The Greatest Health Threat We Face Today: War

Meredith Bruskin holding sign "WAR = CLIMATE CHAOS" (photo credit: Gigi Larc)

Approaching the 20th anniversary of the climate disaster cleverly titled the "War on Terror" -- clever, because you're never going to win a war against an abstract noun -- I'm sharing some words of wisdom from a dear friend. 

Nurse practicioner Meredith Bruskin spoke on the theme "Climate is Health" at our protest of the Blue Angels air show climate crime last weekend in Brunswick. 

You can see video of her remarks if you prefer to receive information that way.

Mary Beth Sullivan & me with ARRT! banner and our Maine Natural Guard shirts
(photo credit: Gigi Larc)

Thank you Luke for speaking about the next generations, something that Indigenous People always consider. I would like to start by recognizing we are on Indigenous land. In addition to the Abenaki, the place we now call MaINE IS HOME TO THE SOVEREIGN PEOPLE OF THE WABANAKI CONFEDERACY, THE PENOBSCOT, PASSAMAQUODDY,, MALISEET AND MI'KMAQ PEOPLES. We live on their unceded homelands as they continue their struggle with the State of Maine to recognize their inherent sovereignty.

Their struggle is central to the health of all Maine's people-- because it is a fight for the rights of Mother Earth and for community, against State and corporate control and disregard of our natural resources. And I want to express gratitude for their dedicated stewardship of this land and waters, for past, present and future generations.

When Lisa asked me to talk about climate and health, it seemed simple -- climate is health. The water we drink, the air we breathe, the food we eat -- all essential for our physical health. And when toxins and carcinogens spill into the earth and waters in the interest of corporate profits, cancers increase. We all know that plastic is choking our fish and oceans, burying islands in the South Pacific and spilling into the rivers here in Maine, that lead is poisoning our eagles and our children and tainting our tapwater, and carbon dioxide is strangling the breath of the entire planet--and stoking the cycles of droughts and floods and extreme weather patterns that are traumatizing people around the globe.

Gigi Larc with ARRT! sandwich board (photo credit: Mary Beth Sullivan)

And the pursuit of endless war to increase the profits of our arms dealers and their investors, militarize this country internally, and prop up a fossil fuel economy an d a political system built on white supremacy that has brought us to this raging time, all have a terrible cost in mental health and spirit. Our worsening addiction crisis is no surprise. PTSD from Climate crisis and war are rampant; and we are still losing 18 veterans every day, to suicide.

Jason Rawn with a message for Blue Angels air show audience
(photo credit: Mary Beth Sullivan)

The greatest health threats we face today are war and the existential threat of nuclear war

either by accident or climate catastrophe or what I would call, insanity -- and the risk of a climate disaster causing a nuclear meltdown is terribly real -- I imagine folks in Louisiana understand that really well right now.

Every climate catastrophe causes illness, stress that affects our immune systems, trauma, displacement and increased pollution of our land and waters that in turn causes an increase in illness and lowers life expectancy. And we know the connection to the unequal burden of both climate change and militarism on people of color, indigenous peoples, and the poor.

This pandemic gives us a clear view of the effect on health of the deep inequality in our society. We CAN afford healthcare for all our citizens. It would actually save us money to have a Medicare for All system, and it would save thousands of lives yearly as well. Surely, the money spent on displays promoting the military like the Blue Angels could be a hefty down payment for maternal healthcare, and to support Women's Right to Choose! -- let alone that just half of the Pentagon's budget could wipe out hunger nationwide.

Recently about 50 people, activists like us, walked in Asheville, North Carolina to protest Raytheon -- the second largest arms manufacturer world wide -- relocating part of its manufacturing to North Carolina for cheaper labor, in a "military" supporter state.

Speaking out about military spending and the effect this will have on the climate crisis, one of the protestors, Steve Norris said: " This is local resistance to a national disease."

Exactly. We each do whatever we can to choose health over the disease of power by wealth and the war and disaster economy that supports it. Despite the fire raging, we continue. That is what we do. Just like the healthcare workers who are currently risking their lives and exhausting their spirits in their work caring for people in this pandemic, likely a virus very connected to the climate crisis. Just as the indigenous and environmental activists at Line 3 and at pipeline sites around the world who risk arrest and beatings--and in some cases, their lives, continue--so do we.

We will not let them glorify destruction in our name without speaking out.

And every time we speak the truth, we shore up our immune systems and together, share that strength. Despite . Thanks for being here.

