The US military is a behemoth that covers nearly the entirety of the planet, and the extent of the damage it is doing to the environment is difficult to comprehend. The military emits more carbon pollution than any other single institution and, depending on which estimates you trust, more than a vast number of countries in their entirety. As the world continues to hurtle toward climate disaster, the military is disproportionately responsible.
Earth’s Greatest Enemy, a new documentary project from journalist and activist Abby Martin, makes sure you won’t forget it.
Martin, host of The Empire Files, has long been an outspoken critic of American imperialism and US militarism. Around 2020, however, Martin’s focus shifted: she and her codirector, Mike Prysner, had a baby and began worrying about the future and the climate catastrophe threatening it: “What would it be like when our son is our age?” Martin asks. The new parents made the link between the war machine they’d spent their professional lives opposing and the climate crisis threatening their son’s future.
The result is a film that interrogates the American military’s disregard for the environment and culpability for its destruction — not only in a macro sense but also in individual towns, cities, and ecosystems all over the world. Everywhere Martin and Prysner travel, from Maryland to Hawaii, from Georgia to Gaza, evidence of the military’s might and depravity toward the earth and many of its vulnerable inhabitants piles up: military families are poisoned by contaminated drinking water, Iraqi citizens breath toxic air, and activists like Manuel Esteban Paez Terán of Atlanta, Georgia, known as Tortuguita, pay the ultimate price for standing in the machine’s way.
Toward the film’s conclusion, Martin comments that in the process of making the documentary, she and her team “were constantly confronted with the sheer, overwhelming nature of it all,” that “the…
Auteur: Abe Asher
