OMNI

CONVERGENCE OF CATASTROPHES WARS AND WARMING, ANTHOLOGY #1

Compiled by Dick Bennett, for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology

March 8, 2024

HTTPS://OMNICENTER.ORG/DONATE 

What’s at Stake:   These essays reveal how rapidly and significantly awareness has grown world-wide of the full scope of increasing, intensifying, interrelated problems.   But not so much in the US.   ― Thomas Hardy

RESISTING DOOM of CONVERGING CATASTROPHES

CLIMATE CHANGE EMERGENCY THE SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS NOW
And our stance should be??   4-15-23

     Dante in “The Inferno” places fence-sitters (one translation) just outside Hell, stung eternally by swarming wasps.   Another translation renders the word opportunists.

     If nuclear weapons and global warming each alone threatens our civilization and together seem sure to end civilized life and most species, shouldn’t we be defiantly, inevitably abrasively alert, resisting?  Numerous commentators tell us that only a mass movement can reverse our leadership failure.  Who will arrest the leaders and awaken the majority?   Dante condemned to Hell the adiaphorus and all who claim moral neutrality, are indifferent to emergencies, would euphemize language.  And perhaps he would condemn today the hypocrites and doublespeakers who advocate violence and war to control the world in the name of peace and justice.   Imposters, phonies, flimflammers, conmen-women for justice and peace.  The Mealy-Mouthed Sly Party. 

       In such a world, in such a world, what the peace movement must do is clear.  Now, before the nuclear and warming dangers end us, we not only must not avoid direct language and action but must embrace openness and truth, must name the war and warming mongers, before we are engulfed by their bombs, radioactivity, scorching temperatures, famines, floods, and drowning cities.  Yet nonviolently.   Violence, the violent have chosen, are choosing to destroy civilization and species.  Nuclear war will be necessary to rid the planet of vermin Putin, etc.. 

     But remember MLK Jr. and all the models of nonviolent action.    Not strong language and action have impeded the peace and justice movement, but effete, flaccid, safe language and public policy .  Right here in Fayetteville, Arkansas, for example.   Remember the countless outrages and crimes committed by the Bush II administration (none prosecuted).  And then remember our chief university giving Condoleeza Rice (a chief architect of the Iraq War) $170,000 to give one speech here, on world peace! and no copies available to assist response until one year later, and then only under pressure!!   This model charlatan and conwoman for peace and justice was celebrated as a model by a complicit university.  We must reverse both models and quickly.

     Our scientists tell us (the IPCC six Assessments) we have little time left unless we get off the fence, or the wasps of a million varieties—overpopulation, a thousand Hiroshimas, ceaseless floods and droughts, hurricanes and forest fires, rising seas--will destroy the entire species that caused the emergency.   –Dick Bennett

CONVERGENCE OF WAR AND WARMING
By Dick Bennett  7-14-22   https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2022/07/convergence-of-war-and-warming-and-7-14.html

As climate changes stress our human institutions, we are likely to face deadly conflicts over critical resources.  Klare.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/nuclear-defense-climate-change/

         The threats of wars and warming, their causes and consequences, are well studied, but facing and reversing those threats are, to say the least, nascent sciences.  We know well also the success of organizing denial of or distracting people from the harms of both.  Another reason might be that they are studied piecemeal, when they are occurring simultaneously.   And this factor has been little studied.  The result is constant underestimating of both impact and consequences.  A war alone is incalculably horrendous.  A war during increasingly extreme weather is incalculably worse.  And then arrives a succession of pandemics of zoonotic diseases!  And world population is increasing (and consumption in the northern affluence)!!  It’s no wonder populations, addicted to distractions, are passive and acquiescent, at least preceding the heat, or droughts, or fires, or floods, or hurricanes.

     Most people have had difficulty grasping the realities of nuclear war or the realities of climate change.  How much more difficult is anticipating their convergence, and the virtual impossibility of understanding, when pandemics and population (number and consumption) are added.

      So our best scientists and social scientists must prepare for that multiple, converging future. Following in the footsteps of the United Nations’ IPCC scientists, they will not begin from scratch.  The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has functioned magnificently (though always underestimating severities) since its founding over 30 years ago.  A new, realistic, matured focus on convergence requires little change in title or acronym: The Intergovernmental Panel on Planet Earth Convergences (IPPEC)?

     Do we have time?   It’s time we convicted fossil fuels corporations for forty years of lying about their harms; it’s time we made public the neoliberal promoters of war; it’s time we exposed fully the failure of neoliberalism to act meaningfully against wars and warming (and the dismantling of democracy and pandemics) for a full convergence reality, and to replace the old system by a  new that will preserve us.

Dick Bennett, 7-14-22

CONTENTS WARS AND WARMING CONVERGENCE

WAR, NUCLEAR WAR

SCOTT RITTER.  “THE SILENT EULOGY”

Scott Ritter.  “The Silent Eulogy.”
Bradley and Dudziak.  Making the Forever War.

Gilroy.  Mass Shooters, US Militarist Culture, and the Mass Media
Kimberly.  Mass Shootings and State Violence.

Kuzmarov.  The Ukraine War.

Tom Dispatch.  Ukraine War on a War Planet.

CLIMATE CHANGE
 Bendell and Read.  Deep Adaptation.
Jaynes.  “Climate and Biodiversity.

CONVERGENCE
Bromwich.  “Living on a War Planet.”
Garateix.  “War & Climate Change.”

McCarthy.  “War Impacts Climate Change and Environment.”

Goodman. War and Climate Crisis.
Mach.  Climate and Armed Conflict.

Mouawad.  “Ecocide.”

Berhe.  Climate Change and War.

Braun.  Impact of War on Climate.

Sengupta.  Climate Change Worsening War.

Hendrix.  Climate Change and Conflict.

Henderson.  Climate Change, Violence, and Cruelty.
PENTAGON

Crist.  Military Carbon Bootprint.

Crawford.  (Book).  Pentagon, Climate Change, and War.

Ghosal and Arasu.  War in Ukraine and Asian Energy Future.

Garriga and Biondo.  Pentagon and Climate Change.

Gerson.  Prevent Wars and Warming.

REFUGEES

Abel.  Climate, Wars and Refugees.

Nahvi. Climate, War, Refugees.

Orellana.  War, Climate Change, Migration. USA.

Schuller.  Humanity’s Last Stand.

