Every War is a War Against the Earth

[ by Kathleen Dean Moore ]

posted 12/11/01

Pine siskins sing in the ponderosas behind me, but all I can think of are finches falling with their wings on fire. I've come with my canoe to a small lake in the Oregon mountains, to seek some measure of solace in the peace of this place. Still, the nightmare image will not leave my mind--small flocks of finches and sparrows blown outward by the force of exploding passenger planes.

©Alan Mazzetti

In my mind's eye, each bird bursts into yellow flame and arcs to the ground, leaving a tiny trace of smoke and sparks. Robin Morgan, a poet and women's-rights activist, described the death of the birds in an on-line letter she sent from New York City after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. "Who could have imagined it?" she wrote. "The birds were burning."

Now the United States is deep into war in Afghanistan, while terrorists continue their secret war against us. But the charred birds in New York's gutters remind us that both sides are waging an unacknowledged war as well, against the undefended earth. Compounding the human tragedy, the uncounted deaths in dust and flame, is the damage war inflicts on the ultimate innocents--the rivers and mountains, the birds, the fertile edges of the sea.

More than 30,000 seabirds died as a direct result of the Iraqi war, in massive spills of crude oil and black smoke from burning oil wells along the Arabian Gulf. The Vietnam War was a war against the rice fields, jungles, and mangrove swamps that sustained and sheltered the insurgents. The weapons of that scorched-earth war? Twenty million gallons of herbicides, incendiary bombs that set the dead marshes on fire, and Rome plows, giant bulldozers that destroyed jungle ecosystems at the rate of 1,000 acres a day. The atomic bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed everything in one golden flash--the schoolchildren and grandmothers and ancient pines and songbirds in their bamboo cages. The bombs falling in Afghanistan explode with a heat so searing it kills even the soil, in a country where already forests are leveled, hillsides raw and eroded, and fully half the agricultural land destroyed by war with the former Soviet Union.

There is so much to grieve for, so many reasons for sorrow and regret. Birds falling, buildings falling, people falling, bombs falling; Icarus with his manmade wings, flying dangerously close to the sun and plummeting to earth in a flaming tangle of feathers and beeswax; riveted metal wings--those gravity-defying aluminum wings--exploding, along with faith in human progress, and falling to the streets with torn pages from accountants' ledgers, drifting and falling; hope itself falling with scorched wings.

I launch my canoe on the dark lake. Waves radiate from the bow and pulse slowly across the water, lifting the reflected stars and bending the light from the moon.

I ask myself, Has a nation ever waged war against another nation without waging war also against its own land and sea? Without plundering its own treasures and defiling its own hills? The machinery of war makes a great noise--clatter of oil pumps, roar of jet engines, thump of ordnance against the desert floor. As much as a third of the world's environmental degradation is the direct result of war or the preparation for war. The U.S. Department of Defense "creates more than five times as much toxic waste as the five major U.S. chemical companies," according to Susan Lanier-Graham, author of The Ecology of War. An F-16 burns in a single hour more fuel than an average American will burn in two years. And will we devastate an Arctic plain alive with caribou and curlews and cloudberries, to replace the jet fuel used to devastate an Afghan hillside busy with marketplaces and schools?

I rest my paddle across my knees and let the canoe float. In the darkness, I can smell woodsmoke and white pines. Mergansers murmur to themselves as they settle for the night. The tragedy is that war turns its weapons against the earth at just the moment when we most need the comfort the natural world can provide. There is peace in wild places, the world going about this steady business of living. Trees breathing in and out, snow falling on the sea. And there is hope, always hope, in the earth's healing cycles and the vastness of time. In every damp cedar stump, each fish carcass and steaming marsh, in all its musty, magical ways, earth transforms death into life, endlessly. The canoe turns on the black water, as the earth turns, and stars drift across the silent night.

In a different autumn, my husband and I launched a canoe on the Hanford Reach, a section of the Columbia River that curves around the vast Hanford Nuclear Reservation. It's a swallow-graced stretch of river that flows through junipers and sage. But we had floated only a few miles when a dust storm raced in across the tablelands, driven by wild wind. The sky turned black. Streams of dust blew up the bluffs and ripped into the air. Tumbleweeds rolled upriver, bounding off the waves, spiraling water like sparks from a Catherine wheel. We fought our way off the river and grounded the canoe next to a massive concrete intake pipe.

There we were in storm-blown weeds, pinned between the river and a cyclone fence bound in barbed wire. Beyond the fence was the vast sagebrush steppe surrounding the concrete bunker of the reactor that produced the plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb. Across the river, there were sirens mounted on tall black poles, and signs warning us to flee if the sirens let loose--as if there were any escape from the wind and the storm-clouds and the shadow of weapons-grade plutonium, slowly decaying in its concrete vault.

In time, the wind roared away into the hills, bending the willows to mark its path. The grasses righted themselves. Gulls flapped into the air and hovered over the rocks, dropping freshwater clams, wheeling around to drop them again. Goldfinches perched, swaying, on teasels and horsetails, and yellow warblers came alive in the cottonwoods. An osprey took to the sky, sailing low over the barbed wire and circling above the water. As the storm cleared, late afternoon sun shot in under the billowing black sky and lit the length of the river. Reflected light flickered over the osprey's breast and caught in its feathers. The osprey flared, turned sharply, and soared upriver with fire in its wings.

Count the birds in the true cost of war. Count the shattered forests. Count each lily, burned in its underground bulb. Count the oil-soaked avocet. Count the wilderness and the scarred desert range. Count all these innocents, and grieve for them all.

Kathleen Dean Moore is a professor of philosophy at Oregon State University and the author, most recently, of Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World. Her essay "Amazing Grace" ran in the March-April 2001 issue of Audubon.