When you hear the title of the new film from independent journalist/director Abby Martin and her team at The Empire Files, you may or may not have a good guess what it’s referring to. I’ll give you a hint: It’s not Martians, China, or Dr. Doom.

Earth’s Greatest Enemy is about the U.S. military, particularly its role as the planet’s biggest institutional polluter and climate change contributor. While provocative, the title is not sensationalist: It is a sober description of an entity whose activities harm virtually all life on earth, including the ones it’s sworn to protect. The film makes this case persuasively, with details and stories that will assault your conscience – and, hopefully, motivate you to join the struggle for change.

The military as polluter and climate change accelerator

Earth’s Greatest Enemy isn’t about the lives lost in direct, armed conflict. That toll is staggering, but it’s also more straightforward. This film is about something more subtly sinister: The colossal environmental damage the military does in its quest to uphold America’s global capitalist empire.

This damage comes in many forms, not least of which is greenhouse gases. For instance, the movie claims that just one flight of a Boeing Pegasus emits more carbon dioxide than the average American driver will emit in 40 years. With some 800 bases around the globe, each with fleets of heavy vehicles, the military goes through some 270,000 barrels of oil a day, adding about 55 million metric tons of CO₂ to the atmosphere – more than most nations.

And those numbers are just what’s on paper. The military is notoriously careless about its recordkeeping, having failed eight consecutive audits. On top of that, the military is only really required to track domestic greenhouse emissions, and is exempt from international climate agreements. The military’s actual emissions, the film argues, are likely many times higher than we know.

From there, the film zooms in on some cases that highlight the health and environmental consequences of our military’s reckless behavior. Here are a few that really stuck with me:

• Birth defects from depleted uranium in Iraq. War itself produces devastating environmental hazards, from toxic dust to radiation to broken sewage systems. In Iraq, it’s estimated that we used 250,000 bullets for every insurgent killed. At least some of these were depleted uranium rounds, which now litter cities and rural areas, leading to widespread birth defects and chronic illness.
• Occupation of Okinawa. The military currently has 32 installations on Okinawa, an island chain smaller than Rhode Island off the coast of Japan that we’ve occupied since World War II. The film shows the military clear-cutting a mountain, shaving it down, and dumping the debris into the ocean to expand a new base. Martin and her husband and co-producer, Michael Prysner, document native Okinawans as they protest the base’s construction and are arrested. Aerial footage of the monstrous base sticking out into the sea from this beautiful island was one of the most striking visuals in the film, a perfect symbol of the unholy arrogance of this enterprise.
• The poisoning of Camp Lejeune. At Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, between 1953 and 1987, some one million people are estimated to have consumed contaminated water, leading to widespread birth defects, illness, and infant deaths. Even after learning the water was contaminated, the military covered it up and allowed the poisoning to continue. The film follows one woman as she tries to catalog the full toll, visiting graveyards and contacting families.
• Navy sonar kills marine mammals by the millions. Navy sonar is incredibly loud, approaching 240 decibels, and can travel up to 300 miles. This has devastating effects on marine life. At that volume, the soundwave can cause injury and deafness, disrupting mating, communication, hunting, and all aspects of marine life. Despite environmental protections for many of these species, the Navy obtains special exemptions called “takes” that permit them millions of marine mammal casualties each year, including blue whales and dolphins. Non-mammals are not even counted or considered.
• Blowing up unused ordinances. Much of the military’s environmental damage is borne of pure wastefulness. In one memorable scene, soldiers pile up a huge amount of unused grenades, bullets, and other weaponry to make a spectacular fireworks display of it all. One Navy sailor explains that whatever doesn’t get used doesn’t get re-funded in the next fiscal cycle, so nothing can ever come back from a mission. Weapons and munitions are blown up for no reason or simply dumped into the ocean, just so they can be bought again in the next cycle. 

These cases are mere microcosms. Environmental devastation follows the military everywhere. One man interviewed for the film explained how he found contamination around 400 military sites, every single one he examined, including radiation and heavy metal pollution. He became interested in the subject when he realized that the oysters he was eating were contaminated by the base across the waterway from him in Maryland.

One thing the film does extremely well is highlight the human element in these stories. The people featured here are not radical agitators. They’re trying to protect their homes, resources, environments, water, and their friends and family and neighbors. They’re documenting what’s going on and speaking out because crimes of this scale demand accountability. They’d rather be fishing, gardening, or spending time with their families, but in one way or another the military has made that impossible for them. And it demonstrates just how remarkable people can be when they’re facing this crisis directly in their lives and communities, whether at home or abroad.

