy contamination, but ongoing contamination with the waves of militarization that we see today. So, I was really upset that this wasn’t a mainstream issue, that this wasn’t incorporated in the narratives with mainstream environmentalism. And instead, you saw people like Elizabeth Warren talking about greening a global military empire, which we know is completely unsustainable and uninhabitable with the viability of a planet that sustains human life.
Chris Hedges: Well, and they don’t just poison those abroad. I remember the bombing in Bosnia when I covered the war and, in those craters, nothing ever grew because there was uranium. Those were uranium depleted munitions. I drove on my way to Basra, where I was eventually captured by the Iraqi Republican Guard, up the highway of death. It was coated in white dust from Iranian depleted munitions that of course sickened and killed many of the service members who had to go clean it up. But you also talk about Camp Lejeune, that these poisons are, in that sense, the military’s non-discriminatory. They’re quite happy to poison their own as well. We didn’t even talk about the trash dumps in places like Iraq.
Abby Martin: Exactly, I mean you look at something as cynically exploited as the 9-11 first responders. I mean these were lauded as the heroes of 9-11, slapped over all the propaganda to activate that reptile brain after 9-11 and what was done to them? Basically, left to die, denied health care at every step of the way. These are the 9-11 first responders that were digging through the asbestos-laden toxic dust. So of course, the service members are completely expendable in the eyes of the ruling class and the military brass.
I mean, every base is a story of toxic dumping with the soldiers as the lab rats. We saw this during the waves of radiation with nuclear, the extractivism with the Cold War, literal US soldiers as lab rats with the nuclear testing and, today, the burn pits and, of course, you mentioned Camp Lejeune. This was the worst water contamination event in American history and for years the military command was dumping intentionally toxic chemicals and lying about it. And then, of course, this is their modus operandi. They deny claims. They deny the existence of the toxic dumping until it’s undeniable and then they’ll just basically dole out these claims with such an extreme delay that a judge today said it will take 100 years to basically look at every claim because they’re trying to deny the class action lump sum lawsuit.
So, it’s insane. I mean this is a 50 plus year old story and there’s still people that are sick and dying because of this cover-up. And they’ve never been held accountable and they’ve never properly remediated any of these areas. Chris, most of the superfund sites in the US have either housed military installations or been used for military use and they completely do not clean these sites up. They are left to rot and kill the people who live there, and this includes American citizens and servicemen members.
Chris Hedges: Well, Camp Lejeune, the Marine Corps camp, it of course not only sickened and poisoned the Marines, but their families. As you said, it was incredibly prolonged because the military denied it. You do explore it in the film, but give us the kind of details of just how callous that abuse was.
Abby Martin: Yeah, this is a thing that people can look at and say, “They didn’t know any better”, right? “It was a long time ago. They certainly didn’t know the toxicity. They didn’t have any safe alternatives.” Of course they did. Similarly to PFAS today, they have safe alternatives. They don’t need to use PFAS. They choose to, Chris, they choose to. There’s always safe alternatives. There’s always other things that they could be doing other than open burning, open detonation on all of these indigenous lands and desecrating these places. But when it comes to Camp Lejeune, this was a story that was happening for decades. I mean, they were dumping so much toxic waste because you look at just the maintenance of the military arsenal alone, the amount of toxic chemicals that are dumped into the ground and the open atmosphere just to clean these engine parts to make these engines mission ready to fly around in pointless patrols.
So, the amount of toxic waste that that’s accumulating every day, it’s really unquantifiable. So, the military was doing this, dumping the toxic waste into water wells at this Marine Corps base for years and years and years. So, when the tests were done and they knew the wells were poisonous, instead of stopping the dumping, Chris, they continued. They continued for years and covered it up while Marines were drinking the water, bathing in the water. I mean, it was just like Red Hill where they were literally bathing, cooking, cleaning in toxic water. And who died as a result of that? Of course, countless people. I mean, we’re talking about a million people that were impacted by this. But the people who really were affected by this were the babies. The babies who didn’t have the ability to deflect the carcinogens in their body. They didn’t have the ability to do that. So, we saw over a thousand babies that were killed. Stillborn, newborn infants, Chris.
One of the women who goes back to these graves sees three born and died gravestones of children. Every two years, this woman would have a stillborn baby and probably thought it’s her. She didn’t know to blame the military brass. They didn’t know. There was no accountability. There was no information given. Still to this day, you have people, activists, are going out with cards saying, “Did you know about Camp Lejeune? Hey, you might be affected by this.” I mean, it’s absolutely insane to think of the lives lost, the destruction wrought on the families there, and actually no knowledge of what happened. Think about how many lives were ruined thinking that’s you, and there was no answers for these people.