TEXTS

NUCLEAR WAR

The flight test of a Russian Yars ICBM, February 29, 2024

I was planning on publishing Part 2 of my article on Alexei Navalny.

However, today Alexei Navalny’s body is being laid to rest in a funeral service in Moscow attended by a few thousand well-wishers and supporters.

My wife has always cautioned me not to speak ill of the dead.

Especially on the day their mortal remains are being returned to the earth.

Instead, I am compelled to write about something else.

It is the funeral that will never be held.

The obituary that will never be read.

The eulogy that will never be spoken.

Who’s passing do I lament?

My own.

My family.

My friends.

My fellow Americans.

Humanity.

The mechanism of our deaths will only too late be revealed, most likely in a blinding flash of light that will bring us to our knees, awaiting the shockwave that proceeds the unbearable heat that will transform our flesh and bones, instantaneously, to ash.

We cannot claim that we were not forewarned of our imminent demise—ever since Robert Oppenheimer proclaimed himself to be “Death, the destroyer of worlds,” we have known that we possessed the mechanism of our own destruction, and yet we have done nothing to remove this danger from our lives.

Robert Oppenheimer

Instead, we continued to perfect this most horrible of weapons, devising even more deadly warheads, and more efficient delivery systems upon which to deliver them to our enemies, all the while knowing that any large-scale use of these weapons would signal our own passing.

For an all-too-brief moment, the insanity of the course we had set became apparent, and we undertook to return the genie to the bottle, to reverse course, to save ourselves and our fellow human beings.

Scott Ritter will discuss this article and answer audience questions on Ep. 141 of Ask the Inspector.

But hubris intervened, and when the source of our nuclear angst—the Soviet Union—faded into the pages of history, we sought to leverage our new-found status as uncontested nuclear-armed global hegemon by proclaiming an end to history, promoting ourselves and our political system, through an intellectual exercise that would have made Darwin proud, into the highest expression of human development.

But in a flash this moment was gone, evaporated along with the edifices of our capitalistic existence as remote corners of the globe pushed back against our arrogant self-coronation. We sought to conquer a world which no longer brooked being conquered, to dominate people who refused to bend the knee, all along shielding ourselves from the reality of our atrophied power by hiding behind an aging nuclear arsenal we fooled ourselves into believing was supreme.

In our arrogance we divorced ourselves from the processes of arms control we once used to secure our survival. We withdrew from the anti-ballistic missile treaty which breathed life into the deterrence value of mutually assured destruction, believing that the only destruction which should be assured was that of our enemies, real and imagined.

SPRINT anti-ballistic missile base

We withdrew from the intermediate nuclear forces treaty, forgetting that the reason we entered it was to remove one of the most destabilizing weapons in Europe in an effort to secure peace. Instead, we sought to reintroduce these destabilizing weapons, secure in our mistaken belief that our enemies would not be able to match our military prowess.

And we negotiated in bad faith a series of strategic arms reduction treaties, seeking strategic advantage when we should have been seeking strategic stability.

The target of our arrogance, Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin, tried in vain to dissuade us from the path we were taking. In 2007, speaking at the Munich Security Conference, Putin cautioned that Americas had “overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural, and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?”

As a result, Putin warned, “no one feels safe. I want to emphasize this—no one feels safe! Because no one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them. Of course, such a policy stimulates an arms race.”

Vladimir Putin addresses the Munich Security Conference, February 2007 (photo deleted)

We ignored him.

Instead, we convinced our European partners of the illusive dangers of an “expansive” Russia, all the while minimizing the real dangers of a Russian nuclear arsenal on the cusp of revival—all it needed was a push in the right direction, one we were only too happy to provide by ignoring Russian concerns about missile defense.

In 2018, the nuclear chickens came home to roost. Citing our disregard for the niceties of arms control, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia was in the process of developing a new generation of nuclear weapons capable of overcoming any defense the United States was preparing to deploy. “You didn’t listen to our country then,” Putin said, referring to his past warnings about the dangers of an arms race. “Listen to us now.”

We did not.

Instead, we worked our European allies into a frenzy, stoking the fires of conflict with exaggerations of both the threat posed by Russia, and Europe’s ability—through NATO—to defeat this threat—especially if the vehicle for bringing Russia to its knees was a proxy conflict in Ukraine.

Our European partners played their part well—too well. Having been convinced that Russia posed an existential threat to the survival of Europe, and equally convinced of the security provided by the American nuclear umbrella, Europe fell victim to its own artificially constructed narrative, believing that a Russian victory in Ukraine really did threaten the very survival of Europe. They chose to minimize the dangers posed by Russia’s nuclear arsenal, lulled into a false sense of security by America’s own dismissal of the capabilities Russia claimed to possess, and opted to chart a path toward confrontation with Russia on Ukrainian soil, even though Russia had said this was a red line which, once crossed, would inevitably lead to a nuclear war.

German Taurus cruise missile

“There has been talk about the possibility of sending NATO military contingents to Ukraine,” the Russian leader noted in an address delivered to the Russian parliament this past Thursday. “But we remember the fate of those who once sent their contingents to our country’s territory. But now the consequences for possible interventionists will be far more tragic. They must realize that we also have weapons that can hit targets on their territory. All this really threatens a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons and the destruction of civilization. Don’t they get that?”

Apparently, they don’t.

So here is to the American experiment.

Born July 4, 1776.

Died…we’ll never know.

An imperfect union, it strove to be better, fighting a revolution to free itself from the tyranny of the British crown while preserving slavery as a constitutionally approved institution. America fought a bloody Civil War to end the evil of slavery and preserve the Union, all the while implementing its self-anointed God-given “manifest destiny” which drove into near extinction the indigenous people who populated the continent we conquered. We came to the aid of Europe not once, but twice, over the course of a century, helping defeat the forces of fascism and imperialism, before becoming fascist-like in our domestic policies that supported our imperialistic foreign policies.

America, the beautiful.

God shed his grace on thee.

The Castle Bravo nuclear test of March 1, 1954

This is the eulogy I will never be able to deliver, because like the rest of you, I am fated to die in a nuclear holocaust of our own making. We have embarked on a collective journey whose only destination is death and destruction.

We have ignored, at our own peril, the efforts of those, at home and abroad, who have tried to get us to take an off-ramp.

I would have liked to have had the epitaph on my gravestone read, “Here lies a warrior for peace, who dedicated his life to the cause of making the world a safer place to live.”

