Peace activists and organizations have worked for years to bring environmental and peace activism together. When an environmental campaign includes the peace movement, it’s time to join in and show up and take part.
Listen to how Russell Gray of Extinction Rebellion talks about peace and the climate. If we want to build the coalition of peace and environmental movements that we’ve dreamed of, this is how we do it.
World BEYOND War is joining with StrikeDC to nonviolently shut down DC for the climate on September 23. We are organizing in affinity groups.
Sign up here to be in the World BEYOND War affinity group. Or start your own. Or endorse or donate to StrikeDC here and promote World BEYOND War’s affinity group to everyone you can with this link: http://bit.ly/wbwaffinity
Strike DC will be posting on its website statements from each affinity group, including the following from World BEYOND War:
War and preparations for war are not just the pit into which trillions of dollars that could be used to prevent environmental damage are dumped, but also a major direct cause of that environmental damage.
The U.S. military is one of the biggest polluters on earth. Since 2001, the U.S. military has emitted 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases, equivalent to the annual emissions of 257 million cars on the road. The U.S. Department of Defense is the largest institutional consumer of oil ($17B/year) in the world, and the largest global landholder with 800 foreign military bases in 80 countries. By one estimate, the U.S. military used 1.2 million barrels of oil in Iraq in just one month of 2008. One military estimate in 2003 was that two-thirds of the U.S. Army’s fuel consumption occurred in vehicles that were delivering fuel to the battlefield.
A major motivation behind many wars is the desire to control resources that poison the earth, especially oil and gas. In fact, the launching of wars by wealthy nations in poor ones does not correlate with human rights violations, or lack of democracy, or threats of terrorism, or scarcity of resources, but does strongly correlate with the presence of oil.
As the environmental crisis worsens, thinking of war as a tool with which to address it threatens us with the ultimate vicious cycle. Declaring that climate change causes war misses the reality that human beings cause war, and that unless we learn to address crises nonviolently we will only make them worse.
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