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the nexus between our addiction to fossil fuels and imperialism, which I think is also a theme of the film.
Abby Martin: Yeah, I mean, you look back at the existence of the US military as an institution. It’s always been to extract, I mean, basically as the enforcement arm of extractivism. You look at the first extraterritorial bases, and they were always to protect coal, the infrastructure of coal. And then it became oil, right? When oil was discovered that became cemented as the national security priority. It’s always been there. It’s just that we adopted the pretense of national security being human rights, democracy, freedom. It’s always been explicitly about oil. But the military has always been the enforcement arm for global capital.
So, today, the military basically is pointed as this arch nemesis in the film. But really, it is just the consequence of an imperialist system that imposes the dictates of global capitalism around the world at the barrel of a nuclear armed gun. And the consequences are dire if you don’t bow to the dictates of the system, Chris. So, I always look at the perpetrators that have been rightly pointed at in terms of the global pollution that we are experiencing today, Big Oil, Big Ag. But who enforces these mechanisms? Who props up this system? Who does it? It’s the U.S. military. The oil companies have a military and that’s the U.S. military.
Now you mentioned the fact that if you look at just the institutional level of pollution in terms of the consumption of oil, that amounts to 150 countries, right? But it doesn’t even scratch the surface of the emissions because we’re talking about U.S.-led military emissions, which includes NATO. It includes the Great Power Competition. When the U.S. continues to build up its armaments and withdraws from all these treaties, well, of course, Russia and China will respond with their own military buildup. It all goes back to the impetus, to the imperial core and the belligerence and arrogance by the US.
And then you see this reaction, this wave around the world reacting to the US belligerence. But you talk about the necessity of maintaining this arsenal and kind of the self-fulfilling prophecy, and that’s, I think, really the key here is the actual infrastructure of the fossil fuel domination and that cyclical need to get the natural resources to pillage and plunder, to extract the last vestiges of natural gas and oil, to justify feeding the arsenal. To feed the oil dragon, you need to continue to grow and expand just to feed it.
So, it really is a self-fulfilling prophecy in the worst way possible. It’s collective suicide because the military itself is the main driver of this system. It is driving this unsustainable world that’s dominated by fossil fuel. And then it uses the expanse to justify its own growth and expansion. And then you have people like Nancy Pelosi and these liberal politicians saying the military is the solution for the problem that it caused. So, we’re in the worst way possible where there’s no imagination or ingenuity outside of the system itself that has caused the very problem that we’re facing. And they want it to be the solution for it.
Chris Hedges: Well, as the climate breaks down, as you have increasing numbers of climate refugees fleeing from the Global South, as you have naval bases, and the military is planning for this, essentially buried underwater because of sea level rises, the very problem they create becomes the excuse not only for their existence, but their expansion where Trump is now talking about a military budget of a trillion and a half dollars. I mean it is this kind of very bizarre feedback loop.
Abby Martin: Yeah, it is. People talk about the notion of the imperial boomerang. Of course, for marginalized brown and black people, they’ve always felt the brunt of our colonial, the consequences of colonialism and imperialism. But I think for people who look like me in this country, they’re seeing that this is inseparable. This boomerang effect of the consequences of having a global military empire that acts as a for-profit corporation. That when you have surplus weaponry that you need to continue to justify the next generation of these pointless vehicles, it either is handed off to entities like ISIS or the Taliban or to local police forces here in the US, which in turn brutalizes and subjugates its respective populations like in Minneapolis. So, it’s a feedback loop in the worst way in every possible way that you need to continue to grow on a finite planet. You need to continue to justify the growth and the expanse. And so, one fascinating thing about Trump that I’ve heard you articulate many times is the fact that he’s completely dropped the mask. I mean, all of this is just very explicit. It’s about the oil. Iran’s the third largest oil producer in the world and Venezuela’s the first. I mean, this is insane. It’s an overlap of just the law of the jungle, complete lawlessness, harkening back to the days of Christopher Columbus, where it’s just openly colonial, like Operation Total Extermination of Latin America.
Any country that doesn’t bow to this global system will be punished, will be destroyed unapologetically from the ruling class. So, when we did this film, what’s amazing about it, it was kind of the incubation period to get us somewhere like Trump. I mean, this was the neoliberal doctrine. This is the neoliberal order. This is what was deemed normal, right? This was the status quo. And this is a death spiral, Chris.
