Peace with Creation while facing the reality of War

The social, economic and political consequences of war are plain to see. Their outworkings and agonising human costs are exposed in news and media outlets daily.  Despite this, it is almost universally accepted that war is justified or even necessitated where other channels of preventing slaughter and destruction have failed. The fact that there has never been a period of history in which battles were not raging somewhere on the planet demonstrates how deeply warfare is ‘hard-wired’ in our species.  All too often, wars end without any real or just resolution of conflict. This is perhaps unsurprising given that the horrors perpetrated in wars often harden pre-existing tensions between people, ideologies, and nations, leaving all parties with bitter resentments and irredeemable losses which provide fertile ground for future conflict.

The belief that evil can ultimately only be defeated by ‘good people’ taking and violently wielding power over ‘bad people’ has achieved quasi-religious status, employing the language of redemption or salvation. It is a belief that is often found, glorified or romanticized, in storytelling, mythology, religion, and popular culture. The theologian Walter Wink, whose work the Earth Justice group has been engaging with for some time now, describes how almost all superhero stories employ the same familiar narrative arc, with heroes and villains engaging in mortal combat, the hero eventually emerging victorious and the villain crushed … until the inevitable next epic battle. Wink calls this ‘the myth of redemptive violence’.

At a time when the world faces the dual existential threats of ecological collapse and the highest number of armed conflicts since WW2, it feels important to take note of the significant environmental costs of war, before considering ‘COULD there be another way?’

1. Climate. It is widely accepted that military activities account for about 5.5% of total carbon emissions. Current rearmament programmes will increase this significantly, endangering critically important global climate goals. Greenhouse gas emissions by Nato alone have been estimated to rise by almost 200m tonnes a year. The production of weapons, vehicles, aircraft, and other military hardware involves highly energy-intensive processes, and fossil fuel emissions during operational phases of war are immense. In the post-war phase, rebuilding war-torn areas involve high emissions from construction and transportation activities. In addition, forest clearance for military and rebuilding use reduces the planet’s capacity to absorb CO₂.
2. Pollution. Chemical weapons and other pollutants such as oil spills, heavy metals and unexploded ordnance leave long-lasting contamination in soil and water. Disposal of conventional weapons, particularly from burning, detonation or dumping, causes widespread pollution. Bombings and the burning of fossil fuels by military vehicles and aircraft contribute significantly to air pollution, releasing particulate matter, sulphur dioxide and carbon monoxide into the atmosphere, with significant impacts on human physical and psychological health.
3. Ecosystems and biodiversity. Widespread destruction of terrestrial and marine habitats and major direct loss of more-than-human life occur at all stages of war: training exercises; building of infrastructure; deployment of weapons and bombs; deforestation; deliberate or inadvertent attacks on oil, industrial or nuclear facilities, movement of tanks and heavy machinery, burning and scorched earth practices, disposal of military waste and weapons, and mass population displacement.

In his book ‘The Powers that Be’ Wink discusses an alternative “third way” to address acts of violent domination. This model is neither passive submission nor violent retaliation. It is exemplified in gospel stories where evil is opposed without being mirrored, the oppressor resisted without being emulated and the enemy neutralised without being destroyed. Citing three stories in particular (the turning of the other cheek, carrying the Roman soldier’s burden an extra mile, and the impoverished debtor) Wink overturns familiar interpretations of the texts to show how Jesus’s teaching in each of these passages, far from representing exaggerated submission to ill-treatment, is in fact a highly specific and brilliantly subversive way of disarming the oppressor’s domination and regaining the oppressed person’s control and dignity – without resort to violence. Wink views the cross of Christ as the ultimate symbol of redemptive nonviolence, demonstrating God’s way of dealing with violence, not simply by absorbing it but by transforming it. Wink states clearly that the church should oppose violence in all its forms – because it utterly rejects domination as a solution to wrong-doing.

Nonviolent resistance has been a powerful tool for successful challenges to unjust regimes throughout history. Persistent and determined tactics such as civil disobedience, non-cooperation, boycotts, hunger strikes, sit-ins, peaceful protests, marches, and legal challenges have brought about real change, including regime change. Examples from the last century include the Indian Independence Movement where Gandhi’s philosophy of satyagraha (truth-force) was instrumental in India gaining independence from colonial rule, and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States which achieved major legislative victories contributing to the dismantling of racial segregation and expanded voting rights.

Analysis of factors associated with the success of these movements include widespread engagement and participation, moral ‘high ground’, clear achievable goals, identifying the oppressors’ weaknesses, strong leadership balancing both confrontation and negotiation, strategic targeted non-cooperation, effective communication, tactical flexibility, and international support. Many of these factors apply to the peaceful pro-Palestine movements that are now active round the world. While they appear to be having little discernible effect on halting the merciless carnage that is being inflicted on Gaza by, in Wink’s terms, the ‘Powers that Be’, is it naïve to hope that they could be instrumental in turning the tide on what the world will now consider acceptable in the ultimate outworking of these terrible hostilities that so heart-breakingly demonstrate that war cannot bring about peace when the fires of hatred are being so violently stoked?

As war becomes ever-more dangerous to people and planet, can we learn from Nature that life will spring back, not by destroying the destroyer but by finding its own way to flourish, no matter how disastrous the circumstances, when the world affords it peace.