HUMAN AND ENVIRONMETAL IMPACT OF WAR BY OLADOKUN SULAIMAN

human and environmental impacts of war
Environment impact of war
Recent time has seen so much noise about issue of environmental degradation , climate change , ice winter ( another phenomina rarely talked about) call for new ways to do things on this planet , in order to give opportunity for others to enjoy the privilege human is given on this planet . Much is talked about various root cause, but less is talk about the major cause- war


Human history has witness three things that relate war and the environment:

· Competition for environmental resources (or minimizing environmental disadvantage);

· environmental change as tool of war;

· Significant environmental consequences of war.

All of which varied at scale and level of technology and the degree of social complexity providing the main sources of variation.

In reality environmental characteristics of countries - and the distribution of resources available for economic exploitation - have led to armed conflict as a result of competition between states desire to control the human and physical environmental resources of countries beyond their borders - in short, imperialist competition. Others are fueled by other motives and more immediate layers of causation (racism, militarist policies, arms races, assassinations of leaders, etc.).Likewise, time has seen environmental change on a local or regional scale being used as a weapon of war:

· Consider the scorched earth tactics used by Stalin's armies against the German invaders,

· The repeated firing of cities throughout Japanese history.

· The First World War brought rationalized war mobilization of whole industrial societies - and the transformation of the golden fields of Flanders and the forests of northern France into the never to be forgotten image of an environmental of four years of the living hell of trench warfare.

· The second round of the first in fact - brought the perfection of aerial bombing of cities in the form of the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the first nuclear war.

. The iran iraq wars,. The gulf wars and many many other wars human have fought since the ice age


As Clausewitz’s put his dictum that “war is but the continuation of policy by other means” which means that that war is but the alteration of the environment of the enemy to achieve the ends of policy. Whether at the micro-level of creating a killing field surrounding individual enemy soldiers, or the larger but more slow-acting blockading an enemy nation's ports, or creating a firestorm that destroys great cities and consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of its working civilians, a key aspect of war as a tool of state policy is the manipulation of environments large and small to achieve specified ends of state.

However war has been going for along time in human history, the last 150 years, and the twentieth century in particular, have been horrific, with a historically unprecedented combination of a scientific approach to weapons development and a diminution of restraint on the scale of violence and its targets. That period opens with the massive fratricidal slaughter of the US Civil War - the first industrial war. Rapid technical advances in weapons development, combined with industrial production brought the rapid firing rifle, the machine gun, and aerial bombing all first deployed specifically for use against 'natives' by the European powers in Africa, East Asia and the Middle East.

To speak of the environmental implications of these barbarisms is almost grotesque. However, beyond these horrific but well known matters, we must now recognize that both human society and the natural environment have entered into a new historical phase. War - as both cause and effect of environmental change, and as a crucial connector between the environment and the social world, has, as a consequence, also changed profoundly.

This shift has three important characteristics influencing that has constant aspects of the connection between war and the environment:

1. war pragmatic transformation of environment: this involve the way in which human action alters the ecology of the earth, with a clear potential for irreversible intervention;

2. war and environmental security -and the preparations for war give paradigm case that demonstrates that we can no longer separate “human” from “the natural environment”-we live in the “constructed environment” where human activity and its ecological setting are mutually interdependent in a manner that changes the characteristics of both and increases the risks to both;

3.Interpretive diversions: systemic misrecognition of environmental risk-One of the characteristics of the present stage of the global political ecology is a systematic collective inability to recognize the true nature of the threats we face and act accordingly.

Was pragmatic alteration of environment
Global warming is major threat to the biosphere, but also in the long history a treat to the future of the planet on which the intentional behavior of animals - in this case humans - have modified the global environment. For a long time scientist have warned about climate change and potential disturbance if present socio-technical systems are unaltered, and about the necessity and effectiveness of various proposed remedies through human activity devoted to an ideal of exponential material growth in industrialized societies

To state the obvious, various bombing that have been done on the planet all produced substantial environmental transformations - some of which were intended by the designers of the weapons involved, and some of which were surprises. Though the human consequences were appalling in both number and degree, for example the first nuclear explosion sites at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less threatening than what was to come later, after 'peace’. Because of point form environmental degradation and the effects on the planet and its inhabitant. At first sight it may seem that the environmental effects of weapons, terrible as they may be, cannot be and should not compared with the effects of global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer.