Alas, I, like all of you who are reading this, am doomed to die in a war that could have been avoided if we just tried a little bit harder to avoid it.

The shame is that, at that moment when the inevitability of our passing hits home, in the millisecond that will follow the flash of light and the comprehension of what it signifies, all of us will think “If I had just…”

But it will be too late because we did not.

We allowed the military industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about to become manifest.

We remained indifferent to the reality of its pervasiveness, even as our own government informed us that the reason for pursuing our suicidal path of destruction with Russia in Ukraine was so that our defense industry could profit.

But there is no profit in death.

Rest in peace, America.

And may God damn us all to hell for destroying that which he had bequeathed us.

Share

Subscribed

Donate now

Making the Forever War:  Marilyn B. Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism.  Edited by Mark Philip Bradley and Mary L. Dudziak  University of Massachusetts Press, 2021.   Culture and Politics in the Cold War and Beyond Series.  232 Pages

The late historian Marilyn B. Young, a preeminent voice on the history of U.S. military conflict, spent her career reassessing the nature of American global power, its influence on domestic culture and politics, and the consequences felt by those on the receiving end of U.S. military force. At the center of her inquiries was a seeming paradox: How can the United States stay continually at war, yet Americans pay so little attention to this militarism?

Making the Forever War brings Young's articles and essays on American war together for the first time, including never before published works. Moving from the first years of the Cold War to Korea, Vietnam, and more recent “forever" wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Young reveals the ways in which war became ever-present, yet more covert and abstract, particularly as aerial bombings and faceless drone strikes have attained greater strategic value. For Young, U.S. empire persisted because of, not despite, the inattention of most Americans. The collection concludes with an afterword by prominent military historian Andrew Bacevich.

Mass Shootings from Culture of War
“Thirty Six Percent of Mass Shooters Were Trained by the U.S. Military, But Few Americans Know This Because the Media Never Report It” By Jack Gilroy on Aug 30, 2022 10:27 am.

Media pundits and politicians blame lax gun laws, social isolation and mental illness for mass shootings, but ignore the advent of a fascist culture that venerates the U.S. military.

In the wake of a barrage of mass shootings, the media have offered a variety of explanations centering predominantly on the social isolation and mental illness of shooters and their easy access to military-style weaponry due to lax gun regulations.

These factors are significant but almost all media pundits avoid the gorilla sitting in the psyche of the American mind—that of the huge military budget and culture of military veneration, which is reminiscent of fascist cultures.

In a July 8 column entitled “Why Shooters Do the Evil They Do,” New York Times columnist David Brooks characteristically cites mental illness, loneliness and the need for recognition and power as lying at the root of recent mass shootings.

What is missing is any discussion of American-style militarism, something Brooks has whitewashed throughout his writing career.

According to David Swanson, Director of World Beyond War, 36% of mass shooters have been trained by the U.S. military—when only one percent of Americans serve in the military.

Many of the mass shooters also have used military-style weapons and have worn military-style clothing.

Jillian Peterson and James Densley recently published a detailed study of mass shooters sponsored by the National Institute of Justice entitled The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic, which has been widely cited by the media.

The book casts light on many dark corners of American life but characteristically ignores among the darkest—the military-industrial complex. […]

This essay appeared first in CovertAction Magazine.

Margaret Kimberley.  “Mass Shootings, Empire, and Racist, Copaganda Dog Whistles.” Mronline.org (6-3-22).

Two mass shootings produced not only anger and grief but lies and pretense that violence here is somehow mysterious. Political leaders advocate state violence all the time, calling for new victims to be created here and around the world.

Jeremy Kuzmarov.  “If the U.S. can’t boss the World, it will spitefully destroy it.”  CovertAction Magazine  (April 13, 2023) (more by CovertAction Magazine).  WarAmericas, United StatesNewswireJohn Bellamy Foster, New Cold War.   Mronline.org (4-16-23). 

In May 2022, Henry Kissinger gave a remarkable speech at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, where he urged the Biden administration to seek a peace agreement in Ukraine that satisfies the Russians because “pursuing the war beyond this point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine but a new war against Russia itself.”

Unable to accept the reality of a growing multipolar world order, U.S. elites are willing to risk nuclear war.

TomDispatch.  August 29, 2023.

[If you're in a giving mood, do visit our donation page and think about offering us a (brief)  donation. Tom]

The old anti-Vietnam War song that began, "War, what Is It good for? Absolutely nothing!" couldn't be more on the mark these days. Just imagine that you live on a planet where the truest "war" may be the one we're waging against nature -- and that nature is increasingly waging on us. That "war" could, in the end, simply broil us all.

This summer, the war in Ukraine has finally started to take a backseat to endless headlines about heat waves, fires, floods, and record extreme weather of more or less every sort. As we broil and sweat, as communities are burned down or flooded out, who even notices the latest casualty figures from that other war? Yes, the New York Times recently reported that, based on the estimates of American officials, an almost unimaginable 500,000 Ukrainians and Russians have already been killed or wounded in that conflict which, despite recent lame peace efforts, shows not the faintest sign of resolving itself any time soon.

In fact, escalation continues to be the rule of the... well, under the circumstances, let's not say "game."  Russian bombardments of Ukrainian ports and grain storage facilities have worsened recently, while the Ukrainians have begun using -- god save us all -- American cluster bombs in quantity on the front lines of the war. (The Russians had already been doing so.) And the latest news is that the Biden administration has once again (as with those cluster munitions and before them Abrams tanks, among other weapons systems) decided to up the ante on the Ukrainian side by allowing Denmark and the Netherlands to provide that country with F-16 fighter planes. And so it seems to go... and go and go and go some more.

As TomDispatch regular David Bromwich suggests all too vividly today, we now find ourselves on a war planet -- and whether that war is among humans or with nature, it only seems to be escalating by the month. Tom

CLIMATE CATASTROPHE, EMERGENCY, CHAOS

Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos.

Jem Bendell and Rupert Read, Editors.  Polity P, 2021. Bottom of Form

Edited by the originator of the concept of deep adaptation, Jem Bendell, and a leading climate activist and strategist, Rupert Read, this book is the essential introduction to the concept, practice, and emerging global movement of Deep Adaptation to climate chaos.

