Par Abe Asher
Abby Martin’s latest documentary, Earth’s Greatest Enemy (Earth’s Greatest Enemy), takes stock of the environmental damage caused by the American war machine and follows the trail of destruction left by military bases until the melting of the polar ice caps.
The United States military is a gigantic organization that spans almost the entire planet. The extent of the damage it inflicts on the environment is difficult to comprehend. The American army emits more CO? than any other institution and, according to reliable estimates, more than many countries taken together. As the world hurtles ever faster toward climate catastrophe, the military is disproportionately contributing to it. Earth’s Greatest Enemya new documentary from journalist and activist Abby Martin, makes sure you’ll never forget it.
Abby Martin, présentatrice de The Empire Filesan independent documentary and interview series, has long been a vocal critic of American imperialism and militarism. Around 2020, Abby Martin’s focus shifted: she and her co-director, Mike Prysner, had a baby and began to worry about the future and the threat posed by the climate crisis. “What will the world be like when our son is our age?” asks Abby Martin. These young parents established the link between the war machine against which they had fought all their professional lives and the climate crisis which threatens the future of their son.
This film exposes the U.S. military’s disregard for the environment and its responsibility for its destruction – not only on a macro scale, but also in villages, towns and individual ecosystems around the world. Everywhere Abby Martin and Mike Prysner go, from Maryland In Hawaii, from Georgia to Gaza, evidence is mounting of the military’s impact and harm to the Earth and its most vulnerable inhabitants: military families are poisoned by contaminated drinking water, Iraqi civilians breathe toxic air, and activists such as Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, a native of Atlanta, Georgia – better known as Tortuguita – are paying the ultimate price for opposing the system. (Manuel Esteban Paez Terán is an environmental activist who was shot and killed by a police officer in Atlanta while opposing the construction of a center police training in place of a forest.)
At the end of the film, Abby Martin observes that she and her team were “constantly confronted with the overwhelming scale of all the destruction” during the making of the documentary, and that “the more we watched, the bigger it got.” But Earth’s Greatest Enemy is particularly chilling not when it simply describes the environmental destruction caused by the army, but when it highlights the ideological orientation of military leaders towards the planet.
Particularly when Abby Martin attends an Air & Space Forces Association panel discussion, titled “Guarding the Northern Tier : Domain Awareness and Air Superiority in the Arctic“Protecting the Northern Border: Domain Awareness and Air Superiority in the Arctic.” In footage from the conference, we see a uniformed officer telling the “companies present” that Alaska, due to the rapid disappearance of sea ice, is “a place to come and experiment.” The melting of glaciers is not seen as a warning, but as an opportunity to continue the endless plunder of the Earth’s natural resources. The conference speakers are unable to imagine that Alaska’s ecosystem, kept intact, could have any value.
The relationship between capitalism and militarism is fundamental to understanding why the military seems so unserious when it comes to reducing its CO emissions. The US military was largely created to protect the accumulation of capital through resource extraction. The first domestic military bases were established to protect the fur and mining industries, and the first overseas bases to give the military access to coal.
According to Abby Martin, the primary motivation of the American military is to maintain a global economic system dominated by the United States, based on the exploitation and disproportionate consumption of natural resources. Climate change may be a concern for the military, but solving it would almost certainly involve overturning this system. This could explain why many leaders of powerful countries like the United States seem less interested in solving the climate crisis than in preparing to dominate a planet that is warming and becoming increasingly unlivable.
The documentary gives an overview of how this logic works at the highest levels of power. When Abby Martin goes to the 2021 UN climate conference (COP26) in Glasgow, she sees the presence of more than four hundred fossil fuel lobbyists. She also describes the UN conference as “corporate tradeshow“(“professional business show”).
During the conference, Abby Martin asks Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, how she can justify an increase in the Pentagon’s budget if the military contributes significantly to global warming. Nancy Pelosi responds that “national security advisers are all telling us, one by one, that the climate crisis is a national security issue.” Climate change is a triggering factor for conflicts linked to resources and migratory flows. Thus, the very crisis that the military helps perpetuate becomes a justification for increasing military funding – a vicious cycle.
Earth’s Greatest Enemy is not just a political documentary; it is also driven by personal themes. Thus, the shadow of the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the United States hangs like a dark cloud over the film. Mike Prysner served in Iraq and returned as a vocal critic of war and American militarism; Abby Martin became politically aware when she protested the invasion as a student.
The film opens with the words of a war veteran who lives in a tent on the street in Los Angeles and is determined to spend his days playing the piano before losing feeling in his hands. In the second part, the film returns to the devastating, transgenerational effects of the war on health in Iraqi cities, but also on American soldiers and their children.
The emphasis on the small-scale consequences of the army’s disregard for the environment and the populations who live there constitutes another recurring theme of the documentary. One of the most poignant passages concerns the story of Camp Lejeune, a U.S. Marine Corps base in eastern North Carolina, where service members and their loved ones have, since the mid-1950s and for decades, drank and bathed in water contaminated by toxic substances.
However, the film sometimes struggles to embrace the entirety of the problem and moves from COP26 to ocean pollution, then to the construction of a base in Okinawa, without always maintaining a clear narrative line. But the task is colossal: Accurately examining the environmental effects of the U.S. military – even when it comes to very small parts of it in very specific places – is overwhelming, as Abby Martin acknowledges herself. Earth’s Greatest Enemy does its best to convey the extent of the damage caused by the US military and urges us to take action, while there is still time. (Article taken from Jacobintranslated by LAVA Belgium2026)
