Deforestation: Avatar, Vietnam, and the War on the Trees

(Originally appeared at Tenthmil.com)

One thing the blockbuster film “Avatar” showed in glorious, graphic 3D: In war, no matter who wins, the forest nearly always loses.

There goes the neighborhood

In the normal course of life, average folks tend to be conservationists. Why shouldn’t they? Just like the Na’vi of “Avatar”, most human societies throughout history developed systems that enabled people to live on the same patch of ground for generations.

The Bible actually commands: “When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, in making war… thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an axe against them.” This was also the norm in the intercity warfare of classical Greece; The Spartans only cut down Athenian olive trees when their enmity became really nasty. 

Trees are part of that stability, whether it’s olive and fruit trees for food, or other species for lumber, shade, and cover. You plant trees for yourself, and for your children and grandchildren.

 Today we call that “sustainability.”

But in times of war, the timeframe changes: people do what it takes to survive this year, this month, this day. If that meant cutting down a forest, then the forest came down, regardless of the effect it would have on future generations.

 And indeed, that’s what happened as empires arose in the ancient and classical world. First, warfare devastated Mesopotamia – the deserts of Iraq were once rich farmlands, and the brown hills once were covered in forests.

Then the Greeks and Romans waged their wars, and the tree-cutting spread throughout the Mediterranean. Forests came down to build siege engines, for army cookfires, and sometimes to punish enemies.

The war on the forest

But Caesar cut down Gallic forests to prevent his enemies using them for cover; Augustus did the same on the German frontier. That set the stage for the next thousand years of warfare – Henri II of England set fire to the forests of Ireland for the same reason.

And it wasn’t just the forests of the enemy that were decimated. The Phoenicians wiped out their own resource, the storied cedars of Lebanon, to build their fleets. The forests of Spain were leveled to build King Phillip’s Armada; then France’s forests were cut down for ships, and so were England’s – it’s estimated that when Nelson battle Napoleon’s fleet at Trafalgar, each of his ships had taken about 6,000 mature oaks.

In the modern era, third-world conflicts are often financed by timber sales. The Khmer Rouge Communist insurgency in Cambodia was financed by rainforest destruction; that has since happened in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Indochina, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Central Africa, the Amazon, Colombia, Central America, and New Caledonia.

Wars also create refugees, desperate people struggling to survive far from their native region. Without a stake in the local ecology, and with life and death on the line on a daily basis, they strip the region of food and firewood. During the Rwanda conflict, refugees nearly drove the mountain gorillas to extinction. In the Congo, it was elephants that were nearly destroyed.

And in many cases, ecological destruction leads to war and conflict that in turn leads to more ecological destruction. In Darfur, it was deforestation that led to scarcity, conflict, drought, and a huge refugee crisis… which in turn led to more deforestation and desertification.

We keep pushing the envelope.

The tree-destruction scene in “Avatar” looked like something out of the Vietnam War, for good reason.

In Vietnam, the American Army had Caesar’s problem: the enemy used the forest for cover. But they had a whole new way of dealing with it: Napalm to burn them out, and Agent Orange to defoliate. The jungles of Southeast Asia couldn’t fight back like “Avatar’s” Eywa, and took years to recover. The toxic side effects took their toll on the local ecosystem, as well as the local people, and also the American soldiers who were exposed.

When Saddam Hussein’s army pulled out of Kuwait during the first Gulf War, they set fire to the oilfields, creating a whole new kind of environmental devastation. During the most recent Lebanon conflict, Israel bombed a major coastal oil facility, staining 80 miles of coastline with 110,000 barrels of oil. At the same time, Hezbollah rockets fired into Northern Israel set off forest fires, destroying an estimated 600,000 trees.

But there actually is a bright side…

After Gulf War II, the US restored the marshlands of Southern Iraq, bringing back a habitat of 7,000 square miles (twice the size of Rhode Island) that had been turned to desert by Sadam Hussein in retaliation for an uprising of Shia Arabs.

During the Guatemalan Civil War, the Peten District became such a dangerous place (more than 100,000 people were killed) that tree-cutting effectively ended, leaving it today as one of the largest surviving stands of virgin tropical rainforest north of the Amazon.

There’s an international movement to create peace parks along international borders that have suffered ecological upheavals, such as the eastern Congo.

And there’s the Korean Demilitarized Zone.

Picture a pristine environment.

