Earth’s Greatest Enemy – an interview with Abby Martin
As the world confronts climate breakdown, a new film argues the greatest environmental threat is not industry alone, but empire itself. Investigative journalist Abby Martin speaks to Rastko Novaković for this week’s In Common about militarism, pollution and the global struggle for accountability.
We fail to protect the forces of life at our own peril: nature, culture, and self-determination are all tightly woven, and we feel violence against them intimately. The US military is the violent arm of history’s greatest empire, and just as the US is not a national republic, so its military is not national, but planetary. To maintain US domination through its 800 bases globally, controlling extraction at the point of a gun, it poisons, pollutes, and kills all life.
It is this system that is put on trial by investigative journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin and her partner, Iraq war veteran Mike Prysner, in their new film Earth’s Greatest Enemy. In this eviscerating panorama, Martin speaks to violated communities and researchers, she haunts the institutions that enable this impunity to carry on, and confronts the empire’s agents directly. We caught up with her in the run-up to the film’s Scottish premiere.
RN: Are there any rules governing US military pollution?
AM: It's a completely lawless state. Given the US rules of conduct in Iran, Gaza, and everywhere else around the world, one can only imagine what they are doing with no one overseeing them. With greenhouse gas emissions, during the Clinton administration, they pursued an exemption for military emissions from their national total, and every other country followed suit. So all of these climate conferences have been essentially a sham, since we're not actually counting emissions in totality.
All the environmental cleanup and remediation efforts are basically a consequence of litigation from environmental organisations and groups. For example, the sonar the Navy deploys in oceans around the world, which travels hundreds of miles, causes bubbles in the brain and severely impacts feeding, nursing, and navigation for marine life. They release these environmental impact studies every couple of years to try to placate environmentalists, but it’s cursory and superficial. They don't even assess the majority of ocean life, shredded by these high-decibel assaults. The military can override the US government under the pretense and auspices of national security. They can go into places that no commercial fishing, no other government vessel can. It's all because of the US military's global domination of the planet.
In the case of Hunter's Point in San Francisco, there was a superfund site where they buried radioactive waste barrels, affecting predominantly Black, minority, low-income communities. The remediation effort has been a joke because they basically falsified documents. It was the biggest case of eco-fraud. So this is what they do when they're pinpointed to actually do something about the mess that they have created.
When we look at legacy contamination, they continue to deny the claims, like the case of Camp Lejeune. They will continue to deny until these people just die. So that's what they do to their own service members and their families at these bases.
RN: All this pollution is merely the residue of projecting violent power. What threat are we facing there?
AM: The mask is being completely ripped off. The US is a naked imperialist state. This is naked colonisation. You have the Trump administration completely abandoning any sort of pretense that this is about some benevolent empire engaging in human rights, diplomacy, and spreading democracy. This is quite obviously and blatantly stated as being about seizing oil, pillaging, and plundering Venezuela and Iran's oil supply. This has always been about acquiring, seizing, and controlling every last drop of oil and natural gas and every other vestige of natural resources that is not completely under the boot of US domination all around the world. No one will stand in the US's way, including 165 Iranian schoolchildren. Everyone is expendable, everyone and everything.
RN: What signs of hope did you find in making and touring the film?
AM: People are completely starved for the information. They know that they're being gaslit, and they just don't know where to go to get good information and to fight back against this crazy, incessant propaganda. The richest men in the world have controlled and consolidated all of the media, and they're amplifying a false version of reality. The vast majority of people are repulsed by this. They do not want to live in a hollowed-out military empire where parasitic, vampiristic billionaires are sucking us and bleeding us dry, and using it to bomb children in the Middle East. The vast majority of people do not want this.
The oil depots that were just bombed by the US and Israel, pollution has no borders, right? Cancer, carcinogens have no borders. So all of this impacts every single person on the planet. Everything does, and people are waking up to that. They're tying it all together. Five years ago, hardly anyone cared about Palestine. Now it's understood as intrinsically tied to everyone's collective liberation. So I'm seeing this burgeoning, this eruption of consciousness and mass awakening in the States that I never had before. The rest of the world's waiting for us to wake up and organise accordingly. And it's about time we do.
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The World At A Crossroads: Imperialism, Empire and Resistance public discussion featuring Abby Martin, organised by Conter and Skotia, 23rd March
Scottish premiere of Earth’s Greatest Enemy at GFT, 24th March, organised by Inclinations Film Club