I would like to read a poem I dedicate to all of you, called "Despite"...

Cold crisp day, close to breaking

wafer thin , lifted gently

from its lair between tissues

of time : what was, what will be.

And it will. Filled with sky as

translucent as breath

and just as new, these mountains

shared with all their valleys

and companions, oh the friends

that walk with us along the way!

Rich as rain after a long dry time,

as a fire, on a cold winter night.

For this, beloved, I sing my song.

This is the light

that the heart carries.

Despite. Despite.

-- Meredith Bruskin, Swanville

Despite a large turnout and great speeches like Meredith's, there was very little media coverage of our protest of the Blue Angels air show. This despite advance press releases and follow up calls.

You can read Sam Pfeifle's analysis of this news blackout here, published by Maine Beacon. 

Notable exception: C. Thacher Carter in the Times Record who phoned me after the event. His article covering the air show also appeared in the Portland Press Herald, Lewiston Sun Journal, Kennebec Journal, and Waterville Morning Sentinel (all papers with the same owner).

Polluting Isn't Patriotic And Real Angels Don't Drop Bombs

The Navy's Blue Angels are major polluters who generate around 800,000 tons of CO2 when they put on an airshow. 

Photo credit (including whole group pic): Ellen Davidson

Sixty people from ages 94 to 1 turned out to protest yesterday in Brunswick, Maine, lining the streets as hundred of cars bumper to bumper crept by.

Photo credit: Ellen Davidson

Luke Sekera-Flanders of Community Water Justice was our MC and spoke forcefully on the mandatory patriotism he has experienced growing up and attending public schools in Maine.

Photo credit: Ellen Davidson

The recent high school graduate also shared the costs to climate of the U.S.'s vast military empire.

Photo credit: Ellen Davidson

Bruce Gagnon of Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space spoke about the menacing presence of US military aircraft in countries around the world, and shared that Brunswick resident Jean Parker’s sliding glass door shattered on Friday as the Blue Angels did their practice runs prior to the air show.

Photo credit: Ellen Davidson

I spoke on behalf of the Maine Natural Guard urging people to take the pledge to help their neighbors connect the dots between climate crisis and Pentagon greenhouse gas emissions. Information on this has been controlled because military emissions are usually omitted from national reporting by the US. Urged people to sign on to demands that COP26 in Glasgow this fall include military emissions in the agreement that nations negotiate there.

Photo credit: Gigi Larc

Meredith Bruskin of Swanville spoke from a public health nurse perspective on the effects of climate crisis on our physical, mental, and spiritual health. And of militarism's damage to our spiritual well-being.

Photo credit: Ellen Davidson

VFP national Executive Director Garret Reppenhagen who has recently moved to Lincolnville, Maine spoke about enlisting to go to Iraq for economic reasons after his veteran father passed away. He decried the glorification of war via air shows that lure unsuspecting youth into signing away years of their life and possibly experiencing trauma they never recover from.

Photo credit: Ellen Davidson

Tarak Kauff from New York spoke about the Pentagon’s environmental harms and the militarized culture we live in.

Photo credit: Ellen Davidson

The IDEAL Maine Social Aid & Sanctuary Band showed up and energized the crowd with several rousing numbers including a singalong of classic antiwar anthem “Down by the Riverside.”

Flyers on climate & militarism were handed through many car windows by Veteran for Peace members including Doug Rawlings, co-founder of VFP which originated in Maine.

Photo credit: Gigi Larc

Banners created by the Artists' Rapid Response Team (ARRT!) of the Union of Maine Visual Artists were highly visible to passing motorists.

Photo credit: Gigi Larc

My husband Mark Roman was spotted in his Maine Natural Guard t-shirt in downtown Brunswick later in the day by a woman who noted that there was a big protest at the air show today. She shared that her mother had made a sign for the occasion: Polluting Isn't Patriotic.

Our protest was also included in the local newspaper Times Record's reporting on the air show by C. Thacher Carter:

The Blue Angel performances also drew a crowd of roughly 60 protestors, who spoke out against the environmental impact of the Blue Angel performance. Protestors stood near the main gate at the corner of Bath Road and Admiral Fitch Avenue late Saturday morning.

Lisa Savage, founding member of Maine Natural Guard and 2020 U.S. Senate Independent Green candidate, was one of the protestors present. The Maine Natural Guard is an organization that examines the Pentagon’s use of fossil fuels and its impact on climate change.

