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In general, war isn’t good. And it’s especially not good for the environment.
“The environment?” I hear you say. “What about the innocent victims, the countless civilian lives lost to bloodshed, the ghastly conditions, the hate, the fear, the violence? I mean, sure, no one wants the environment to suffer, but surely it’s the cost of human life lost in war that really turns the proverbial stomach of mankind?”

 
I’m not about to argue that the atrocities suffered by people at the hands of the merciless war machine are unimportant. It’s no surprise that our condemnation of warfare centres on loss of life – after all, we are only human and it is something of ourselves that we see in those helpless victims. But the generally human-centric focus of war reportage can skip over the very real harm that war has on the environment. This isn’t just a save-the-whales Greenpeace plea. The effects of warfare are far-reaching and the long-term effects in particular give us all reason to worry.
 
 
First things first, a sombre and poignant poem.
 
 
"We will live in the death smog for a while, breathing the dust of the dead, the 3 thousand or so who turn to smoke , as the giant ashtray in Lower Manhattan continues to give up ghosts. The dead are in us now, locked in our chests, staining our lungs, polluting our bloodstreams. And though we cover our faces with flag s and other pieces of cloth to filter the air, the spirits of the dead aren’t fooled by our masks."
- Lawrence Swan
 
 
This haunting response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks was written only a few weeks after the fact, in October 2001. Swan chooses to focus not on the atrocities that he has witnessed, the outrage of the American people, the rage percolating within them like some bad filter coffee. Instead he has put pen to paper and produced an environmentally enlightened poem. If only the “staining our lungs/polluting our bloodstreams” was a paradigm of poetic licence. Unfortunately, though the studies wouldn’t have even yet begun when this verse was born, the long-lasting environmental impact of 9/11 has since become all too clear.

 
Let’s start with an entrée of igneous jet fuel, care of two aircraft. Around 90,000 litres of it, in fact. Then, onto the main course: a whopping great part of the towers’ structure consisted of that dastardly deliverer of lung cancer, asbestos. Good. Throw in a few buckets of Americium-241, the radioactive isotope in the buildings’ hundreds of smoke detectors; some mercury light bulbs for a bit of zing; the constituent parts of 50,000 computers, well crushed and finely chopped; and voilá, bon appetit. For dessert, an ongoing and heady concoction of dioxin and polychlorinated biphenyls at record levels will be served, as the rubble at Ground Zero continues to burn.
 

I wish I were making this all up. In fact, Dr Marjorie Clarke, an environmental scientist from the City University of New York, described the emissions as “equivalent to dozens of asbestos factories, incinerators and crematoria - as well as a volcano”. Wake me up when September ends.

 
And, let it not be forgotten, this was the product of one day of warfare. If we consider what events that fateful day sparked, namely a still-ongoing conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq, things start to get downright depressing.

 
Of course, nothing gets the job done like a nuclear weapon. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by American forces in 1945 have their own chilling environmental legacy. Let me walk you through what happens when an atomic bomb descends from the skies. First of all, there is a blinding light and a giant wave of heat which cause any dry and flammable materials nearby to combust. Any human or other living creature (except perhaps cockroaches) within a kilometre of the explosion dies instantly. Buildings collapse, water lines break and fires are left burning for lack of water. Sometimes there’s a firestorm, killing anyone who miraculously survived the initial explosion. And then the radiation sickness kicks in, lingering for some years. Radioactive sand might clog waterways, polluting any available drinking water. In Hiroshima, the impact of the bombing was noticeable within a 10km radius of the city.

 
The unhappy statistics are endless. In the Middle East there always seems to be some argument going on, usually over oil. Sometimes the precious black stuff gets burnt in the process. In the Gulf War, Iraqi forces fleeing Kuwait set fire to their oil stores. This caused smog formation and acid rain; a soot layer was deposited in the desert and on plants, which suffocated. It took nine months to extinguish the fires.

 
Throughout the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first, the environment in much of the world has been subjected to some serious abuse at the hands of warring humans. So what’s being done about it? Sure, there’s an international criminal court for genocide, but what about ecocide?

