Goin' Broke The Cost of War
 Events
Lincoln Revival
December 7 Volunteer Speaking Our Peace Socialist! Communist! Terrorist! Kill Him!
By Paul Olson, NFP President Global Warming Greenland’s Icemelt Speeding Up
By Professor Bruce E. Johansen Nebraska Peace Stratcom
The Most Dangerous Place on the Face of the Earth Whiteclay
Updates on Nebraska's tiny reservation border town. Dick Cheney
Impeachment is on the table. Peace Matters
Omaha NFP Newsletter Alexandra Svoboda
One Year Later StratCom Conference Space Conference
 Visions for Peace Visions for Peace

The World Will End in Fire

Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus

Poor old Robert Frost. He thought the dilemma of whether the world would end in fire or ice concerned whether passion or hatred would destroy the world:

Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire. . . .

But “ice” — hatred — constituted Frost’s alternate destruction of choice.

But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Of course, like Frost, we know that both desire and hatred will enter into our destruction. But can we ‘be more specific,’ as my teachers in high school would say? My father thought that some kind of fire from God would end the world (the “elements will melt with fervent heat” he used to say). And when the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he thought he knew specifically how it would happen.

Another kind of ‘fire’ though may be more likely. As UNO Professor Bruce Johansen said at a recent NFP-Oxfam America forum in Omaha this past June, for this fire to come, we don’t have to do anything — other than keep on keeping on. The presentations by Johansen, Maril Hazlett of the Land Institute, and Jim French of Oxfam were powerful statements about how global warming will not stop for decades even if we do everything we can. ‘Thermal inertia’ (the ‘lag effect’ of carbon in the atmosphere) and feedback loops (that act to accelerate the warming process) will keep it going. They three speakers told how here in Nebraska, where we have excellent wind and sun, our legislators have failed to provide incentives for wind and solar and energy-saving devices to cut our losses. They told how — per person — Americans put 16 times as many warming pollutants into the air as do developing world citizens. They told how people are already starving and moving about as hunger refugees in Africa and Asia because of our global warming waste and greed. Peace is up for grabs.

Nebraskans for Peace has taken on the ‘environment’ as a priority not because we wish to duplicate what the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, the Nebraska Wildlife Federation, Oxfam, or the Center for Rural Affairs are doing. They do good work. We have adopted militarism and the environment as a priority because we believe that the U.S. military does do not believe what Chief Seattle and his people believed:

Every part of this earth is sacred… Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing, and every humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap that courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man… This we know: All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

The implicit assumption of militarism, however, is that land can be seized and owned, that life is not a web, and that what befalls some of us need not befall all. Ownership can be secured by guns.

Did the military believe as Chief Seattle did, they would not have left carcinogens in the aquifers near Mead, York, Grand Island and Hastings. They would not be claiming that they do not have to obey the EPA and clean up the carcinogenic TCE found in military sites all over the country. They would not have waited decades before starting to clean up TCE near Mead, and decades more before cleaning it up completely, even when the poisons are migrating near the Omaha water supply. They would respect the web. The land the bombs of WWII supposedly secured for us, military carelessness has lost to decent human use at Mead.

Despite this, the military knows its interest in global warming. While the Bush/Cheney Administration was dismissing global warming as a ‘myth,’ the military issued two reports — a 2003 study by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security and a 2007 study endorsed by many generals and admirals entitled, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change. The former offers a scenario where heat and fresh water from glaciers collapses the Gulf Stream and other like currents that presently bring warm water toward the poles. The collapse would make Europe and North America colder and drier, leading to extreme drought in the breadbasket areas of North America and Europe. Such climate change would create reductions in the globe’s useable food, water and energy supplies, consequent vast refugee and border management problems that would, in turn, create heavy-duty nationalism and a ‘fortress mentality’ worldwide. In specific areas, Northern European populations might push southward, and the Middle East would host vast conflicts over water and energy resources. You can visualize the wars.

The second study projects a world characterized by “extreme weather events, drought, flooding, sea-level rise, retreating glaciers, habitat shifts, and the increased spread of life-threatening diseases.” The warming will “exacerbate already marginal living standards in many Asian, African and Middle Eastern nations.” It will further erode “…conditions in already fragile areas… as food production declines,” increase diseases, destroy clean water sources, and force large populations to move in search of resources. (Oxfam case studies point to rising rivers and severe storms jeopardizing crops in Bangladesh, and longer droughts making subsistence more difficult in West African countries like Mali and Burkina Faso.) The admirals and generals who endorsed the report argue that “the national security consequences of climate change be fully integrated into national security and national defense strategies” and that the U.S. “commit to a stronger national and international role to help stabilize climate change.” We should, they say, “commit to global partnerships… to better manage climate impacts” and find better energy alternatives. The consequences of failure will be terrorism, weakened and failed governments or authoritarian ones, a U.S. drawn into a larger role in Africa, and possibly a further nuclearization of international tensions. Last month the military released another study essentially repeating these findings.

We do have alternatives to military solutions in which StratCom will likely be our hammer to keep the starving at home, intimidate non-cooperative governments, destroy terrorist targets, wall up borders and keep down nuclear threats. There is another way, and the military half recognizes it. That way is to stop our emissions post haste, negotiate a new and better Kyoto accord, create relief and conflict resolution tools to answer hunger and refugee problems, and rely on negotiation among members of the world community to keep us part of the web of life.

The world need not end in fire. Or ice.