Abby Martin on the Climate Cost of US Empire

What would climate politics look like if it put the military at the center of the conversation? In her documentary Earth’s Greatest Enemy, Abby Martin examines the environmental costs of US power, from its dependence on fossil fuels to the contamination left behind at military bases.

Those costs reach service members and their families as well as the communities around them. At Red Hill in Oʻahu, fuel releases in 2021 contaminated drinking water supplied by the Navy. At Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, another contamination exposed personnel to chemicals associated with increased risks of cancer.

Martin spoke with Shilpi Chhotray for A People’s Climate, a podcast from Counterstream Media and The Nation, about the politics behind that damage, what she saw while reporting in Hawai’i, and where collective action can exert pressure. You can listen to the conversation here and subscribe to A People’s Climate and other Nation podcasts here.

—Shilpi Chhotray

Shilpi Chhotray: Why do you call the US military “Earth’s greatest enemy”?

Abby Martin: The film covers not just emissions but the maintenance of the military arsenal coupled with legacy contamination and the further militarization and expansion of the military, and what that actually does to our drinking water, to our air. Seeing the ecocidal destruction in Iran and Gaza, it becomes really clear what’s going on.

SC: You’ve said we have to look at the military as the institution keeping fossil fuel infrastructure in place through brutality and violence. Can you speak to that?

AM: The climate community has rightfully looked at fossil fuel infrastructure. But those companies have a military that works on their behalf. The US military is basically the enforcement arm of global capitalism. The military has always been a force for extractive industries to maintain its own force around the world.

National security has always explicitly been about fossil fuels and securing and maintaining access to those fossil fuels. When you look at all of the bases around the world, where are they? They’re where the main arteries of capital flow. It’s controlling the supply chain and the arteries of capital. That expanse necessitates the continuous growth and pillaging and plundering of all the resources on Earth, just to maintain itself.

SC: Most of this film was made under the Biden administration. What keeps this level of violence in place no matter who’s in power?

AM: The film is important because it’s a time capsule of the Biden administration. It exemplifies the status quo and what has been deemed normal by the ruling class, by the global elites. That’s really important and instructive because it has gotten so bad.

Trump has taken it to such a new level, but we have to go back and realize Trump is not an anomaly. Trump is an extension of the system that incubated this. He’s a natural consequence of what has been normalized and allowed. When we don’t hold criminals to account, when we let this impunity reign, coupled with the wanton environmental destruction, this is what we get.

SC: What do you wish people understood about the cost of war for the people sent to carry it out?

AM: I see it firsthand. Everyone in the military is a victim of this machine. They’re a victim of propaganda too. We are all being harmed by this. But what it’s doing to service members, it’s killing them too.

SC: If military dominance relies on fossil fuels, what does that mean for the possibility of a real energy transition?

AM: We can’t have an energy transition with a global military empire. It’s not going to be allowed. You see people in the film telling me that point-blank.

The problem is you can’t green a global military empire that essentially runs on oil. That is oil, oil, oil. You even heard major generals tell me it’s a pipe dream. We need oil.

SC: Let’s talk about Hawai’i. What happened at Red Hill in Oʻahu?

AM: [Jet fuel] seeped into the drinking water wells used by military families. These antiquated, rotting storage tanks sat right above Oʻahu’s main aquifer. The military decided to build storage tanks of oil right on top of it. Why?

The Red Hill disaster is one part of what the military has done to Hawai’i. A lot of Americans have no idea that Hawai’i was a sovereign country that had its own government up until the late 1800s.

SC: You got access to RIMPAC, the Rim of the Pacific naval exercise. What did you witness there?

AM: The scale and scope of these exercises are massive. They sink a ship. They love doing that. They will destroy a ship and let it sink to the bottom of the ocean. They do this as the grand finale, I guess, at the end of the exercises.

They use Hawai’i as not only a dumping ground but as a playground for themselves. They have a good time. They treat the island as expendable. They’re blowing stuff up, patting themselves on the back, pumping fists.

SC: How the hell are you getting into RIMPAC and these industry and military events? A quick Google search would show you’re Abby Martin, the anti-imperialist.

AM: There is a contradictory narrative throughout the film. On one hand, the military is this very secretive institution. They don’t grant you any access. But on the other hand, they’re dumb. They don’t Google you.

They don’t do their research. I’m applying to get into these spaces and I’m like, I’m Abigail Martin. They’re like, “Come on in, Sis.” I thought I was going to be beating down other journalists at RIMPAC because it’s such a huge event.

I lived in DC for several years. I know how it works. It’s access, access, access. You don’t want to step on the toes of not being able to get back into these spaces. So you play the game. I go into these spaces knowing that I will never go back. You have one shot to get it right.

I’m not special. I do the bare minimum of what a journalist should do. My question is, where’s everyone else?

SC: Where are the pressure points? What are some tangible things you want to see?

AM: There are incremental steps that can be taken now. There’s the big vision of what ultimately needs to happen to have a habitable planet that we can all survive on. And there are things that need to happen right now that are completely feasible and that are actually being proposed.

The military budget continues to grow and grow and grow. It needs to be completely cut in half right now.

There’s been so much movement with the encampments and the demand for accountability of what weapons systems and contractors are invested in universities.

Banding together, building big tents and broad coalitions and stopping these things in their tracks. That’s possible. There’s so much that we can do, but I think we have to decommission this global military empire and we have to force accountability mechanisms to make the remediation happen. We have to force the military to clean up their mess.

SC: I keep thinking about the 1960s and ’70s and the rise of anti-imperialism at the height of the Vietnam War. What will it take to see our society rise up in that way?

AM: We’re in the infancy stages of organizing and mass education. I feel like we’re getting back to that foundational understanding that capitalism is driving a lot of this. That’s why Gaza has been such a fundamental moment of awakening for so many people, understanding the mechanism and the structure of why these things are happening.

We have to be anti-imperialists. We have to be internationalists, and we have to have solidarity with all oppressed people in the Global South and understand how their oppression is our oppression. It’s all intrinsically tied together.

As an advocacy journalist, I create media to agitate. I try to use propaganda in a way that’s slapping you across the face with the truth, but not to paralyze you, to empower you. Education, action, community, building organizations that have the understanding of what we’re talking about, because we can’t make a dent in the environmental space if we don’t address the elephant in the room.

We’re not going to fight them militarily. We have to speak in the language that they speak: capital flow, withholding our labor, strikes, understanding how labor is essential. During Occupy Wall Street, that shut down the ports. It was the most beautiful day of my life because I saw the power of all of these people coming together and I understood how it could be stopped.

We can’t ever let this system prevent us from imagining something different, from realizing that we have the power and the agency to do something else. This movie is just one tool in the arsenal to give us a fighting chance.