Jem Bendell is Professor of Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cumbria and the originator of the Deep Adaptation movement.
Rupert Read is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, a Green Party campaigner and former spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: what now the limits are breached?
Part I: The Predicament
1. The scientific case of global over-heating and the root of denial

2. Deep Adaptation: a map for navigating climate tragedy, Jem Bendell
3. The reasons for anticipating collapse, Pablo Servigne, Raphaël Stevens, Gauthier Chapelle, Daniel Rodary

Part II: Shifts in Being
4. Climate Psychology and its Relevance to Deep Adaptation, Adrian Tait
5. Deeper implications of societal collapse: co-liberation from the ideology of e-s-c-a-p-e.  Jem Bendell
6. Unconscious addictions: mapping common responses to climate change and potential climate collapse, Rene Suša, Sharon Stein, Vanessa Andreotti, Tereza  ajkova, Dino Siwek, and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Collective
7. Facilitating Deep Adaptation - enabling more loving conversations about our predicament, Katie Carr and Jem Bendell
8. The Great Turning: Reconnecting through Collapse, Sean Kelly and Joanna Macy

Part III: Shifts in Doing
9. Leadership and management in a context of deep adaptation
Jonathan Gosling
10. What Matters Most?  Deep Education Conversations in a Climate of Change and Complexity  Charlotte Von Bulow and Charlotte Simpson  74l.
11. Riding two horses: The future of politics and activism, as we face potential eco-driven societal collapse  Rupert Read
12. Relocalisation as Deep Adaptaton: Matthew Slater and Skeena Rathor.
Concluding the Beginning of Deep Adaptation: Jem Bendell and Rupert Read.

REVIEWS
“The authors of this book have courage to recognise the reality of our time and face the uncomfortable facts of climate calamity. The theme of this book is indeed scary. But it’s full of bright ideas for how to transmute both fear and difficulty into kind and wise ways of living and working. The thinkers, academics and activists who have contributed to this book embody the wisdom to adapt to this unprecedented catastrophe. They also show the practical ways and means to live and act with the imagination and resilience. Not everyone would agree to these radical ideas but everyone needs to know about them. So, I recommend this book to all.”   Satish Kumar, Editor Emeritus Resurgence & Ecologist and Founder, Schumacher College

“This book is the “red pill” of our times, offering neither certainty nor confirmation of any story you may be holding about where we are heading in the face of so many colliding crises. What it does offer is togetherness in our insecurity and frameworks in our unknowing for coming to terms with and making sense of these times. I look forward to both “deep adaptation” and “collapsology” entering mainstream discourse, so that we might then imagine creating together, as our current paradigm crumbles.”
Gail Bradbrook, co-founder, Extinction Rebellion

“The contributors are unafraid to challenge conventional wisdom on the climate crisis and go against the grain with a provocative assessment of what we are now able to achieve and where we should focus our efforts.”   Ecologist

“Collapse followed by transformation is a common way that complex systems evolve. Perhaps collapse of our high consumption, climate-destabilising society can lead to transformation towards a brighter human future. The Deep Adaptation framework outlined in this book is a helpful way to seek that transformation.”
Professor Will Steffen, Australian National University Climate Change Institute

“In this book I am joined by scholars from around the world who seek to be present to the suffering and difficulties of our time. Please turn toward these ideas, not away, to find your own path in a turbulent future.”  Joanna Macy, author of A Wild Love for the World

“Deep Adaptation is only the beginning – it is one in which we expand our thinking and open ourselves to the possibility of a completely new emergent paradigm, as yet unknown. That fills me with curious hope.”   Maddy Harland, Permaculture Magazine

“Lucid, productive, and necessary… Bendell succeeds in distilling a terrifying future into a series of questions that invite people into conversation. By doing so, he gives us a language to speak the unthinkable.”  Salon
[I have read this Publisher’s Description several times, each time becoming less sure Deep Adaptation is the radical analysis it claims for itself.  Its apparent argument that we have passed all crucial climatological tipping points and all will face climate chaos sooner or later will be radical for most readers.   But its solutions sound like neoliberal individualism.  The radical for our capitalist nation would be an argument for large government able to resist changes of planetary scope, international collective action; that is, the Marxist explanation of the global collapse and reorganization into a cooperative society.  I look forward to reading the book.  No Index so I do not know if Marx is even mentioned or any Marxist principles, or if the features of   minimal government capitalism are examined.   No clues either in the Table of Contents.  Deep Adaptation? –Dick]

STRUGGLING TO GRASP THE TRUE MAGNITUDE OF THE EMERGENCY: CLIMATE AND BIODIVERSITY TOGETHER

“Treat Climate And Biodiversity Crises As One Global Health Emergency.”

By Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, EcoWatch. PopularResisstance.org (10-29-23).    A new editorial published in more than 200 health journals challenges health professionals and world leaders to look at global biodiversity loss and climate change as “one indivisible crisis” that must be confronted as a whole. The authors of the editorial call separating the two emergencies a “dangerous mistake,” and encourage the World Health Organization to declare a global health emergency. “The climate crisis and loss of biodiversity both damage human health, and they are interlinked. That’s why we must consider them together and declare a global health emergency. -more-

CONVERGENCE WAR AND CLIMATE CHANGE  

DAVID BROMWICH.“Living on a War Planet: And Managing Not to Notice.”  David Bromwich, “The Everlasting Alibi.” 

A new war, a new alibi. When we think about our latest war — the one that began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, just six months after our Afghan War ended so catastrophically — there is a hidden benefit. As long as American minds are on Ukraine, we are not thinking about planetary climate disruption. This technique of distraction obeys the familiar mechanism that psychologists have called displacement. An apparently new thought and feeling becomes the substitute for harder thoughts and feelings you very much want to avoid.

Every news story about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s latest demand for American or European weaponry also serves another function: the displacement of a story about, say, the Canadian fires which this summer destroyed a forest wilderness the size of the state of Alabama and 1,000 of which are still burning as this article goes to press. Of course, there is always the horrific possibility that Ukraine could pass from a “contained” to a nuclear war, as out of control as those Canadian fires. Yet we are regularly assured that the conflict, close to the heart of Europe, is under careful supervision. The war has a neatly framed villain (Vladimir Putin) and — thanks to both the U.S. and NATO — a great many good people containing him. What could possibly go wrong?

