2) The ravages of war

Picture: Kuwait, 1991

Since 1914, war has become a permanent feature on all continents. Two hundred conflicts, two hundred million deaths, two cities flattened by atomic bombs! Napalm, chemical and bacteriological weapons, cluster bombs, killer drones... the latest technology at the service of barbarity.

The twentieth century has been repeatedly named the most barbaric century in the history of mankind. But the 21st century is well on the way to figure even higher in the annals of horror, having opened with the Twin Towers attacks on 11 September. Since then, the chaos has spread from region to region: Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Congo, Ukraine, Israel/Palestine... and perhaps tomorrow Taiwan.

War has become so much the centre of gravity of the whole of society that it focuses all scientific research on it. Microwaves, freeze-dried products, tins of food, self-injecting syringes, GPS, aviator sunglasses, the Internet... the list of objects produced by military research is endless. The First World War gave rise to a permanent war economy: in a fierce struggle, governments had to focus their industry and scientific research on this area of destruction and death. Since then it has been war that structures society.

Today, worldwide military spending exceeds 2400 billion dollars a year. This figure is rising steadily and will be even higher tomorrow!

War takes the lives of millions of people. But it also annihilates all other forms of life. Battlefields are desolate wastelands; flora and fauna are wiped out.

Each war causes an environmental disaster that lasts for centuries: heavy metals, chemicals and radioactive elements remain for centuries, even millenia. The consequences of the First World War are still being felt today. Lead and mercury from the degradation of munitions contaminate groundwater wherever there were trenches. In France, because of the shells buried in the soil, 120,000 hectares of battlefield are still unfit for any human activity! During the Vietnam War in the 1960s, the US army deliberately used an ultra-toxic herbicide (“Agent Orange”) to destroy vegetation and make it easier to spot Viet Cong forces. As a result, this chemical destroyed all the forests in 20% of the south of the country and continues to contaminate the environment and population! And what about nuclear power? All the nuclear-equipped states are carrying out tests that are causing a considerable increase in cancer in all the ‘local’ populations. 2,000 official nuclear tests to be precise.

The conflict in Ukraine is a concentration of all these destructive forces. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides, the risk of the Zaporizhzha power station going off the rails is making the world tremble; collapsed buildings everywhere are releasing incalculable quantities of asbestos into the air; abandoned tanks, weapons and medical equipment represent tonnes of highly polluting waste. Just one figure: while the country contains 35% of Europe's flora and fauna, almost 30% of the country's forests have already been destroyed.

In Ukraine, environmental destruction is a weapon of war. The explosion of the Kakhovka dam on 6 June 2023 is proof of this: thousands of hectares of farmland and nature reserves destroyed, industrial sites flooded, causing the water from the dam to mix with various chemicals, hydrocarbons and waste water, and so on. The devastation of Gaza by the Israeli miliary is having similar effects on the environment as it massacres and starves the population in tens of thousands. Today's wars show that this scorched earth strategy has been reinforced: destroying the resources of an environment in order to starve its adversary. This was also one of the objectives of using napalm in Vietnam.

And to complete the circle, all the colossal military spending to come will even lead governments to abandon their minimum commitments to the climate: drastic cuts in programmes to reduce CO2 emissions, in research into alternative energies, and so on.

This is the world as it has been since 1914, a world at permanent war that is gobbling up resources and burning up entire regions. If nothing is done to stop this dynamic, states will continue their killing spree, and the hotbeds of war will spread until they consume everything.