I'm not committed to environmental orthodoxy about matters such as climate change. I had my doubts before the terms changed from global warming over to climate change, and they haven't changed. The recent events in Paris demonstrate that many others have doubts as well and are willing to revolt at the cost of seven dollars per gallon for gasoline, half that amount in taxes. However, I do believe that man can create significant environmental damage, and specifically, I'm thinking of the damage caused by war.
I'm currently reading a book formed around the war-time letters of a Marine aviator to his parents in Connecticut. Carl Dunbar's third training assignment in the spring of 1942 was at Jacksonville Naval Air station during the time when German submarines were playing havoc off the eastern shore of America by torpedoing ships, principally tankers transporting petroleum from the Gulf Coast around the Keys and north along the Atlantic shore to East Coast refineries.
During free time, Carl and his fellow flyers would flock to Jacksonville Beach to enjoy the sun, sand and surf. On April 23, 1942, he wrote: "One of the little lunch counters where we find our main subsistence on weekends had a display of grim reminders of the torpedoings, which had washed up in front on the beach. A life raft, the rudder from a whaleboat, a case of shelves, with one panel shattered by shrapnel, a tar-soaked broom and a bunch of bananas all black with tar. All the articles were covered with oil and partially burned. There was a loon dragging about the beach last weekend. Its feathers were covered with fuel oil and he could not fly. In the water, only his neck appeared. I don't believe it did get back out in the ocean again, for each time it tried, the surf pounded it back again unmercifully."
Can you imagine how we would greet such a spectacle today? The media would have a field day reporting such an environmental disaster … and rightly so. I can recall as a boy in the 1950s picking up large tar balls on Florida's beaches, something that is rarely seen today. I'm comforted that our beaches are very clean and the sea has healed itself from such environmental degradation.
What about other examples of environmental destruction during war? At Andersonville, Ga., a stockade was built in 1864 to enclose 10 thousand Union prisoners. A few months later, nearly 43,000 prisoners were locked within its walls. A single creek, running across the south end of the prison camp provided the only water source for cooking, cleaning, sanitation … everything. By August, more than a thousand men were dying every month from disease, heat, exposure, etc. I invite you to visit Andersonville; it's less than a three-hour drive and both sobering and instructive.
A century ago, World War I pitted the European powers against each other in the first truly world war. When you visit the scene of four years of trench warfare along 400 miles of the Western Front, you can scarcely imagine the carnage and destruction caused by artillery, machine guns and chemical weapons. At Verdun alone, nearly one million French and German soldiers perished in the 1916 maelstrom. And at war's end, the returning soldiers carried a virulent Spanish Flu virus across the world that killed another 50 million over the next two years, the worst public health crisis in recorded history.
World War II was incredibly destructive, especially across Europe and in the South Pacific. Some of the scars to the land remain, but most have healed over the past seven decades. The war in Southeast Asia was terrible to the environment, with incredible aerial bombing and the use of defoliants like Agent Orange to kill massive amounts of vegetation.
"Scorched earth" is a policy of destruction for defeated armies. Hitler ordered this in the spring of 1945 but most of his generals refused to follow the order. At the end of the Gulf War in 1991, Saddam Hussein ordered his retreating army to set fire to Kuwait's oil wells, fouling the skies of the Persian Gulf with pollution that would last for months. Today in Palestine, the terrorists in Gaza and Lebanon are attempting to start forest fires with their airborne incendiaries to burn-out Israel.
Indeed, man can foul the planet's earth, air and water. Nothing more clearly illustrates this than the effects of war. But over many centuries of man's folly, the earth has healed itself which is reassuring. There is a theological explanation. We live in a sinful world where man's folly often separates us from God's word and intention. On the other hand, when we understand God's creation and respect it, we are pleasing to Him.