A fantasy has taken root among well-meaning liberals. Ukraine, they believe, is the “good war” people like them have been searching for since 1945. “This is our Spain,” young enthusiasts have been heard to say, referring to the Spanish Republican war against fascism. In Ukraine in the early 2020s, unlike Spain in the late 1930s, the Atlantic democracies will not falter but will go on “as long as it takes.” Also, the climate cause will be assisted along the way, since Russia is a large supplier of natural gas and oil, and the world needs to unhook itself from both.

That theory got tested a year ago, with the underwater sabotage of Russia’s Nordstream natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. President Biden, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland all welcomed that environmental disaster. In an eventually deleted message the former Polish foreign minister and war advocate Radislaw Sikorski tweeted thanks to the U.S. for what he took to be a transparently American operation. The American media, however, treated the attack as an imponderable mystery, some reports even suggesting that Russia might have destroyed its own invaluable pipeline for reasons yet to be fathomed. Then, in a February 2023 article, the independent investigative reporter Seymour Hersh traced the attack to the U.S., and later Western reports would come halfway to his conclusion by assigning credit to Ukraine, or a pro-Ukrainian group. As of late summer, all reporting on the Nordstream disaster seems to have stopped. What has not stopped is the killing. The numbers of dead and wounded in the Ukraine war are now estimated at nearly half a million, with no end in sight.

The Nordstream wreck was only one attention-getting catastrophe within the greater horror that a war always is. An act of industrial sabotage on a vast scale, it was also an act of environmental terrorism, causing the largest methane leak in the history of the planet. According to a report in Forbes, “The subsequent increase in greenhouse gases… was equivalent to as much as 32% of Denmark’s annual emissions.”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine was an illegal and immoral act, but the adjective that usually follows illegal and immoral is “unprovoked.” In truth, this war was provoked. A contributing cause, impossible to ignore, was the eastward extension of NATO, always moving closer to the western borders of Russia, in the years from 1991 to 2022. That expansion was gradual but relentless. Consider the look of such a policy to the country –- no longer Communist and barely a great power — which, in 2013, American leaders again began to describe as an adversary. 

With the end of the Cold War in 1991 (the very global conflict that gave NATO its reason for being), the eastward projection of the alliance accelerated dramatically. Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, all former members of the Soviet bloc, were brought into NATO in 1999; and 2004 witnessed an even richer harvest of former satellites of the USSR: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, all either near to or bordering on Russia. Then came the Bucharest Summit Declaration of April 2008: Georgia and Ukraine, the NATO heads of state announced, would be given the opportunity to apply for membership at some future date. If you want to know why Putin and his advisers might have considered this a security concern for Russia, look at a map.

Counterfeit Solidarity

The United States has supported Ukraine with copious donations of weapons, troop-trainers, and logistical and technical advisers left to work the interoperable targeting equipment we “share” with that country. Between 2014 and 2022, NATO drilled at least 10,000 Ukrainian troops per year in advanced methods of warfare. In the war itself, weapons supplies have climbed steadily from Stinger and Javelin missiles to Abrams tanks (whose greenhouse-gas environmental footprint is 0.6 miles per gallon of gas, or 300 gallons every eight hours of use), to cluster bombs, and most recently the promise of F-16s.

All this has put fresh wind in the sails of the weapons manufacturers of the American military-industrial-congressional complex. In May 2022, the CEO of Lockheed Martin thanked President Biden personally for his kindness. F-16s, after all, are big money-makers. As for the additional fuel that ordinary Ukrainians require, it is now being sequestered underground by Ukrainian commodities traders at enormous environmental risk.

Wars and their escalation — the mass destruction of human life that is almost invariably accompanied by destruction of the natural world — happen because preparations for war bring leaders ever closer to the brink. So close, in fact, that it feels natural to go on. That was certainly the case with Russia, Ukraine, and NATO, and the escalation that followed. Examples of such escalation are indeed the rule, not the exception in time of war.

Think of the invention, testing, and strategic planning that led to the dropping of the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. In Jon Else’s extraordinary documentary The Day After Trinity, the physicist Freeman Dyson offered a sober analysis of the momentum driving the decision to use the bomb:

“Why did the bomb get dropped on people at Hiroshima? I would say: it’s almost inevitable that it would have happened — simply because all the bureaucratic apparatus existed by that time to do it. The air force was ready and waiting. There had been prepared big airfields in the island of Tinian in the Pacific from which you could operate. The whole machinery was ready.”

In the same sense, all the apparatus was in place for the war in Ukraine. Joe Biden, a conventional cold warrior, has always had a temperament rather like that of President Harry Truman. The Biden of 2023, like the Truman of 1945, comes across as impulsive, not deliberate. He likes to pop off, thinks he is appreciated for taking risks, and fancies himself particularly good under pressure. This state of mind partly accounts for his decision to label Vladimir Putin a “war criminal”: never mind that such a description would apply with equal truth to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for launching the invasion of Iraq in 2003 — a war that Biden, as chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, supported unreservedly. His insistence that “this man [Putin] cannot remain in power for god’s sake” and his belief (as of mid-July 2023) that “Putin has already lost the war” exhibit the same pattern of effusive moralism accompanied by a denial of inconvenient facts.  

A different perspective was offered by Anatol Lieven at the Responsible Statecraft website:

“We are repeatedly told that the war in Ukraine is a war to defend democracy and help secure it across the world. Our American, French and British ancestors (and even the Russians, from March to October 1917) were also told the same about the Allied side in the First World War. It did not quite work out that way, and nothing guarantees that it will happen that way in Ukraine.”

In the case of Ukraine, such false hopes have been pushed far more freely by the media than by the military. War is a drug, and they have chosen to be the dealers. 

The Media Airbrush

War propaganda can be delivered in picturesque as well as popular ways. A prime example of the former approach was Roger Cohen’s August 6th front-page New York Times story, “Putin’s Forever War,” based on a recent visit. (“I spent a month in Russia.”) The apologetic intent here is underscored in the headline, which picks up an epithet once applied to the disastrous American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and slyly transfers it to Russia. The coverage is all in the same key, over six full pages of the paper Times, bulked out with color photographs of cheerleaders, churches, dank stairways, military processions, statues, tombs, and models on a fashion shoot.

From the start, Cohen adopts the voice of a prophetic observer of a new war, even as he makes it sound a good deal like the old war with the Soviet Union. “Along the way,” he writes,

“I encountered fear and fervid bellicosity, as well as stubborn patience to see out a long war. I found that Homo sovieticus, far from dying out, has lived on in modified form, along with habits of subservience. So with the aid of relentless propaganda on state television, the old Putin playbook — money, mythmaking and menace of murder — has just about held.”