So, the film’s really instructive because it shows us how we got here. It gives us answers to how things have gotten so bad, how it is possible that someone like Trump can get in and ratchet things up to this extent, because he’s not a king. He’s not an anomaly. He’s exactly the perfect encapsulation of the system that we have today.
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the opposition. Those who are attempting to confront the now naked imperialism that backs genocide in Gaza, that carries out unprovoked attacks against countries like Iran. Where is it coming from? And what are the strategies that are effective to combat this monster that we’ve created?
Abby Martin: I mean, as uncertain and dystopian as the time that we’re living through is, Chris, I find it simultaneously very exciting because of the uncertainty, because of where it could go. We both know that 10 years ago, talking about socialism was considered completely controversial in this country. We are living in a country that its unofficial religion is anti-communism. And so, to live in a time where all of this is exposed, the bankrupt, hollowed out nature of this feckless opposition that has done nothing but lay down as the doormats for empire, for genocide, I mean, it’s a very important time because there’s no toeing the line. There’s no middle ground. It’s really socialism or barbarism.
We have to abandon this notion that this is the end of history. This is the finality of our economic system. This is unacceptable. This is barbarism in its purest sense. This is where it’s gone. It’s gone on the ruins of all these institutions that have basically just been fronts for U.S. power this whole time. It’s all been exposed as sacrificial, like we are all sacrificial lambs, all of the human beings on this planet and also the environment, all of us are expendable basically in the eyes of the ruling class. It’s all about short-term profit. It’s not even about tactics or strategy.
I mean, you look at the Strait of Hormuz, you look at even the Iraq War. When has the US even won a war, right? I mean, we stole the glory from the Soviet Union with World War II, but when has the US, in terms of asserting its imperial dominance and US hegemony, when has it actually resulted in a victory, like a military victory? It’s all about profit and that’s what’s so dystopian about it. They are willing to create apocalyptic moonscapes all over the planet. Dead zones still existing from small armaments during World War I. I mean, this is the result. This is the legacy of these wars, but they’re not stopping. In fact, you saw it getting worse with Iran – the intentional targeting of oil infrastructure, oil depots, natural gas pipelines. The casual warning of committing war crimes – today is ‘Bridge Day’, tomorrow is ‘Power Plant Day’ with the world’s media just being like, “Is he gonna do it? Like, let’s find out. We have a 48-hour timeline.”
So, I think this is how we got here is the wanton impunity for war criminals, not holding people accountable for the Iraq war crimes. I mean, this is how we get Gaza This is how we get the new lawlessness and the law of the jungle. And so, the resistance that we’re seeing to it is incredible, the sustained actions around the world, people’s understanding that Gaza is actually the connective tissue to our liberation all over the world. How Gaza fits into everything because five years ago no one understood that and it was always considered too controversial. It was a third rail and now it’s understood as everything. It is intrinsically tied to humanity’s liberation, and so to understand that and to see that foundation of understanding ripple throughout the world is something that is incredibly motivating and inspiring to me. And I do have revolutionary optimism in the fact that people are putting their careers on the line, their bodies on the line, their lives on the line just for the chance to move the needle, Chris, because that’s what we’re up against. We’re up against a completely insane global system. But it’s comprised of a bunch of dumb people. And that’s also what gives me hope. It’s not just the banality of evil, it’s the stupidity of evil. These people are so compartmentalized in their self-preservation that they can’t even see what’s right in front of them. They can’t even see that they’re destroying the planet for their kin. So, this is the opening that we have. We have a chance to change the world, to insert the truth, to reclaim our narratives and uplift those. And this movie is one tool in the arsenal to push that forward.
Chris Hedges: And yet when capitalists feel threatened, they reach for fascism. And we are rapidly consolidating a fascistic system within the United States. Fascists are not particularly smart. They’re often very buffoonish, but they’re very deadly.
Abby Martin: Indeed. And to see the US waning its power in terms of the consciousness of the public. I mean this is the least popular war ever. Trump has the lowest approval rating but still, the fact that they don’t even need to try I think says a lot, right? The fact they didn’t even need to placate the public. They didn’t need to put out a propaganda campaign like in the wake of 9-11, What does that say? They don’t even care to try.
And that really exposes the state that we’re in, the detachment from the ruling class to the public, the fact that they don’t care. That should show us everything, that there is no connection whatsoever. There’s no representation. There has to be something that we do that’s outside of this electoral arena because it has completely failed us. There’s no material gains whatsoever from the Democratic Party. They are going to continue to basically push this system as we all fly off a cliff.
