From Draft NOtices, April‐June 2026
— Simeon Man
On February 18, more than one hundred community members and students attended a screening event at the University of California San Diego for Earth’s Greatest Enemy, a documentary film about the global environmental costs of the U.S. military. The event featured a Q&A with director Abby Martin and was co-sponsored by the Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts, the UCSD departments of Ethnic Studies and Communication, and Project YANO.
The film tackles head on the two pressing issues confronting the planet: U.S. militarism and the climate catastrophe. The U.S. military — with over 800 bases around the globe, more than the next ten largest militaries combined — is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases and the greatest polluter on Earth. Yet, the U.S. military has been consistently exempted from international climate agreements and thus not held accountable to the global emissions standard. This contradiction lies at the heart of the film and underscores its main proposition: that true climate justice requires demilitarization, and demilitarization requires the dismantling of the U.S. empire, which has thrived on waging open-ended wars in the interest of U.S. capital.
Martin is an independent journalist who has been outspoken against U.S. militarism and the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, which is praiseworthy if only because most U.S. journalists have been complicitly silent for two and a half years. The film argues that the military-industrial complex, so thoroughly enmeshed with the reproduction of capitalism, including the fossil fuel industry, will never offer a solution to climate change that does not exacerbate the crisis. “There is no greening our way out of this,” Martin says, as the film takes viewers inside a defense contractor convention aboard a U.S. warship during the biennial RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific) Exercise. Martin pulls no punches with her questions, for example, asking military officials aboard the warship: “Is this worth it? Is the wanton destruction of marine life worth RIMPAC?” The trite non-responses and befuddled looks she receives is otherwise comical if not for the catastrophic, deadly impact of the decisions and actions of these so-called leaders.
The film is devastating, heartbreaking, and overall, an intense experience. Yet I believe some viewers will feel an imminent sense of possibility because of some of its most powerful scenes documenting people’s resistance. One prolonged scene near the end of the film shows the Okinawan people’s struggle against the construction of a base over the endangered coral habitat of Henoko Bay in Okinawa, where locals — mostly elders — have staged a sit-in protest that has now surpassed three decades. And there’s the scene of Native Hawaiian water protectors mobilizing in response to the Red Hill fuel leak in 2021, which threatened the lives of residents, military personnel, and the future of O‘ahu itself; and the Muscogee forest defenders of Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta, who fought against the construction of Cop City, the massive police urban warfare training center that is materially connected to U.S. militarism abroad and to Israel’s occupation of Palestine. These moments of the film remind us that Indigenous people have always been on the frontlines against U.S. militarism and climate change, even if the film does not state so explicitly.
Overall, the film is an indispensable tool for educators and activists, a must-watch for young people who are considering joining the military, and for anyone who believes that critiquing the military makes one somehow unpatriotic, disloyal, or disrespectful. Too much is at stake, and this film is vital for understanding just how deeply our worlds are connected and that the U.S. empire is indeed Earth’s greatest enemy.
To find out where the film is being screened, visit https://earthsgreatestenemy.com. The next screening in San Diego will be on July 31. See poster below
This article is from Draft NOtices, the newsletter of the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (https://www.comdsd.org/).
