The US military is a behemoth that covers nearly the entirety of the planet, and the extent of the damage it is doing to the environment is difficult to comprehend. The military emits more carbon pollution than any other single institution and, depending on which estimates you trust, more than a vast number of countries in their entirety. As the world continues to hurtle toward climate disaster, the military is disproportionately responsible.

Earth’s Greatest Enemy, a new documentary project from journalist and activist Abby Martin, makes sure you won’t forget it.

Martin, host of The Empire Files, has long been an outspoken critic of American imperialism and US militarism. Around 2020, however, Martin’s focus shifted: she and her codirector, Mike Prysner, had a baby and began worrying about the future and the climate catastrophe threatening it: “What would it be like when our son is our age?” Martin asks. The new parents made the link between the war machine they’d spent their professional lives opposing and the climate crisis threatening their son’s future.

The result is a film that interrogates the American military’s disregard for the environment and culpability for its destruction — not only in a macro sense but also in individual towns, cities, and ecosystems all over the world. Everywhere Martin and Prysner travel, from Maryland to Hawaii, from Georgia to Gaza, evidence of the military’s might and depravity toward the earth and many of its vulnerable inhabitants piles up: military families are poisoned by contaminated drinking water, Iraqi citizens breath toxic air, and activists like Manuel Esteban Paez Terán of Atlanta, Georgia, known as Tortuguita, pay the ultimate price for standing in the machine’s way.

Toward the film’s conclusion, Martin comments that in the process of making the documentary, she and her team “were constantly confronted with the sheer, overwhelming nature of it all,” that “the more we looked, the more it grew.” But Earth’s Greatest Enemy is at its most chilling not when it simply chronicles the environmental destruction wrought by the military, but when it captures the extraordinary ideological orientation of its leadership toward the planet.

Nowhere is this clearer than when Martin attends an Air & Space Forces Association conference panel entitled “Guarding the Northern Tier: Domain Awareness and Air Superiority in the Arctic.” In the filmmakers’ footage from the conference, we watch an officer in uniform tell “the companies out there” that Alaska, due to the rapid disappearance of sea ice, “is a place to come and experiment.” The melting of the glaciers is seen not as a warning but as an opportunity to continue an unending conquest of the earth’s natural resources. The presenters at the conference are unable to imagine that the Alaskan ecosystem has any value intact.

The relationship between capitalism and militarism is foundational to understanding why the military appears so unserious about curbing emissions. As the film explains, the US military was built largely to protect capital accumulation through resource extraction, with its first domestic military bases established to protect the fur and mining industries and its first overseas bases established to help the military access coal.

In Martin’s view, the military’s primary incentive is to maintain an American-dominated global economic system built on the extraction and disproportionate consumption of natural resources. Climate change is a concern for the military, perhaps, but solving climate change would almost certainly mean toppling that system — which is perhaps why many leaders of powerful nations like the United States seem less interested in solving the climate crisis than in setting themselves up to dominate a heating and increasingly unlivable planet.

We get a sense of how these logics operate at the highest levels of power when Martin visits the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow and notes that there are more than four hundred fossil fuel lobbyists in attendance, calling the United Nations conference a “corporate tradeshow.”

At one point during the event, then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi, resplendent in a red pantsuit, calls on Martin to ask a question at a press conference. Martin takes the opportunity to ask Pelosi how she can justify passing a budget raising the Pentagon budget if the military is a key contributor to global warming. Pelosi responds that “national security advisors all tell us that the climate crisis is a national security matter,” an accelerator of conflict over resources and migration flows. Therefore, the very crisis that the military is helping perpetuate becomes a justification for increasing military funding — a vicious cycle.

As much as Earth’s Greatest Enemy is a political documentary, it is also animated by its personal themes. The long shadow of the United States’ invasion and occupation of Iraq, for instance, hangs over the film. Prysner served in Iraq and returned an outspoken critic of the war and US militarism; Martin had her political awakening as a college student opposed to the invasion.

The film opens with the words of a veteran of the war living in a tent on the streets of Los Angeles, determined to spend his days playing piano before he loses feeling in his hands. In its second half, it returns to chronicle the devastating, generational health effects of the war in Iraqi cities as well as on American soldiers and their children.

This focus on the small-scale effects of the military’s disregard for the environment and the people in it is another recurrent theme. One of the most affecting passages of the documentary concerns the history of Camp Lejeune, a US Marine Corps base in eastern North Carolina, where for decades beginning in the mid-1950s, military personnel and their family members drank and bathed in water contaminated with toxins.

At times, the film struggles to get its arms around the entirety of the issue, jumping from COP26 to oceanic pollution to base construction in Okinawa without always maintaining a clear narrative arc. But then, the task is enormous: looking closely at the environmental record of the American military — even at very small parts of it in very specific places — is overwhelming, as Martin herself tells us. Earth’s Greatest Enemy labors to convey the scale of the damage the U.S. military has wrought and implores us all to act while we still can.

This work has been made possible by the support of the Puffin Foundation.

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