The name Putin appears with great regularity as the article proceeds, doing extra duty for the historical analysis and exposition that are mostly absent.

“I first visited Moscow,” writes Cohen, “four decades ago, when it was a city devoid of primary colors eking out existence in the penury of Communism.” But Moscow has changed and the reason is Putin: “He opened Russia, only to slam it shut to the West; he also modernized it, while leaving the thread to Russia’s past unbroken.” So here, as in many Western accounts, the problem turns out to be not just Putin but the fact that he embodies a backward, naturally vengeful, country and its irretrievable past. The people of Russia are lost and — a few courageous dissidents excepted — they are given over to primitivism, hopeless nostalgia, and of course aggression. Putin is their epitome.

He “governs from the shadows” — no point in skipping the vampire trope — “unlike Stalin, whose portrait was everywhere. There is no cult of the leader of the kind Fascist systems favored. Yet mystery has its own magnetism. The reach of Mr. Putin’s power touches all.” There is, in other words, a cult of personality without either the personality or the display that belong to such a cult: “Putinism is a postmodern compilation of contradictions. It combines mawkish Soviet nostalgia with Mafia capitalism, devotion to the Orthodox Church with the spread of broken families.” It did not take a month in Russia to write those sentences. A day at the New York Times would have sufficed.

The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev finally emerges as the hero of this story. Nowhere quoted, however, is the Gorbachev who, between 2004 and 2018, contributed eight op-eds to the New York Times, the sixth of which focused on climate change and the eighth on the perilous renewal of a nuclear arms race. Gorbachev was deeply troubled by George W. Bush’s decision to withdraw from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty (which Putin called a “mistake”) and Donald Trump’s similar decision to pull out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Does anyone doubt that Gorbachev would have been equally disturbed by the Biden administration’s virtual severance of diplomatic relations with Russia?

In an October 25, 2018, op-ed, Gorbachev summed up the American tendency throughout the preceding two decades: “The United States has in effect taken the initiative in destroying the entire system of international treaties and accords that served as the underlying foundation for peace and security following World War II.” Notice that the bellicose American “initiative” began well before the ascent of Vladimir Putin and, according to Gorbachev, it possessed — like the expansion of NATO — a dynamism that operated independently of developments inside Russia.

Return to Earth   MORE  https://tomdispatch.com/living-on-a-war-planet/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=560f92039c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_07_13_02_04_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1e41682ade-560f92039c-308836209

Marilyn Garateix.  “War and Climate Change: At the Intersection of Geopolitical Conflict.”  IRE Journal (Third Quarter 2022).  

Several topics: 1) The struggle of journalists to report even record-breaking climate news that is complex and divisive and competing with war.  For example, “Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” from the IPCC was reported by The Oxford Climate Journalism Network March 4, 2022, in “As an Oil-funded War Ravages Ukraine, Climate coverage Struggles to Find Its Footing.”  But the occasion did inspire the needed “warning that the twin crises of war and climate change were deeply connected.” 2)Websites are referenced that help reporters with war and warming assignments.   The Media and Climate Change Observatory is cited for recording the increase  of global coverage of climate change.   3) The Costs of War Project website at Brown University reveals the “human and financial costs of war.  The Pentagon “remains the world’s single largest consumer of oil.”  Unfortunately, the author repeats the false label of Department of Defense when its reality is the same old Department of War and it’s the War of Terror.  4) The author urges reporters to “put a human face” on their stories.  --Dick

Joe McCarthy. “How War Impacts Climate Change and the Environment.”

 “ Global Citizen.  April 6, 2022.  Few things fuel the climate crisis quite like war.  The US’ broader “War on Terror” has released 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, according to the Watson Institute at Brown University, which has more of a warming effect on the planet than the annual emissions of 257 million cars.

Amy Goodman. “War Helps Fuel the Climate Crisis as U.S. Military Carbon Emissions Exceed 140+ Nations.”  Democracy Now! November  9, 2021.  www.democracynow.org › 2021/11/9 › cop26_militaryWar Helps Fuel the Climate Crisis as U.S. Military Carbon ...  Climate activists protested outside the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow Monday spotlighting the role of the U.S. military in fueling the climate crisis.

Katharine J. Mach, et al. “Climate as a Risk Factor for Armed Conflict.” Nature.  June 12, 2019.  www.nature.com › articles › s41586/019/1300-6  Here we assess the current understanding of the relationship between climate and conflict.

Amanda Mouawad.  “'Ecocide': how war and climate change are often linked.” Phys.org. 2023.   phys.org › news › 2023-12-ecocide-war-climate-linked'.   Dec 7, 2023. The link between climate change and war has been a running theme at COP28, highlighting how many countries suffer from both deadly conflict and environmental disasters.

Asmeret Asefaw Berhe. “On the relationship of armed conflicts with climate change.” PLOS.org.  June 1, 2022.  journals.plos.org › climate › article  The current attention on how climate change can increase the damage caused by armed conflicts is ultimately motivated by theories that suggest that resource availability and access are the root causes of most violent conflicts [ 19, 20] because climate change is expected to have serious implications for resource access and availability….

Stuart Braun. “The Climate Impact of Conflict.” DW.com. 2021.  www.dw.com › en › the-bootprint-of-war-carbon    May 28, 2021.   Less talked about is the impact of war and the military on the climate crisis. This is partly  because military emissions have been largely exempted from international climate treaties,...

Somini Sengupta. “Climate change is making armed conflict worse. Here’s how.” NYT. Mar 18, 2022.  www.nytimes.com › 2022/03/18 › climate  The people of that Mariupol are trying to survive not just shelling by Russian forces.

Cullen S. Hendrix, et al. “Climate change and conflict.” Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. www.nature.com › articles › s43017/022/00382-w   Jan 4, 2023. Metrics Connections between climate and conflict have been the centre of critical debate and discussion. In this Viewpoint, five researchers provide their thoughts and opinions.

“Scientist details reasons why climate change is a recipe for 'political violence and cruelty'.”  Story by Alex Henderson • July 2023.  
Climate change deniers often argue that it's wrong to link natural disasters to a changing climate because hurricanes, floods, tornados and droughts were causing misery long before the 20th and 21st Centuries. But the point they miss, according to scientists, is that climate change is making disasters both more common and more intense. . . .