 
Arie Afriansyah, a lecturer from the University of Indonesia’s Faculty of Law, is in the final year of his PhD at Otago and is grappling with that very question. His dissertation focuses on what international legal sanctions exist for breaches of environmental law in times of war.

 
There are in fact four bodies of international law that lend protection to the environment: international humanitarian law (IHL), international criminal law (ICL), human rights law (HRL), and international environmental law itself (IEL).
 
The first, IHL, is a set of laws that seeks to regulate war and armed conflict for humanitarian reasons. IHL focuses on the protection of civilians (or those no longer involved in the conflict) and restrictions on the means and methods of warfare. However IHL, and many more laws from the other areas mentioned, apply to only a limited extent where internal tensions or armed conflict are concerned. This raises problems as more and more internal conflicts are arising, compared to the international wars that characterised the twentieth century and around which IHL was developed. Unfortunately, a recent United Nations report acknowledged that “internal conflicts are the most strongly linked to the environment”. While states are still obliged to conform to international standards, it is the responsibility of the state itself to enforce environmental law on its warring factions.
 

Afriansyah points out that any existing sanctions for environmental damage have so far been applied inconsistently and unpredictably. There is one singular example of a state being openly punished for its naughtiness: Iraq was made to pay for its environmental indiscretions during the Gulf War which took place in the early 1990s. And, not only that, but it also had to atone for the transgressions of the opposing Coalition, which included US forces. Afriansyah suggests that if Iraq had been the victor in that war, it is highly likely that no environmental sanctions would have been imposed on the Coalition because Iraq started the war, by invading Kuqait illegally to begin with. And besides: a) the USA has that handy little power to veto any United Nations Security Council recommendations it doesn’t like; and b) everyone wants to be BFF with the USA.
 

So it seems that it is not the heinousness of the atrocities that determines whether states should make good for their misdemeanours, but rather whether they were victorious (or not) and their relationship with the other members of the UN, in particular Uncle Sam and his permanent Security Council member buddies.
 
At present, investigations into the environmental and wider humanitarian impact of a conflict can only be conducted by the UN if the warring states agree to it. That’s the first thing that should change, says Afriansyah, who would instead advocate an obligatory investigation and report by the UN after each conflict. Even then, he acknowledges, the report may not necessarily prompt any penalty, especially if one of the parties involved happens to have a power of veto.
 

Professor Judy Bennett of Otago’s Department of History points out that while the environment is often war’s silent victim, there can be some unexpected interactions between warring forces and their surroundings. For example, in the Western Pacific during World War II, thousands of Allied troops, unprepared for the topical climes, were incapacitated by malaria. This germ warfare did the job nicely for the Japanese. In the American Civil War, the Northern forces used the environment for psychological warfare: they tore down fences and buildings, stole livestock, and left the landscape so alien that Southerners felt their environment had turned against them.

 
Another almost bizarre example is the strip of no man’s land (called the “demilitarised zone”, or DMZ) between North and South Korea, which has turned into a veritable bio-haven for species, some of which were once thought to have been extinct from the Korean peninsula. Rare birds such as Manchurian cranes and Siberian herons stop by in the DMZ on their migratory route. Unfortunately (and ironically) this sanctuary is only safe as long as North and South Korea keep up their squabble.
 

Despite this happy example, Bennett makes it clear that warfare is getting worse for the environment. As weapons become more effective and destructive, the environment suffers more and more. For example, the nuclear weapons tested in the South Pacific after WWII – in a time of peace – were bigger than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the annoying tendency of radioactive isotopes to hang around means displaced islanders are left unable to live on their ancestral home almost sixty years on from the testing.

 
Living in peace and harmony sounds great, but unfortunately things aren’t that simple. We humans are slow to learn from our mistakes. And it is not only us, and our fellow inhabitants of earth, who suffer. The environment does too. The UN may be frustratingly toothless in enforcing international environmental standards but at least there are people like Arie Afriansyah hoping to change that.