The Environmental Protection of Military Bases?

[ensho]

http://counterpunch.com/vine04302010.html


Ratifying Expulsion


Just weeks before Earth Day, and for the second time in little more than a year, environmental groups have teamed with governments to create massive new marine protection areas across wide swaths of the world’s oceans. Both times, however, there’s been something (pardon the pun) fishy about these benevolent-sounding efforts at environmental protection.

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A Base Issue

Both marine protection areas provide safe homes for sea turtles, sharks, breeding sea birds, and coral reefs. But they are also home to major U.S. military bases. Chagos’s largest island, Diego Garcia, hosts a secretive billion-dollar Air Force and Navy base that has been part of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program. The Pacific protection areas are home to U.S. bases on Guam, Tinian, Saipan, Rota, Farallon de Medinilla, Wake Island, and Johnston Island.

In both cases, the otherwise “pristine” protected environments carve out significant exceptions for the military. In Chagos, the British government has said, “We nor the US would want the creation of a marine protected area to have any impact on the operational capability of the base on Diego Garcia. For this reason…it may be necessary to consider the exclusion of Diego Garcia and its three-mile territorial waters.” In the Pacific, the Bush administration stressed that “nothing” in the protected areas “impairs or otherwise affects the activities of the U.S. Department of Defense.”

The incongruity of military bases in the middle of environmental protection areas is particularly acute since many military installations cause serious damage to local environments. As Miriam Pemberton and I warned in the wake of Bush’s announcement, “Such damage includes the blasting of pristine coral reefs, clear-cutting of virgin forests, deploying underwater sonar dangerous to marine life, leaching carcinogenic pollutants into the soil and seas from lax toxic waste storage and military accidents, and using land and sea for target practice, decimating ecosystems with exploded and unexploded munitions. Guam alone is home to 19 Superfund sites.”

Similarly, the base on Diego Garcia was built by blasting and dredging the island’s coral-lined lagoon, using bulldozers and chains to uproot coconut trees from the ground and paving a significant proportion of the island in asphalt. Since its construction, the island has seen more than one million gallons of jet fuel leaks, water fouled with diesel fuel sludge, the warehousing of depleted uranium-tipped bunker buster bombs, and the likely storage of nuclear weapons.

For all the benefits that marine protection areas might bring, governments are using environmentalism as a cover to protect the long-term life of environmentally harmful bases. The designation also helps governments hold onto strategic territories. Indeed, all of the Pacific and Indian Ocean islands involved are effectively colonies, including the Chagos Archipelago, which Britain refers to as the British Indian Ocean Territory and which was illegally detached from Mauritius during decolonization in the 1960s.

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military are killing the earth in more ways then one

[babylonsister]

1. Umm.... The Military Goes Green

http://environment.change.org/blog/view/the_military_goes_green


The Military Goes Green
by Nikki Gloudeman April 22, 2010 03:26 PM (PT) Topics: Carbon Regulation, Climate Security, Energy Efficiency, Oil and Gas, Renewable Energy


When it comes to environmental impact, it's hard to top the Pentagon.

The DOD generates a whopping 80 percent of the entire U.S. government's energy output, uses 300,000 barrels of oil for its aircraft and vehicles each year, and operates 600,000 buildings which suck up more than 3.8 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity.

Luckily, according to a new report by the Pew Project on National Security, Energy, and Climate, the military is making important strides toward curbing this massive footprint.

Troops in Afghanistan are using solar cells to power their computers, for instance, and the Army and Air Force are using the sun to help power several of their bases. The Fort Irwin base in California is set to go off the electrical grid entirely in the next 10 years.

Generating the most buzz, however, are efforts to green fighting vehicles. The Navy has announced its so-called "Great Green Fleet," a cache of ships, subs, and planes that will run completely on biofuels, will be operational by 2016. This week, it tested the "Green Hornet," which runs on a mix of jet fuel and mustard plant-derived biofuel. The Air Force, meanwhile, recently completed a test of its own aircraft powered 50-50 by conventional fuel and biofuel.

This commitment isn't entirely altruistic. With oil prices on the rise, there is a powerful financial incentive to wean fuel dependence. The Pew report notes that for every $10 change in per barrel oil prices, the DOD must pay an extra $1.3 billion in additional energy costs.

The military's greening strategy is so beneficial, in fact, that some are using it as example to inspire the White House. Phyllis Cuttino, director of Pew's climate and energy program, has called on lawmakers to take note, and pass climate change legislation ASAP: "(The U.S. government) should put a price on carbon, invest in energy innovation, and help deploy renewable energy. Doing so will make us more prosperous, reduce pollution, and enhance our national security."

[ensho]

2. a drop in a very large bucket

and what about the non existent clean up of the toxic bases? all of them are toxic.

[babylonsister]

3. Sure, there are a lot of issues that have to be addressed, like the

toxic bases, that have been toxic for decades. But they are taking steps in the right direction.