According to scientist/author Stan Cox, climate change will also lead to more violence— from crime to political conflicts.  In an article published by The Nation on July 7, Cox explains, "Climate disasters are not only failing to goad governments into taking bold action, but may be nudging societies toward increasing violence and cruelty…. Although weather disasters of many kinds can increase public concern about climate change, they can also help to whip up an oppressively violent sociopolitical climate that may prove ever more hostile to the very idea of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions — especially in large, affluent, high-emission societies."   MOREhttps://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/scientist-details-reasons-why-climate-change-is-a-recipe-for-political-violence-and-cruelty/ar-AA1dzMHV?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=26441cc245aa4e9989c3a2f0dd8e5f8b&ei=370M

O ANIRUD­DHA GHOSAL AND SIBI ARASU Bharatha Mallawarachi in Colombo, Sri Lanka; Edna Tari­gan in Jakarta; Mari Ya­m­aguchi in Tokyo; and Tong-hyung Kim and Hyungjin Kim in Seoul, South Korea, con­trib­uted to this re­port.  “At an energy crossroads.”  Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Oct 06, 2022).   What the war in Ukraine means for Asia’s cli­mate goals.  Read more...  

PENTAGON
Meehan Crist.  “Let’s get out from under the carbon military boot print.”    June 21,  2023.  Editor.  Mronline.org (7-4=23).  In March last year, U.S. author Meehan Crist wrote the following in the London Review of Books,
One of the worst outcomes of the war in Ukraine would be an increasingly militarised response to climate breakdown, in which Western armies, their budgets ballooning in the name of “national security” seek to control not only the outcome of conflicts but the flow of energy, water, food, key minerals and other natural resources. One does not have to work particularly hard to imagine how barbarous that future would be.

Crist’s point is simply to describe the world we already have, but a bit more so; and her prediction is exactly what is happening.   The U.S. has raised military spending to $858 billion this year; up from $778 billion in 2020.  France has announced an increase from a projected E295 billion to E413 billion in the next seven years (an average of E59 billion a year).   German spending is rising sharply, from E53 billion in 2021 to  E100 billion in 2022 and is set to go further.  Japan aims to double its military spending by 2028 and is also debating whether to start deploying nuclear weapons.   In the UK, the government’s aim to increase military spending from 2.1% of GDP to 2.5% by 2030 comes on the back of what is already among the highest per capita military spends in the world.   NATO, the core alliance of the Global North, already accounted for 55.8% of global military spending in 2021 before any of these increases.  Other direct U.S. allies—with a mutual defence pact—accounted for another 6.3%.

·        So, the direct U.S. centred military alliances account for three fifths of global military spending and yet they are now raising it further at unprecedented rates. These are the world’s dominant imperial powers, acting in concert to sustain a “rules based international order” in which the rules are written in, and to suit, the Global North in general and Washington in particular.

The carbon boot print of these militaries is not measured under the Paris Agreement. It is, nevertheless, huge and growing; and we can’t pretend it isn’t. At the moment, the carbon boot print of the U.S. military alone is the same as that of the entire nation of France. This is incompatible with stopping climate breakdown; both in the direct impact of production and deployment, the diversion of funds which are urgently needed to invest in the transition, and the potential impact of their use—which could kill us all very quickly; particularly if nuclear weapons are used.  John Bellamy Foster’s Notes on Exterminism for the Twenty First Century Ecology and Peace Movements should be required reading for both movements.

Because this military is not sitting idle. The first phase of the Wars for the New American Century—in the form of the War on Terror since 2001—have been calculated by Brown University at 4.5 million people; three quarters of them civilians killed by indirect impacts of U.S. and allied military interventions. The scale of this is because doctrines like “shock and awe” are not simply an impressive displays of explosive power, but specifically designed to smash energy and water systems, both clean water supply and sewage treatment, within the first twenty four hours of an intervention to reduce surviving civilian populations to a state of numbed misery and demoralisation. “Why do they hate us?” I wonder. 4.5 million people is about half the population of Greater London, or three quarters of the population of Denmark and twenty two times as many as have died in the Ukraine war so far (assuming total casualties of 200,000, most of them military on both sides). It’s a lot of people.

RESISTANCE FOR WORLD PEACE

Neta C. Crawford.  The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War:  Charting the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions.  MIT, 2022.  392 pp.

How the Pentagon became the world's largest single greenhouse gas emitter and why it's not too late to break the link between national security and fossil fuel consumption.

Examining the idea of climate change as a “threat multiplier” in national security, she argues that the United States faces more risk from climate change than from lost access to Persian Gulf oil—or from most military conflicts. The most effective way to cut military emissions, Crawford suggests provocatively, is to rethink U.S. grand strategy, which would enable the United States to reduce the size and operations of the military.
Neta C. Crawford is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Boston University and Codirector of the Costs of War Project. She is the author of Argument and Change in World Politics (winner of a best book award from the American Political Science Association) and Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America's Post-9/11 Wars.   Author's Website. 

DANGER OF THE PENTAGON
MELISSA GARRIGA and TIM BIONDO.   “The Pentagon is the Elephant In the Climate Activist Room.“ Common Dreams.  Sept. 8, 2023. 
As long as we ignore the Pentagon's role in perpetuating climate change, our fight to protect the planet is incomplete.  https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/pentagon-climate-change?share_id=7852012&utm_campaign=RebelMouse&utm_content=Common+Dreams&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter    Forwarded by Abel Tomlinson.

Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security November 18, 2017.   President Joseph Gerson.

(617) 661-6130    JGerson80@gmail.com 

cpdcs.org   https://www.facebook.com/CPDCS/

Special Importance of CPDCS today (Dick):  A comprehensive, international peace organization advocating for peace and nuclear disarmament within a framework of common security among nations.

1.   Advocates against war and climate and therefore studies their convergence.
2.  Advocates nuclear weapons abolition.
3.  Works for common security diplomacy among all nations, friends and enemies, to prevent wars and global warming.
4.   Studies the Ukraine/US/NATO War.  Especially see its president’s essays; here are 2 examples: Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security

January 10 at 3:06 PM  ·  

REFUGEES

Convergence: Climate, Wars, Refugees

Guy J. Abel et al.  “Climate, Conflict, and Forced Migration.”  Global Environmental Change.  Vol. 54 (2019).January 1,    

Links wars to climate change and refugees.  “Climatic conditions, by affecting drought severity and the likelihood of armed conflict, play a significant role” in explaining “asylum seeking in the period 2011-2015.”

