EXALT Dialogues: Extractive Militarism, “Green” and Otherwise
Welcome to the 4th and final EXALT Dialogues of 2024, "Extractive Militarism, “Green” and Otherwise".
When: Thursday, December 12, 2024, 17:00-19:00 (Finnish time, UTC+2), 16:00-18:00 (CET)
Where: Online on Zoom. Zoom link will be sent closer to the event.
Speakers: Nico Edwards, Julie Klinger, Benjamin Neimark, and Patrick Bigger
Event description:
As the ‘triple planetary crisis’—climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution—is gaining speed, so are companies’ promotion of ‘ethical consumption’ and ‘decarbonization’, next to government attempts at facilitating ‘a green energy transition’. Meanwhile, industrial production and consumption accelerates without question, spreading more digital ‘smart’ technologies, wind turbines, solar panels, high-voltage power lines (HVPLs), data centers and electric vehicles, and promoting natural gas and nuclear energy as ‘low-carbon’ solutions. Amid the ascendance of green capitalism, we tend to forget that the largest sources of ecosystemic destruction are war and militarism. In line with the proliferation of false solutions accompanying the ‘green transition’, the military is now also attempting to ‘go green’: decarbonizing its operations (Bigger & Neimark, 2017), making violence ‘sustainable’ (Dunlap, 2017) and positioning themselves as relevant, if not a solution (Edwards, 2023), to the triple planetary crisis. This EXALT Dialogue will delve into the realities of war, militarism and shifting ‘green’ forms of extractivism.
The relationship between war and extractivism is intense. War, we might say, in the general sense is extractivism. The construction and reproduction of military power require extractivism—the plundering and reappropriation of ecosystems to build and maintain armed forces. From hydrocarbons (Belcher et al., 2020) to minerals (Dunlap & Brock, 2022), chemical compounds and natural landscapes, the resource use and production processes required by armed force are vast—whether associated with military, security or police forces. For example, more than 455 military US bases are contaminated with ‘forever chemicals’ (EWG, 2023), while communities living on conflict lands, from Iraq to Vietnam, Bosnia to Syria, suffer across generations from the intake of radioactive wastes, toxins and heavy metals—complicating the very idea of ‘post’-conflict (Specht et al., 2024; Thomas, 1994). In short, every node in the life cycle of weapons production and use reaps eco-social devastation. Extractivism, then, facilitates bombings, invasions, police brutality and armed combat, decimating environments and their inhabitants, causing urban wreckage alongside myriad forms of air, water, soil and human contamination. War and militarism, as the exterminating violence in Palestine, Yemen and beyond remind us, remain primary socioecological and climatic concerns.
Facilitated by Alexander Dunlap, this EXALT Dialogue opens a roundtable discussion with Nico Edwards, Julie Klinger, Benjamin Neimark, and Patrick Bigger to discuss the links between extractivism and militarism, including recent efforts toward a ‘military green transition’. Each speaker has 15 minutes to present their insights, followed by time for panelists to exchange with each other and open the space for audience questions and answers. Tracing the connections between militarism and extractivism, this Dialogue highlights the destructive and all too often omitted relationship between the two and explores pathways for remediation to the ever-present and proliferating harms caused by today’s extractive militarism and militarized extractivism.
See the full event description here.