Forests of Mongolian Oaks full of birds; streams full of fish; coastlands with rare birds like Manchurian Cranes and Siberian Herons. Endangered species like the sak wildcat and the Asiatic black bear.

And no people – no people at all.

The Korean DMZ is a narrow ribbon of land 150 miles long and two and a half miles wide. The DMZ was created in 1953 at the end of the Korean War to keep the two Koreas, North and South, from shooting each other.

For more than 50 years, thousands of nervous, trigger-happy troops patrolled along the DMZ, but never ventured across the barricades and barbed wire. And so, inadvertently, it became a refuge. As Korea industrialized, its population boomed and its industry drove countless species into decline and extinction, the DMZ remained untouched.

Not quite as lush as Pandora, the zone still manages to cover an amazing range of environments, including wetlands, forests, estuaries, mountains, coastal islands, and riparian valleys. Waterfowl love it – it’s the wintering ground for two of the world’s most endangered birds, the white-naped crane and the red-crowned crane.

Still waiting for formal protection, the biggest threat to this accidental preserve would be peace. With the South Korean capital, Seoul, just 20 miles to the south, there will be heavy pressure to develop the region for condos and office parks if there is ever a peace treaty between the North and the South.

Perhaps the local waterfowl and small animals are secretly praying for us crazy humans to stay at war with each other….

All images copyright 2009 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

The War Grinds On

(Originally published in the Powell River Peak)

When he graduated from Brooks Secondary School in 2003 and joined the Canadian Armed Forces, Gord Hoffman knew there was a good chance he would be deployed on a mission somewhere in the world. It's one of the things for which the Canadian military is known.

Sometime next month, Hoffman and elements of his unit, the 1 Service Battalion in Edmonton, Alberta, will be shipping out to Afghanistan as part of the national support element. Exact dates and details can't be revealed for security reasons.

(More...)
"I'll be supporting our mission," said Hoffman. "I'm a mobile support equipment operator by trade, which basically means I'm a driver for any number of vehicles that we have over there, including the 16-tonne pallet-loading system, the new armoured heavy-support vehicle system, and the tracked light-armoured vehicle."

Hoffman is one of two Powell Riverites in current deployment. Darryl Hansen, who graduated from Max Cameron Secondary School in 2000, is also going as a driver with the national support element.

"This is my first time overseas," said Hansen. "We'll be patrolling, peacekeeping. We've done a large amount of training and I think we're mentally prepared and ready to go."

Hoffman likewise emphasized the intensity of the training he's been receiving. "We've had a lot of cultural awareness briefings, lessons learned from previous tours," he said. "They've figured out what works best and we're learning from their experience. We've got corporals from the 5 Service Battalion training us based on what they saw there. We're getting a variety of different scenarios, from practice patrols, to improvised explosive devices (IEDs), anything we might encounter in the theatre of war."

When he was in school, Hoffman worked his way up through Junior Forest Wardens and army cadets, and he said that joining Canadian forces seemed like the next logical step. He also worked for several years as a carrier for the Peak.

"I don't get back to Powell River enough," he said. "Being based in Edmonton, I miss the mountains and the ocean. There will be mountains where I'm going in Afghanistan, but not as much rain as in Powell River."

Both Hoffman and Hansen will be leaving wives behind for the six or seven months of their deployments. "It'll be tough," said Hansen. "But I think my wife and I are both mentally prepared for it. We can keep in touch by email."

Hoffman will also be separated from his one-year-old son, Alex. "It'll be hard," he said.

Jim Hoffman, Gord's father, said it took him a little while to get used to the idea of his son going to Afghanistan, both as a parent and as a patriot. Their deployment comes at a difficult time for the mission. There has been increased activity by the Taliban, and last week involved both the death of the 78th Canadian service person, and the release of a report by former federal Liberal cabinet member John Manley, calling for a re-evaluation of Canada's involvement.

"He loves the job, loves the work," Jim Hoffman said. "But I'm not really comfortable with the mission. I don't think they're really there for peacekeeping. There've been too many boys killed."

Hansen said it's all part of the job. "I'm excited to go, proud to serve my country, and I'm looking forward to it."

Supporting the Troops

Via Brandon Freedman and the Huffington Post, CBS News reports on a "Hidden Epidemic" of military suicides.

Tonight CBS will air the first of a two-part series on the "hidden epidemic" of military suicides, revealing numbers that CBS calls "stunning." The report examines data on the suicide rate amongst veterans once they return home, which indicates a serious mental health issue — and a hidden mortality rate.