“This protest was to point out that the carbon footprint of an airshow like this, the Blue Angels, is huge and putting a lot, a lot of carbon in the air,” Savage said. “To be burning jet fuel for entertainment is probably not a great approach to mitigating the effects of the climate change on the ability of this planet to sustain our life.”

Savage said that the group also has the point of view that the airshows are recruiting events to encourage enlistment and that there are 140 nations that consume less fuel than the Pentagon does in a year.

Videographer Martha Spiess was on hand for Peace Action Maine and I will share her documentation of this great event soon.

Military Falsely Posited As Solution To Climate Crisis When It Is Actually A Major Cause

Screenshot from this morning's weather check in

A young parent in my family shared an article yesterday from the I Fucking Love Science website. "New Report Warns 'High Likelihood Of Human Civilization Coming To An End' Within 30 Years" drew on findings in a report out of Australia last month, "Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach." 

It is impossible to read such reports without thinking of the dire future for 4 years old you love.

What struck me about the report, though, was the strong flavor of military "leadership" invoked to address climate catastrophe. The introduction by the now retired chief of the Australian Defense Force (1998-2002) set the tone:

In particular, our intelligence and security services have a vital role to play, and a fiduciary responsibility, in accepting this existential climate threat, and the need for a fundamentally different approach to its risk management, as central to their considerations and their advice to government. The implications far outweigh conventional geopolitical threats.

This did not surprise me as internet search terms "climate change Pentagon" turn up links to how the U.S. military is planning for mitigation of sea level rise on their many coastal bases. 

Such articles NEVER mention the key role of the U.S. military in accelerating carbon loading in the atmosphere.

Nor did the Australian report mention this.

So while the U.S. federal government rebrands fossil fuels as "freedom gas" and "freedom molecules" the carbon loading proceeds apace. Almost no one looks toward the Pentagon to find the solution to our worsening problems: stop waging wars for oil, stop burning highly polluting jet fuels, and stop exploding bombs which besides killing mostly civilians are also killing the atmosphere as a life support system.

On behalf of 4 year olds, it's time for us to get busy.

Educate:
You can read my collection of reports on the Pentagon's role in hastening climate catastrophe here on the Maine Natural Guard website.

Advocate:
Consider taking the MNG pledge to connect the dots between Pentagon funding and climate change.

Join us for the Conversion Campaign news conference if you're in still lovely, cool and wet Maine on June 21.

Join us at General Dynamics' Bath Iron Works shipyard on June 22 to protest the celebration of yet another carbon belching war ship. Call for BIW to build sustainable energy solutions instead.

Before it's too late.

Defeaning Silence On The Carbon Belching Elephant In The Climate Room

How lucky was I to be in action with family and friends at yesterday's Rise for Climate, Jobs and Justice march in Portland, Maine. These powerful banners created by Ellen Davidson of Veterans for Peace in New York were trundled up to Maine by Ellen and Tarak Kauff, a VFP member who spoke at our Peace Hub preceding the funeral march for the cod.

Gigi, seen here helping grandpa and me hold the "Stop the Wars, Stop the Warming --People, Peace and the Planet" banner, held several signs throughout the course of the day. Gigi is a tireless social justice warrior whose mom, Selene Spivak, spoke at the end of the Peace Hub reminding us that the next generation is counting on us to leave a habitable world.

Videos of all the Peace Hub speakers will be available soon thanks to dedicated Peace Action Maine videographer Martha Spiess, and I will share them when I see them. For now here's a short video I made of Bruce Gagnon speaking about the need for conversion of the military-industrial factories to building sustainables: a win for jobs, a win for unions, a win for peace, and a win for the environment.

Maine Public Radio managed to cover the march without a whiff of the fumes constantly belching from the Pentagon's war machine. A glimpse of one banner did sneak in behind the dead cod puppet, but six hundred words was not enough to get "public" radio to mention the elephant in the global warming room. Their coverage was focused on the covert Democratic Party agenda for the entire climate march: register and get out voters. As if voting for Democrats would reduce Pentagon budgets and their CO2 exhaust, a bi-partisan problem that continues under any administration. ("Progressive" rep for Portland Chellie Pingree just voted along with Tea Party rep for the poorer half of Maine, Bruce Poliquin, to authorize the biggest Pentagon budget in history. Nuff said.)

The Maine Natural Guard was out in force yesterday reminding folks to connect the dots between militarism and climate change. Pictured here in our team shirt is Jason Rawn. Mary Beth Sullivan is wearing hers behind the banner, too, and Cynthia Howard rocked her shirt while holding this excellent banner which mimics the popular book series _____ for Dummies.

