Modern Military Weaponry and (un)Sustainable Treatment of the Environment
Publisher: The Commons: Puget Sound Journal of Politics
Author(s): Melanie Siacotos
Date: 2020
Topics: Public Health, Weapons, Waste, and Pollution
This mindset could have been sustainable in ancient warfare but isn't anymore. Where wars were fought with swords they are now fought with explosives. Weaponry and military strategies were much more surface level (i.e. trenches) and had localized affects. Weapons today are more chemically harmful, and those effects are compounded by the globalization of conflict. As the world becomes more interconnected socially and economically it logically follows that conflict in one area of the world would have effects all over (disruptions in trade and access to information for example). Although the industrialization process continues for some countries, the west industrialized starting in the mid 1800s and continuing well into the 1900s.5,6 Humankind has advanced to better understand atoms and chemicals and so we are more equipped (and inclined) to make weapons that are destructive at that level. In approximately the last 125 years, warfare has become environmentally unsustainable. While modern warfare became more proficient at killing humans, it also became more proficient at killing the environment.