Keteyian previewed the segment on the "CBS Early Show" today, saying that the CBS five-month study found that vets were "more than twice as likely to commit suicide in 2005 as non-vets." Chillingly, though the Veterans Affairs Department estimates that "some 5,000 ex-servicemen and women will commit suicide this year,' that's a lowball estimate. Said Keteyian: "Our numbers are much higher than that, overall."

There's been an big increase in post-Iraq soldiers being drummed out for "discipline problems" - the kind of thing that is often a sign of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Wounded Times reports 10 soldiers a day are discharged with "personality disorders". And when they're cashiered, of course, they lose their VA health care, too.

I'd love to know what kind of correlation, if any, there is between soldiers being denied PTSD treatment and that incredible suicide rate...
(There's more...)

More, from NPR, and the Nation:

Jon Town has spent the last few years fighting two battles, one against his body, the other against the US Army. Both began in October 2004 in Ramadi, Iraq. He was standing in the doorway of his battalion's headquarters when a 107-millimeter rocket struck two feet above his head. The impact punched a piano-sized hole in the concrete facade, sparked a huge fireball and tossed the 25-year-old Army specialist to the floor, where he lay blacked out among the rubble.

~~~ snip ~~~

Eventually the rocket shrapnel was removed from Town's neck and his ears stopped leaking blood. But his hearing never really recovered, and in many ways, neither has his life. A soldier honored twelve times during his seven years in uniform, Town has spent the last three struggling with deafness, memory failure and depression. By September 2006 he and the Army agreed he was no longer combat-ready.

But instead of sending Town to a medical board and discharging him because of his injuries, doctors at Fort Carson, Colorado, did something strange: They claimed Town's wounds were actually caused by a "personality disorder." Town was then booted from the Army and told that under a personality disorder discharge, he would never receive disability or medical benefits.
Town is not alone. A six-month investigation has uncovered multiple cases in which soldiers wounded in Iraq are suspiciously diagnosed as having a personality disorder, then prevented from collecting benefits.

Some people are upset by torture

Frank Rich is on a tear today at the NY Times.

The heart of the column:

By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s "enhanced interrogation" techniques have a grotesque provenance: "Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation."

90 years since the War to End All Wars...

"If any question why we died
Tell them, because our fathers lied."

This was Rudyard Kipling's shortest poem - his angry and anguished response to the death of his son in the First World War.
It's been 90 years since "the guns of August" began the process of tearing Europe apart that lasted most of the last century, and Adam Gropnick has a chilling essay in The New Yorker that looks at some new scholarship and some old truths.
As we approach the 1,000-casualty mark in Iraq, and revisit Kerry and W's war in which 50,000 Americans died, it's chilling to contemplate the reality of that earlier conflict:

"The war began on August 4th. By August 29th, there were two hundred and sixty thousand French dead...
On one day during the Battle of the Somme, in the summer of 1916, more than fifty thousand British troops died walking directly into German fire, without advancing the front by a single foot."

There are also disquieting resonances of our own time: the rush to war, the seeming inevitabity of it, the leaders who expected easy victories and think about or plan for what they would do if things didn't go the way they expected...
As we contemplate the prospect of a failed Iraqi state and a new Shia militancy spreading across the Islamic world, it's worth considering some of Gropnick's closing words:

"And so the question remains: Were they right to fight? What would have happened if the British neutrals had held fast on August 3rd and not gone in? A Europe overrun by a triumphant German militarism is only one possibility. A Communist revolution in France is a secondary possibility, with unknowable consequences...
"Yet it is hard to see even a victorious German Reich costing liberal civilization quite as much as its defeat did. Wilhelmine Germany was, if not liberal, at least plural... The logic of German militarism may have meant that there would be a war sooner or later. But, just conceivably, the force of German civil society — of science and reason, in that age of Einstein and Freud and Planck and Warburg — would have tempered the force of militarism. The experiment never had a chance. What is hard to imagine is a worse consequence: Britain and France demoralized and depleted, Germany humiliated but not vanquished, Russia robbed of any chance of liberal reform and turned over to a gang of psychopathic fanatics. What exactly would have been worse than that?"

Reading this piece, I am filled with fear - that we are heading into another storm like that one... and that the long-term consequences of W's splendid little war will be as unexpected, and as debilitating.