It might be said that the transformations of the biosphere that will result from an unchecked increase in greenhouse and other gases produced as a result of industrial socio-technical systems would be true ecological system change resulting from human activity. War bombing may kill millions of people but also environmental changes of consequential character linked to threat of global warming because , everything is linked in ecosystem- we the water and the air and the lands- linked all of us and that transport what we don’t know to one another. Consequently, the threat of war using weapons of mass destruction remains not only serious, but provides the paradigm case for human transformation of the global ecology, possibly irreversibly. The exact results depend on a variety of contingent factors like:

· the physical characteristics of the targets and the bombs employed,

· the height of the explosion above the ground, the prevailing and subsequent weather patterns, and

· The ratios of soot and dust in the plumes that will reach towards the stratosphere. Soot particles tend not to be washed from the atmosphere as rapidly as other matter. More importantly, soot is particularly efficient in absorbing light. Several hundred million tons of soot could coalesce to produce a uniform belt of particles in the northern hemisphere, possibly circling the globe in the mid-latitudes for many months.

· The reduction of sunlight reaching the surface of the earth in the northern temperate and subtropical zones would lead to a sustained average drop in temperature of up to 10 degrees C. Photosynthesis of plants would be immediately interrupted, with severe immediate consequences for plants and animals.

· The direct effects of sub-freezing temperatures, plus radiation, combined with the damage to social and medical infrastructure, would be supplemented by huge pressure on food production. The climatic effects of such a phenomenon would be profound.

· Production of substantial change in temperature, with devastating effects on food production.

Accordingly, we can see that war, is at least as theoretically powerful as a paradigm of the disturbance of the global ecology by human activity as ozone depletion of global warming, both in terms of scientific possibility and historical contingency. Under certain assumptions, it could be stated more strongly: war is now the primary paradigm of climate change due to human intervention.

War and “environmental security”
'Environmental security' is now a hot topic, security manager and academic security studies circles, but also amongst the world’s military. Two main notions of 'environmental security' are involved –

· The impact of the military on the environment in the conduct of peacetime and combat activities,

· The environmental sources of conflict.

But, if we look at some examples of state thinking on this topic, we will see that there is a distinctive pattern of uneven, inconstant, and distorted perception of the connection between military activities and the environment, a pattern of 'misrecognition' familiar to students of politics and of psychoanalysis.

In his lecture to British officer on the difficulties specialists in the use of violence face in dealing with environmental security threats by a professor at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, Gwyn Prins. These dilemmas were neatly summarized in the title of Pryns' subsequent book with Robbie Stamp, Top Guns and Toxic Whales: an F-15 fighter is a superb piece of technology dedicated to the delivery of a certain type of violence, piloted by a highly trained professional, which assisted by space and sonar surveillance systems so accurate they can even distinguish species of dolphins. But using a fighter to shoot a toxic whale does nothing to solve the problem that generated the environmental toxicity in question. Moreover, there is no military technology relevant to repairing the damage to the ozone layer.

Interpretive diversions: systemic misrecognition of environmental risk
Concept of environmental security by the militarized state is intended to reassure citizens that the state is responsive to their concerns about the vulnerability of contemporary society to environmental degradation resulting from both changes in the global environment and from the military's own activities. This is nothing but a German sociologist Ulrich Beck termed 'interpretive diversions' that are a systemic coined under doctrine of conventional wisdom in contemporary society

A new stage of human society that Beck terms 'risk society'. Risk society for Beck, arises in the twentieth century when two conditions are met.

· Firstly, genuine material need can be met and reduced through both technological development and through appropriate forms of social and political relations.

· Secondly, this is dependent on a system of production that generates risks ands hazards at a level and frequency previously unknown.