My remarks at the Peace Hub were excerpted from this excellent article by Stacy Bannerman, "Is Climate The Worst Casualty of War?" We handed out nearly 100 copies of Bannerman's article along the way of the New Orleans funeral-style march through Portland's downtown. And I continued to share these with high school students assembled at City Hall to hear many of their own, including water warrior Luke Sekera, who called out the Nestle Corporation for its theft of Maine's groundwater. Luke mentioned that he has been at this for seven years now. Yup, since he was 9 years old.

Colorful banners created by the Union of Maine Visual Artists' Artists Rapid Response Team (ARRT!) were everywhere, including this beauty created for and carried by the Maine Poor People's Campaign.

This national campaign -- founded to combat Martin Luther King Jr.'s evil triplets of racism, militarism and extreme materialism -- sees how all the pieces of our corporate oppression are connected.

It's time to stop pretending that the Democratic Party will do anything to save us.

Image: Anthony Freda

When The Fire Is Happening, I Have A Responsbility To Say So

Image: Wikipedia Commons "A map of all Superfund sites. The red dots are active sites, and the green dots are clean sites."

Today I continue with the third in a series of posts expanding on the rich discussion between Sherri Mitchell, Rivera Sun and Professor Tom Hastings "War On Earth: Militarism and Environment" linked below (go here to read posts #1 and #2 in my series.)



I was inspired by the testimony of Zumwalt 12 defendant Cynthia Howard, on trial for blocking a public road in front of General Dynamics' weapons of mass destruction plant in Bath, Maine:

I know that my first amendment rights do not extend to yelling "Fire!" in a building, but when the fire is happening, I have a responsibility to say so.

So, where's the fire?

Image from Politico's 2015 article "Where in the World is the U.S. Military?" by David Vine, author of Base Nation

Sherri Mitchell: "Worldwide..there's an incredible amount of land that's under the control of the military. How do we address those issues and try to clean up some of the lands?"

Then there's the problem at home on what were once and in some cases still are Native territories. According to Alexander Nasaryan's 2014 article "The US Department of Defense is one of the world's biggest polluters" in Newsweek, 

about 900 of the 1200 or so Superfund sites in America are abandoned military facilities or sites that otherwise support military needs.

The US Department of Defence is one of the world’s worst polluters. Its footprint dwarfs that of any corporation: 4,127 installations spread across 19 million acres of American soil. Maureen Sullivan, who heads the Pentagon’s environmental programmes, says her office contends with 39,000 contaminated sites.

A list of military Superfund sites runs to 142 and is always expanding. Superfund sites are toxic waste locations prioritized for federally funded clean up operations.

The government cannot be relied upon to solve the problem they continue creating. According to Professor Hastings: "It is 100% up to civil society to address." He was part of a coalition that successfully sought an injunction against a military base in Wisconsin that "had a very faulty environmental impact statement... Then it took the Navy about ten minutes to go down to the circuit court in Chicago...to lift the injunction." Hastings reported the Navy's rationale for lifting the injunction consisted of approximately two sentences that amounted to this: national security.

This is an amazingly short sighted view of real security for the future of people residing on our planet. I think in this instance "national security" can be read to mean: securing continued business opportunities for the super wealthy who profit from the manufacture of weapons systems we all pay for.

For example, real security would necessitate cleaning up superfund sites at home and contaminated lands abroad that have been pulverized by missiles made from depleted uranium. Cecile Pineda argues convincingly in Devil's Tango: How I Learned the Fukushima Step by Step that we need not fear nuclear war in our future because it is already upon us. 

Since the US began slowly killing its own soldiers present at the testing of a nuclear bomb in 1945, radioactive military waste that will outlive you and the next 777 generations of your family has continued to pour into our soil and oceans.


Veterans and their families continue to struggle with health issues that stem from their exposure to toxins decades ago. Mothers in countries the U.S. has bombed with DU continue to bear children with severe birth defects. 

Still, Hastings remains optimistic about the power of the people to fight polluters in uniform: "Whichever administration is in power, we're still able to do things at the civil society level ... As long as we  continue to build bigger coalitions on the ground, we can win." His view is shared by organizers like Sun and Mitchell, and by groups like Popular Resistance who build coalitions around national health, opposition to militarism, and urgent concern for the environment.

Time to yell "Fire!" yet?