January 21, 2005
We can take back our dollars
from the corporations, and organizations that support this
administration's warmongering and redirect our dollars to
supporting what we love and cherish.
Environmental Security Equals Peace
By Redwood Mary
There are thousands of us who do not agree with the Bush Administration's destruction and bombing in the name of freedom. Our advanced technology of war is killing and maiming thousands. For those who survive in Iraq, the Bush Administration has destroyed the capacity of human beings, just like us, to access basic water and food in order to stay alive. This is immoral.
The destruction of human life and the environmental destruction that is being carried on by the Bush Administration is pure 'terrorism'. The rhetoric of this administration is of fear and doom and many of us have not been duped by the jargon justifying the use of preemptive force to create democracy for Afghanistan or Iraq. Our war machine is altering and destroying the natural environmental heritage for future generations.
But we must understand that wars plaguing our planet, the wars of bombs and wars of ideology, are wars over control of land and resources&emdash;the very things we all need to survive. The greatest social justice issue facing this planet is WAR against mother earth and all her species. We tend to forget something very very important in our list of social justice issues, in our quest for human rights; we forget to call for social justice for the earth. Global Warming is here and it accelerated by this forgetting. Global Warming is also fueled by the release of industrial chemicals used to make the machines of war. War pollutes everything it touches. The drums of war and rhetoric of war hypnotize people into a false reality of power.
This administration is incredibly out of touch with the relationship between human activities and how we treat our environment. But we also must look at our rhetoric. Think about it -- we never say "our" environment - we call it "the Environment" as it is something separate from us or as secondary in importance. Each human act that violates natural processes for corporate greed and unmindful human consumption is war against life on this planet and that is something we need to deeply understand. Environmental security is the link to peace.
This administration's disconnection from the very life giving ecosystems that make life possible for us is the same disconnection that creates war. There is a war going on against the planet and it is a war conducted by the Military industrial complex supported by our tax dollars. We have been forewarned that without our planet earth to sustain us there will be no more arguing over human rights or justice.
It has been said that hope carried humankind past the darkness of its folly. Hope and determination and action broke the bonds of slavery and chains of apartheid. Hope is the seed of resistance.
So what does our environment and war have in common? Why should we care when there are so many other pressing issues? The environmental impacts of modern war have increased as the technology of weapons has advanced. This has increased not only in human causalities but also in destruction of our watersheds, our pristine soil, our sacred wild places and species that share this earth with. From the devastating weapons of mass destruction to vast amounts of toxic pollution left from the production, storage, and testing of chemical, biological, nuclear, and conventional weapons we are contaminating millions of acres. The release of industrial chemicals used in war making are poisoning our earth our water and our air.
We live in a closed biosphere -- we cannot continue to live in our own waste be it the plastic we use in our packaging or the nuclear waste that lies in storage with nowhere to go.
We can intervene and we are. In order to stop this insanity we need to get back in touch with the very fabric of life on this planet. The indigenous elders have warned us that we can choose the path of self-destruction or the path of peace and respect and it must come from the energy and currency of love and peace in order to work. This administration is leading us on the path of destruction. But we can turn away and peacefully refuse to go down that path. We have to turn off and tune out the network images that have lulled our minds into feeling helpless. We have to re-connect with the earth for our own and her survival.
We must go outside of our spheres of comfort and educate and create changes in our workplace, our schools, and our places of worship and within our local governments. Every object we use comes from the earth and do we use it for destruction or protection of life? We must help others to start understanding that our levels of consumption are killing, us killing our planet and creating wars over scare resources.
We must write letters to the editors in our local papers and to our representatives and educate them that any time you drop a bomb it is military abortion because pregnant women are in the line of fire. We must make sure our children are held and cared for and raised as peacemakers and not soldiers of war. We must be like the heroic Chipko people in India who defended the trees in their forest with their lives. We can continue on fighting for human rights and at the same time demand the conservation and protection of our forests and the oceans and our urban green spaces. We can refuse poisons to be spread on or lawns and public parks. We can protect our urban gardens from destruction like the amazing citizens in New York City who stood before the bulldozers at Esperanza Gardens. We can follow in the footsteps of NYC's More Gardens! Movement.
We can choose to do something very immediate and very powerful. We can take back our dollars from the corporations, and organizations that support this administration's warmongering and redirect our dollars to supporting what we love and cherish. We can support other activists who are giving up their economic security to work for the security of peace and for the security of a clean environment.
We can divest our pension plans, checking accounts, and savings accounts from the financial institutions that finance the mechanisms of war and re-invest in our own homeland security -- in our local organic farms, in our local community credit unions, in programs that support children and our elders, in visionary non-profit organizations that are creating alternatives to a war that is destroying our planet We are powerful and creative and courageous and we can change our destiny. We all can do something and we can have the greatest re-evolution in history. We are the generation that has the opportunity to make a difference.
I want to leave you with this statement by Ka Hsaw Wa. Burmese Activist, Earth Rights International.
I hope it inspires you.
"Respect for the climate, like all ecological protection is inseparable from the struggle for democracy, for freedom, and for justice."
Northern California activist Redwood Mary (Mary Rose Kaczorowski) has been working from the local to the global -- from the grassroots to the U. N. on Environmental Issues & Human Rights. She has worked in partnership with Julia Butterfly Hill, Dr. Wangari Maathai of Kenya and other notable shakers and movers in the quest for environmental and human rights. She is founder of the Plight of The Redwoods Campaign, co-coordinator of Women Organizing for Sustainable Environment and she holds a degree in Public Policy from Mills College in Oakland CA, USA