Chris Hedges: Abby, it’s always, the Pentagon is really not only unaccountable, but unassailable. It often submits budgets and then Congress will give them more than they even ask for. In many ways, it’s a state within a state. I remember the historian Arnold Toynbee highlighted unchecked, unregulated militarism as the death blow of the empire. You’re right that, of course, this is at once suicidal in terms of the imperialist policies and yet the power of the war industry, I mean even Bernie Sanders isn’t going to go after it. The power of the war industry is such within the American political system that it’s virtually sacrosanct.
Abby Martin: Indeed, this is the problem, isn’t it? Even with the case like Bernie Sanders or AOC as president, they’re still imperialists. I mean, at the end of the day, they are going to sustain the bipartisan consensus of US empire. They have never questioned the notion, the existence of a global military dictatorship, holding the world under its boot, subjugating billions of people.
This is unacceptable. You cannot call yourself an environmentalist if you are not anti-imperialist. Similarly to how Zionism is incompatible with progressivism. These concepts are contradictory. So, the real problem is that one of the only politicians that I ever heard even talking about closing down the bases around the world was Ron Paul, right? This is why he was so popular, but people tried to basically castigate him and lump all of his supporters in as racists. And that’s a really, really problematic premise because you have to have an opposition that is calling into question this imperial machinery of death.
And when you have Bernie Sanders, the most progressive wing of the Democratic Party, not even questioning that, not even talking about roping in these bases, decommissioning any aspect of the military empire. And instead, it’s just the liberal wing of it, right? I mean, defending the use of sanctions as diplomacy. Sanctions killed 1,800 babies in Cuba since 2019. This is mass murder by policy, right? You have AOC, I mean, basically just defending Liberal interventionism. This is a huge, huge problem.
We need to be militant. We need to be proud and confident about our anti-imperialism. We need to not throw the Global South under the bus when times get tough and castigate Cuba and Venezuela. We need to full-throatedly defend the Global South and their sovereignty and independence. And we need to call into question the entire premise that we have the ordained right to arbitrate anything around the world. That’s the problem, Chris. This is chauvinism. This is insane. So, we need to start basically pressing our politicians at the bare minimum that they need to be anti-imperialist. And it’s unacceptable that you have people posing as progressives that are not anti-imperialist at all.
Chris Hedges: Well, all the great socialists, Rosa Luxemburg and others, reminded us that you can’t be a socialist unless you’re also an anti-imperialist. You can’t.
Abby Martin: No, and sadly you’re not seeing any of that. Where is anyone in power talking about this stuff? There’s cursory kind of attempts to just admonish Trump like on these mealy mouth statements from people like Hakeem Jeffries, “Oh, the process. Well, Maduro had to go, but the process had to be better. We should have had the process involved better when it came to a war of aggression and eco-side unleashed against Iran.” I mean, it is disgusting. It is disgusting to have Chuck Schumer out there talking about his undying support for Israel as he tries to hawk books about anti-Semitism while there’s a goddamn genocide going on. This is the opposition party? This is the opposition party that you want to browbeat Leftists and is saying, “Vote blue”? If you’re not going to stand up against genocide, how the hell are you going to fight for democracy? Jesus Christ.
Chris Hedges: Tell us how people can see the film and, also, follow your work.
Abby Martin: You can see the film. It’s up now on Vimeo. It’s for streaming for international audiences and domestic audiences. Check it out, Vimeo. You can check out EarthsGreatestEnemy.com and it’s embedded right on the home screen. You can also get me to do Q and A’s, show the film all around the world if you want to. It’s also available for patrons on our Patreon and YouTube members only. Soon in a couple of weeks, we’re releasing with Watermelon Pictures out on Amazon and Apple, so it’ll be widely available on streaming then.
I encourage everyone to reach everyone you know who’s still reachable with the film. It’s an incredible tool in the arsenal to try to activate and motivate people and agitate them into becoming anti-imperialist and give us a fighting chance against the parasites robbing us blind, Chris.
Chris Hedges: You did a wonderful job, Abby. Thanks. And I want to thank Max and Diego, who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.subtack.com.
Editor’s Note: Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.
You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.
ndants in the 1805 Treaty trial (l. to r.) Chris Mato Nunpa (Two Bears), an elder from Upper Sioux Reservation along the Minnesota River in Granite Falls, a Dakota first language speaker; Susu Jeffrey, FriendsofColdwater.org, and Jim Redsky Anderson, historian for the Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota Community.
