The Earthquake Environmental Justice Aren’t Talking About

On December 15th, many people in Syria felt the earthquake. Seismic scales registered above 3.0 on the Richter scale and could be felt up to 500 miles away. Natural disasters usually have the attention of people around the world. When earthquakes happen, humanitarian workers and supplies are sent to help out. After hurricanes, organizations release statements responding to the urgency of the climate crisis and hypothetical transitions away from fossil fuels. In Syria, what happened on December 15th wasn’t an earthquake– it was a massive airstrike that Israel carried out in Syria. This ongoing bombardment is reciprocally destructive to daily life and the environment as it continues to push the climate crisis further through jarring fossil fuel consumption.

But where are the environmental organizations? Many organizations that would typically release these statements after “natural” disasters have been silent. Except this was not a natural disaster–and the countries that would typically send “humanitarian aid” are the ones that caused this quake to happen. This deliberate mass destruction came shortly after the US dropped dozens of bombs in just a few hours after the fall of Assad. The bewildering longtime silence of environmental organizations when it comes to US militarism is not representative of any genuine commitment to climate justice. The most heavily weighted factors in their silence may be a blissful ignorance from the normalization of a whitewashed “environmentalism”, or the fear of repression and financial repercussions of taking popular anti-war stances. Regardless, the murderous result is antithetical to everything they profess.

A June 2024 UN report on the environmental impact of the genocide in Gaza highlighted the catastrophic impacts of Israel’s incessant bombing on the ecosystem, water quality, air quality, and soil in Gaza. Genocide doesn’t just cause ecocide, isn’t just parallel to ecocide, but is also a result of ecocide. Ecocide is a tactic of genocide. The long-term damage to every ecological foundation in Gaza makes it harder and harder to sustain life. Life can’t be sustained without agriculture or without clean drinking water. And now, the U.S. and Israel are attempting to repeat this cycle of destruction in Syria, just as they have started to in Lebanon.

Regardless of how hard the imperialism and war economy of Western powers try to create a lavish life for its beneficiaries at the expense of everyone else, it is fundamentally impossible to sustain life for anyone when war-making tools continue to devastate the planet. The grim irony is that the war economy eats its own makers.

The first 120 days of the genocide in Gaza alone produced more emissions than 26 countries combined. Every new base that is established across the globe contaminates the soil that it occupies, harming the ecosystem and the valuable biodiversity that is critical for sustaining life. As it builds bases over occupied land globally, the military literally steamrolls over survival.

Now, the U.S. and Israel are taking advantage of a destabilized Syria to eat away at the nation’s territory to gain more standing in a dangerous escalation against Iran. This is the newest development in a decades-long conquest for dominance in the oil industry that environmental organizations have long campaigned shifts away from. The U.S. has carried out this disastrous project through the extraction of oil in the ground for the sake of extracting more oil from the ground, destroying homes, families, and nations in the process, all while stumbling into the possibility of planetary destruction via climate collapse, nuclear winter, or both.

US-made Israeli bombs have killed multiple civilians in Yemen in the past few days. Meanwhile, the “ceasefire” reached in Lebanon continues to be breached as toxic bombs rain down on the people of the country daily, while fossil fuels are unleashed in the sky, which has already led to island nations that toxic U.S. bases occupy becoming inhabitable.

Since Assad’s fall, Israel has claimed more land in Syria than all of Gaza. The more that Israel and its allies encroach on this land, the more emboldened the U.S.-Israeli regime becomes in its terrorism throughout the region and the more it risks our global future. The short and long-term survival of the people of Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen are increasingly threatened due to ecological devastation while they fight to prevent US-made bombs from continuing to destroy their homes every single day. Is their disposability so blinding that these NGOs sacrifice themselves? The longer we escalate, the more emissions will be released from this catastrophe and the longer that crucial biodiversity and indigenous caretaking will be destroyed.

So, amidst this war that is causing complete ecological and planetary devastation, where is the mainstream climate movement? When the U.S. military is the largest institutional polluter in the world, consuming 4.6 billion gallons of fuel annually (77-80% of all US government energy consumption), how can its deadliest campaign in years be ignored by those who seek to protect the planet? When the bombs the U.S. manufactures register on the Richter scale, how is that not a threat to the environment? How is nuclear winter not a threat to agricultural global survival? How can the groups that claim to care about our well-being not stand against a deadly bombing campaign in Syria and possible war with Iran or Russia?

The anti-war movement from within the U.S. is at its strongest in decades. The majority of Americans want a ceasefire in Gaza. The environmental movement from within the belly of the beast must recognize that it needs to be part of this anti-war movement and push for the U.S. to take its hands off Syria. It must raise the public’s consciousness of the dangers of war with Iran. When we think about existential threats to the planet, environmental organizations should be looking at the ecological devastation that Israel & the US are causing and ask themselves why they haven’t done or said a damn thing about the elephant in the room.

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