The key intellectual problems for the present, argues Beck, is not so much the social production of wealth which preoccupied thinkers of the nineteenth century, but the social production of risk that results from exponential industrial growth.

Global warming, the damaging of the ozone layer, or the theoretical possibility of nuclear winter provide examples of the epochal shift in level and type of risk resulting from human productive activity. Yet these are but the grossest indicators of a deeper change that can be seen in contemporary societies.

Globalization is for the most part only the working out of the network of abstracted commodity relationships that Marx analyzed over a century ago. What is new is that those networks of social relation at a distance are accompanied by equally dense networks of abstracted trust and habitually accepted risk. It is this production of socially distributed risk that interests Beck.

Social systems preoccupied with the production of risk have quite different approaches to solving their difficulties from those preoccupied by the social distribution of material production. The remedy for hunger is food, satisfaction of material need - or more generally speaking, wealth. Denial is not sufficient to satisfy hunger. Risk and hazard, however, are different: risks can be eliminated, or if not eliminated, diminished in psychological significance. We are aware of this in our personal lives from time to time: we cannot solve problem, we ignore it, hoping it will go away. The risk is not eliminated, but our minds are at ease.

The more that people cannot actually eliminate risk from their lives, the more necessary 'interpretive diversions' become. These diversions, this process of interpreting danger away, take much different form.

An extreme form is outright denial of the existence of the problem: 'nuclear war is impossibility’.

A common form is acknowledgement of the problem tinged with what appears to be rational skepticism: 'I wonder if scientists aren't just exaggerating a bit about global warming and the need to change our ways'.

Another approach is the familiar psychological process of projection: 'the real source of environmental danger isn't us in the overdeveloped industrial world; it is all those people in poor countries breeding irresponsibly'.

Scapegoating is particularly effective as a form of interpretive diversion: 'The destruction of the ozone layer is all because of capitalist greed - or lazy bureaucrats/people who use hairsprays/overfed auto-holics - or whichever social group is best fitted for the victim role.

And of course, as the example of military thinking about environmental security shows, cooption of potentially radical forms of thought has the capacity to present the appearance of political concern about a problem, while ignoring or minimizing attention to the real threats involved.

Threats from military violence and from the environment are perhaps the two areas of threat most liable to bring interpretive diversions into play, for two reasons.

· Firstly, in each case the level of powerlessness involved for individuals is very great, and the potential effect of the threat is very high.

· Secondly, environmental threats and threats of physical destruction each call into play the most elemental of psychological processes.

For instance, the fear of literal annihilation and the death and obliteration of that entire one loves in the case of nuclear war. Or in the case of (actual or suspected) pollution of food resources - say, from nuclear power plant leakage, or from contamination in the food production process - absolutely fundamental psychic assumptions which are literally imbibed at the mother's breast about the equivalence of the good and the ingestible [food = good] are profoundly threatened. It is hardly surprising that food pollution fears (for example, in relation to genetically-modified foods) often produce either extreme denial or great paranoia, with the discovery of state and corporate duplicity worsening the latter. Fear of nuclear war and associated consequencial ice winter has been constant since the first nuclear attacks of August 1945. Yet the public and open expression of that fear in political comment and social movements has varied in intensity and visibility. In part this variability is accounted for by the campaign by the nuclear states to diminish public concern by either restriction of information on the effects of nuclear weapons and continuing through outright suppression of information or through diversionary campaigns

This all show that environmental and military dangers in contemporary society not only have reached the unprecedented stage where they can alter the character of the earth's ecology, but do so in the context of a type of human society where the management of risk must take place in a social, political and psychological context that itself generates unique dangers.

Today due to environmental revolt, and many many other tings surfacing, an age of knowledge, sensitivity and awareness is emerging , emerging so fast , thus many system is on way o gude us on new phylosiphy of doing thing things-- because it has become clear to many now that , everything in the planet is linked- especially though hydraulic transport of water and air- do u think that can stop human to fight war--

dokunsulaiman@yahoo.com