Unlearning decades of propaganda

Unfortunately, in America, where it matters most, serious criticism of the military almost never penetrates public consciousness. The military operates with nearly unanimous, bipartisan support. Our jingoism is reinforced throughout our lives by films, music, sports, commercials, news, politicians, peer pressure, school, and any number of other forces. 

Part of the film’s goal, then, as I understand it, is to simply confront people with the scale and severity of the problem – not to overwhelm or depress them, but to leave them no possibility of hiding from it any longer. Fully internalizing the reality of this behemoth and the damage it does can be a challenge, even for critics of military imperialism. Most people would probably rather not even hear of it. But Earth’s Greatest Enemy forces an honest confrontation with this existential threat, the systems that prop it up, and the lies we tell ourselves to avoid it. 

This was a key subject in a discussion following the film. I watched a screening at the Austin Film Society, where Martin was joined by veteran and activist Greg Stoker, who is also running for Congress in Texas’s 31st District. According to Martin, even people who praised the film as “the next Inconvenient Truth” were unwilling to support it publicly. Celebrities won’t endorse it; major distributors won’t touch it. She was told that you can’t just talk about the bad things the military does, you have to talk about the good, too.

A critic might well make that point: The movie spends no time talking about how the military defends our freedom, democracy, and way of life. If you’re invested in that story, you might even think all this devastation is ultimately worth it. In one scene, Martin confronts former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi with a question on the military’s environmental footprint. Pelosi quibbles a bit and then makes a vague reference to our national interests. 

Of course, when politicians talk about “national interests” they aren’t talking about your interests or mine. They’re talking about upholding global capitalism, which needs more resources and ever-expanding markets to ensure unlimited, exponential corporate profit. As far as defending our way of life goes, I’m not sure that working 40+ hours a week and watching Netflix is good enough to justify destroying ecosystems. 

While it is harsh on the military as an institution, the film is not remotely about bashing soldiers. Quite the opposite: In fact, several veterans are featured, including a memorable homeless veteran at the beginning whose tent and only possessions are bulldozed and trashed by the state. So much for supporting the troops. 

To my eye, at least, the film is even fairly gentle with the brass and corporate representatives it features. I got the sense these people are in over their heads – afraid to face the full magnitude of what they’re participating in or, perhaps, staying deliberately unaware of it. Except for those at the very top, most of the people in this system have, at one level or another, been lied to. They don’t seem to be driven by psychotic impulses, yet they’re enabling destructive behavior on an unprecedented, global scale. You may or may not feel sympathy for them, but the film is clear that it’s the system that deserves your anger and attention.

Facing down an all-powerful monolith

My biggest critique about the movie is that it can leave you with a fairly hopeless, tragic feeling. That’s not really Martin’s fault. These are extremely powerful forces and the struggle is enormous. The end of the movie does highlight some victories, and there is a faint note of optimism, but being overly positive here would simply be disingenuous.

This system has to be fought from within, and that’s a hard fight to get started, much less win. The military-industrial complex is deeply entrenched, becoming more permanent and powerful ever since President Eisenhower first warned about it 65 years ago. Americans are propagandized to trust and revere the military, to the point where the idea of opposing it in any way might feel treasonous. On top of that, we are all overworked, stressed out, distracted, and drowning in debt – perhaps by design, since it keeps most of us from taking up any troublesome causes.

Ultimately, though, all of this happens with our tax dollars and with our consent. If we took either or both of those away, things would have to change. It is monolithic and extremely dangerous, but not all-powerful. If the people of Okinawa can bravely put their bodies on the line to simply stymie construction of a base there, we can certainly demand better.

We’ll need to do far more than rein in the military to get a handle on the climate crisis. They may be the single largest emitter, but they still only account for a fraction of global emissions. Corporate greed and negligence remains the biggest driver. Still, taking corrective action in the military is a great place to start, and just might have the added benefit of leading to less wars. Stop building and dropping bombs. Decommission our tanks and airship carriers and nuclear weapons. 

While I was in the middle of writing this review, the US and Israel carried out joint airstrikes against Tehran. The Trump Administration did this on a very flimsy pretext, with no congressional approval, and against the wishes of nearly 80% of the country. It’s too early to know what the long-term ramifications will be, but it’s yet another case in point of the desperate need to get control of this beast.

It’s perfectly possible to reorient our society away from the naked, never-ending pursuit of power and profit and instead pursue values like sustainability and equality. People would still be required to work, but they’d get more satisfaction out of it knowing it’s for a community good rather than somebody else’s private profit. And every lifeform on the planet will be healthier for it.

Find a screening of Earth’s Greatest Enemy or donate to support the work of Abby Martin and The Empire Files.