Joining me to discuss this issue is Dr. Chad Briggs, Principal & Strategy Director of GlobalInt, which is a consulting organization specializing in environmental risk assessment, energy futures, and strategic scenario planning. GlobalInt is based in Washington.
Is it poorer states’ environments which are most often affected by war?
Dr. Chad Briggs: I think that it is true that weak states do suffer disproportionately, especially during conflicts. But I would like to point out in the beginning that some of the earlier efforts to highlight environmental security and the impacts of military on the environment came in the 1960s, when people were really concerned over the effects of nuclear weapons development in the Soviet Union. So, once a conflict does occur, then, yes, particularly those do happen in the weaker states, the peripheries. And these are the areas in which the environmental damage tends not to be seen by the public.
Is that because the countries themselves aren’t so noted? They are not in people’s consciousness, as much as, for example, the Western-European countries or the Americas.
Dr. Chad Briggs: Certainly! We don’t get the visualization of what happens in those countries. They don’t have the news media coverage. They tend to be those sorts of places that people say are far away and not well understood, and they don’t affect our lives. And so, they don’t really understand how that conflict affects what they do in their daily lives, how their choices as consumers…for example, a mobile phone has Coltan, which is a rare earth metal often found in eastern Congo. And they don’t understand that using this in your phone helps fuel the conflict in Congo, and then Rwanda.
And this in fact then has an environmental damage, both in terms of the force, but especially with the eastern mountains guerillas. I think it is typical for people to make those connections, unless it is something very discrete, such as, for example, the conflict zone. Only sort of a very concerted public relations campaign can point out that your purchases in the Google shop can have a direct effect on the life of people in other areas. But even that, I think, takes a great amount of effort in order to get that into people’s consciousness, something out of state, out of mind.
And we have situations where poorer states can be used as proxy states for the superpowers to fighting out.
Dr. Chad Briggs: Yes! And we don’t really understand the involvement sometimes, of how the military is really carrying out the activities. And I think we get I bit jaded and thinking that, because we live in this era of total war, that we simply expect the environment to be damaged. And it is difficult for people psychologically to even look at the number of people killed, to the go beyond that and to understand what the effect is going to be environmentally, what long-term effects this is going to have on the infrastructure, on the people’s ability to raise agriculture. And in the countries not even so far on the periphery…take an example of the former Yugoslavia. It is 20 years now since the Datum accords were signed, and yet we still don’t know what the environmental conditions really are. The monitoring is broken down, it is not a priority. And so, it continues on and when the people are reconstructing the country, they simply don’t understand what happened to the water infrastructure, what happened to people’s indoor sort of environment when they are rebuilding houses.
Is degradation of the environment due to militaries something that happens in peace time as well? For example, the nuclear testing that was carried out in Kazakhstan.
Dr. Chad Briggs: Yes! I haven’t been to the nuclear test sites in Kazakhstan or Russia, but I have been to in the US in Nevada. And it is really stunning once you see the scale of the area and what damage had been done. The weapons production as well, which is done in secrecy and is not told to the public. And whether it was the Hanford Site in Washington State or the Mayak Plant near Chelyabinsk, the amount of nuclear radiation that was released into the environment is really substantial. And even on the day-to-day basis, the amount of toxic chemicals that go into the weapons production or for use, or simply, if now we consider the effects on climate change, the amount of fossil fuels that are used simply in the air force… I mean, the US air force, even while it is trying to keep a more environmental program, the simple fact is that it is the world’s single largest consumer of energy. And so, it is difficult to get beyond that.
How long will it take Ukraine’s environment to recover from the present fighting, if it were to stop tomorrow?
Dr. Chad Briggs: I think in the local regions, probably, one or two generations.
So, this is the main point, that it takes two generations for countries to recover from a military conflict. And do you agree with me that this is something that should be broadcasted more often in the widest possible sense for people to become more aware of this issue?
Dr. Chad Briggs: I certainly do! I mean, it’s partly been my life’s work that to talk of it is very important, because if we only look at what is on the headlines and what happens today, we lose sight of how this is going to affect people for generations.
And yet it is still one of the issues that we don’t really consider when we talk about war and when we go to war. The environmental consequences just aren’t that important and they really won’t become important, I guess, until the environment becomes more important than war. And that is not going to happen for a long time.
