Since last February’s snow storm, I’ve been ruminating on climate change. Articles about Greta Thorburg’s choosing to sail across the ocean added information about the impact of air travel in the burning of fossil fuel and the release of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere. These articles reminded me of when we were taxiing out to the runway on our summer vacation last year. On the other side of the runway was a hanger with several military jets. One of the jets was taxiing to its runway where it then took off. It lifted off the ground and a few seconds later, it angled upward and accelerated upward at an amazingly steep angle. In a few seconds, it disappeared through the cloud cover. I experienced its ascent as something metaphorically glorious about the human spirit and what we are capable of.
But now the articles on the impact of airline travel made me wonder about the amount of burned fuel required for that jet’s steep ascent. I began imagining how many military flights are happening each day all around the world, most of them not involving combat. Just practicing or patrolling or moving stuff around. Then I wondered how much of our greenhouse emissions originates within military operations. I’ve seen breakdowns of how much of our emissions originate from transportation, lighting, etc. But what percentage of these sectors originate from military sources?
Then I thought about war from the point of view of greenhouse gas emissions. It takes energy to build buildings and vehicles and people. If they are destroyed, it takes energy that would otherwise not be needed to replace them. In terms of trying to navigate our planet towards a narrowing window of opportunity, we have no room for war. Even the existence of the military is an allocation of resources in the wrong direction.
What if there is a point in the climate crisis where the carbon expenditures of military activities are incompatible with a habitable earth – independent of all the moral, economic, and political issues that are often asked about war and military. The main justification for a military is because for thousands of years, other realms have had and used a military against other realms. Each realm’s military justifies the existence of other realms’ militaries in the short run but what if all their energy expenditures nullify their promise to protect us in the long run? How does one shift away? And to what?
We tend to think of change as linear at the current rate. If we operate on that assumption when the change is actually accelerating downward, we will keep doing too little, too late. We will cling to our assumptions while the world around keeps mysteriously deteriorating. We will continue to orient and direct our lives in the same way that others around us and before us did. But jump in your imagination to a dystopian last stand and ask from that perspective what is important, what do we seek to preserve, what current beliefs and practices hinder the needed work? For me, one answer to those questions is we must move beyond money as a direction by which to orient our lives.
I once read of a boy who grew up in an Asian village surrounded by terraced rice paddies. He and a friend had dug an opening through one of the terraces so that they could play with the water flowing from the higher terrace to the lower one. An old man hastened out and scolded them. Generations of farmers had shaped these terraces to hold the optimum water level for maximizing the rice harvest. By digging into the terrace, the boys were lowering the water level of the higher terrace, which would reduce its harvest which could, in a bad year, threaten the village’s food supply. People could die. Don’t dig in the terraces. We need to develop that communal, internal sense of self-restraint
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