Convergence of Climate, Wars, Refugees, and Peacebuilding

From Susan Nahvi, Friends Committee for National Legislation FCNLMay 5, 2023

Dear Dick,

I thought of you when I read a recent article on the FCNL website! The Program Assistants for migration, the environment, and peacebuilding collaborated on a piece talking about the intersections between these three areas: https://www.fcnl.org/updates/2023-04/solve-our-most-urgent-challenges-we-must-address-intersection-conflict-climate. Given your particular interest in the overlap of these issues, I thought you might find it interesting. Thank you for helping support these fantastic advocates in their work to highlight the importance of addressing these issues in tandem.

 Do feel free to reach out if you need anything, and thank you for being part of FCNL!

 With warmth,

 Susan Nahvi  she/her/hers

Major Gifts Officer, Friends Committee on National Legislation

snahvi@fcnl.org | 202-899-5189

245 2^nd St NE | Washington, DC 20002

fcnl.org I F Like I T Follow I Insta Follow

[This report from FCNL recognizes the inseparableness, the “intersectionality” of climate change, conflict and wars, and refugees, and is the best brief note I have read on the full scope of converging problems.  --Dick] [

Marcia Orellana, Jus Tavcar, and Nuria Raul.  “To Solve Our Most Urgent Challenges, We Must Address the Intersection of Conflict, Climate Change, and Migration.”  The Ethiopia (April 6, 2023). 

A  family is forced to relocate due to drought in the Oromia region of Ethiopia. Ongoing drought, continued economic stresses, and conflict in northern Ethiopia, Oromia, and elsewhere have put millions at risk of a worsening humanitarian crisis.

Climate change, conflict, and migration are three of the most urgent and critical challenges facing the world today. Rising temperatures and frequent climate disasters have led to unprecedented internal and international migration flows. Estimates suggest that more than 30 million migrants will travel across the U.S. border in the next 30 years due to climate displacement.

Climate-driven resource scarcity and increased displacement have exacerbated violence and regional tensions globally. The Institute of Economics and Peace’s 2022 Global Peace Index Report found that global peacefulness has deteriorated for eleven consecutive years, driven mainly by ongoing conflicts around the world. Communities living in conflict zones are often unequipped to adapt to climate shocks. This, in turn, forces yet more people to flee their homes.

These challenges impact and often worsen each other in obvious ways. The need for governments to address the nexus of climate, migration, and conflict is clear. Yet too often, these three issues are siloed from one another. Policies intended to mitigate climate change do not acknowledge the issue of climate-displaced persons or are not conflict-sensitive. To be effective, policymakers must instead lead with anintersectional approach.

A Siloed Approach Harms Our Most Vulnerable Neighbors

Lack of International Legal Protections

Current U.S. and international laws do not integrate solutions for climate change, migration, and conflict. For example, the most common international legal framework to protect refugees focuses on people who face or fear persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Displacement due to solely climate change is not considered a basis for refugee protection.

The need for governments to address the nexus of climate, migration, and conflict is clear. Yet too often, these three issues are siloed from one another.

Experts at multilateral organizations have discussed the difficulty of isolating climate change as a cause of migration from other political and social causes. The U.N. argues that climate change primarily drives internal displacement and that migrants should remain under the responsibility of their own state. However, an increasing number of small island states are currently in danger due to land loss. Consequentially, their inhabitants are forced to migrate to other countries. In nations like Kiribati, it is projected that by 2080 the risk of flooding will be roughly 200 times higher than at the beginning of the 21st century. The government of Kiribati is already seeking solutions to address the loss of land, including temporary and permanent international migration.  

Example: Haiti - Conflict, Extreme Weather, and Displacement

The U.S. government has also repeatedly failed to respond to the severity of complex crises where climate change, migration, and conflict intersect.

During the summer of 2021, we saw years of heightened migration from Haiti reach a peak. Many Haitians fled their country, escaping a series of interlocking crises: political turmoil followed by the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse and the absence of democratic succession of power, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake, and a devastating tropical storm. The Biden administration responded to migrants fleeing this instability with militarized approaches, such as detention and deportation. More than 20,000 people were expelled back to Haiti, and others were returned to Mexico under a pandemic-era migration policy called Title 42.

It is impossible to separate the impacts of these issues. In recognition, Congress should apply an intersectional perspective to its policy solutions.

This response ignored the root causes of forced migration and sent thousands of Haitians back to a violent and unstable situation without acknowledging the conflict and vulnerability within the country.

The continued unwillingness of the United States to provide sufficient assistance to Haitians has worsened the humanitarian and economic crisis on the island. The lack of resources for climate resilience has triggered ongoing disaster vulnerability magnified by deforestation and soil erosion.

All the while, discriminatory migration policies continue to target Haitian migrants in the U.S., these migrants continue to live in limbo and rely on the few narrow pathways available to them to achieve legal protection. While a new program has been created to respond to the migration of Haitian nationals to the U.S., its small in scale, complicated, and does not address the issue’s intersectional magnitude.

What’s Needed
 U.S. foreign policy should protect all people who are forced to flee their homes due to conflict and climate change. These individuals and families, too, deserve the opportunity to pursue safe and fruitful lives. Congress must act boldly to create pathways to citizenship for migrants and invest in sufficient foreign assistance to developing countries struggling with the realities of climate change and conflict.

[Solution]

It is impossible to separate the impacts of these issues. In recognition, Congress should apply an intersectional perspective to its policy solutions. Internationally, the United States must work with global partners to update international laws and agreements to mitigate climate change, protect climate-displaced persons, and interrupt cycles of violence.

Mark Schuller.   Humanity's Last Stand. Rutgers UP, 2021.

https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org › humanitys-last...

"Humanity's Last Stand is a call to arms to elevate our thinking to the species level or, Schuller cautions, the species will face extinction."
Are we as a species headed towards extinction? As our economic system renders our planet increasingly inhospitable to human life, powerful individuals fight over limited resources, and racist reaction to migration strains the social fabric of many countries. ... Google Books

I hope to return to CONVERGENCE, when I will include, overpopulation, pandemics, and the dismantling of our democracy (and?) as additional major catastrophes of the Great Convergence of Calamities in the 21^st century. 

END CONVERGENCE OF WAR AND WARMING ANTHOLOGY #1, 3-8-24