Everything is connected, including the havoc wrought by the destructiveness of war to both humans and the environment.
Last September, the Brunswick Times Record sponsored a forum titled “What Price does our Community Pay for the Military Budget?” A panel, consisting of local representatives from health care, education, social services, business and green/environmental interests, addressed the multi-layered effects of military spending on our communities.
John Rensenbrink represented the green/environmental movement.
Rensenbrink’s presentation centered on the web of life. “Everything is connected to everything else. Creative acts anywhere in the web of life radiate outwards throughout the web. Destructive acts anywhere in the web also radiate throughout the web.” Thus, he continued, “War on people is war on nature, and war on nature is war on people.” His clear examples began with the “long march of industrial man and capitalist man during the past 250 to 300 years was a march of war against nature and thereby a continuing and increasingly devastating war against the people and the planet as a whole.” He included the wanton killing of the buffalo, the terrible destruction of Fallujah in Afghanistan, the BP oil spill, and nuclear weapons in space.
To bring about a change from this ever-downward spiral, he suggests building the infrastructure of enduring peace. He sees “strong communities where people can be citizens and not lonely and separated consumers as the bulwark against militaristic governments and against mammoth corporations combing the planet to satisfy their insatiable greed.”
He further suggests a need to, “heighten and deepen our consciousness that war is war on nature and war on people.” A path forward would be for the environment movement and the peace movement to work together to bring awareness of the devastation of war to the total web of life.
An article on the front page of the Brunswick Times Record for Nov. 5, 2010 makes Rensenbrink’s message all too clear. We see a picture of Tarub, 17 years old, from Afghanistan who was eyewitness to the devastation of war. In Afghanistan, he lived daily with danger from militants, from explosions that destroyed a bus and the people inside the bus, and with overly crowded school rooms and school hours of only a few hours a day. His dream is to become a doctor so he can “help his country.”
In a recent news item, the United Nations warns “a continued failure to tackle climate change is putting at risk decades of progress in improving the lives of the world’s poorest people.”
The U.S. military budget exceeds those of every other industrial country combined. The money spent on war results in 17-year-old Tarub having to flee his wartorn homeland. A direct line could be drawn going from the military budget and to the school closings being proposed in Windham and across Maine. The money spent on war robs every community worldwide of resources needed for education, for human development, for the resources needed to bring us beyond this point of environmental collapse. John Resenbrink’s message should be heard and heeded. “Everything is connected to everything else. Creative acts anywhere in the web of life radiate outward throughout the web. Destructive acts anywhere in the web also radiate throughout the web.”
It is time for a discussion in Windham about the destructive effects of the military budget on our community.
Sally Breen lives in Windham.
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