it costs about four system serves set up barricades at the deployment to do it cos of a customs officials on the front here which was previously under serbian control. and up next r t investigates how complex going to be fragile ecosystems struggling to survive and why no one is telling the story that's next. sometimes we think that it's easier to make war and to work to prevent it or to clean up after it the military is a major player in terms of environmental outcomes. the environment is wars silent casualty when we talk about the costs of war we rarely focus on what happens to the land the animals we rarely focus on that which sustains whom and why. we're

completely out of sync in defining threats to our security. at one time the principal threats were you know what terry i no longer are there now environmental in the homeland security department there sleeping about vulnerability and preparedness we just haven't made the same commitment yet in climate change but we really need to do that at the moment it see if we sleep walking into disaster we can't afford to sleep walk into the future we must take decisions and action which creates a world that we want our children and their children to grow up.

war has changed much over the centuries yet our perception of war has changed little we memorialize the fallen take some note of collateral damage to civilians but in calculating the cost of war we seldom acknowledge its toll on the

natural environment. well when one deals with warfare one has to realize that this tremendous amounts of damage that have done not just human damage but damage the physical environment in which the battlefield takes place and whether it's a small war of a couple of days or whether it's a major war war one war two vietnam war the recent wars in the middle east tremendous amounts of damage done by aerial bombs by napalm. chemicals that are used i would say there's very little consideration during combat operations to the effect on the environment one gets totally preoccupied in the firefight itself. after major combat operations are over in almost any war you have unexploded ordinance. staggered about the landscape you deny the use of agricultural land to the population you can

post tension only infect water supplies and the food chain. and i would say that that's basically the case almost anywhere that you use firepower either air power or to the primary goal in warfare is to beat the enemy and when you want to defeat the enemy as quickly and is. probably cost effectively as you'd like use the most dangerous weapons you can for the most part unless you're your own troops your own population happens to be on the battlefield. with three six barrel gatling gun each capable of firing up the sixth regiment one of these so-called dragon ships and in big heavy damage. from when i arrived in vietnam in february of one thousand and seventy. there was already a great deal of destruction. we were taken out on missions mainly by

helicopter our missions were called search and destroy we would try to search out the enemy and destroy the enemy in the kuchi area there were in numerable tunnels and usually we would try to blow these tunnels up with c. four explosives. and we seldom saw the enemy we tried to destroy the earth that concealed. and sustained the enemy i often wonder if our struggle is not against human beings but against the earth that sustains them. we've become experts in blowing the earth using bonds artillery mortars c. four gunships napalm to reduce the earth to ashes.

you know in the history of wife on earth there been five moments. in which there's been a major spasm of extinction and the best known is when the dinosaurs left the stage as it were we are now clearly in the first stages of a potential sixth spouse of extinction the human footprint on nature it's it's just quite you can see the increase greenhouse gases in the atmosphere you can see it in the proliferating deads and coastal waters around the world you can see it in the oceans becoming acid in terms of warm preparations for war that becomes a list of things in itself whether it's. sonic booms are factoring marine mammals

or it's the burning oil fields here in iraq or it's destroyed coral reefs in the pacific for landing purposes. the list just goes on and on in wartime damage to habitat and wildlife is a given sometimes unintended sometimes the result of a deliberate strategy one of the list examples of the environmental impact of full faired we same during the iraq invasion of kuwait in nine hundred ninety one and to deliberately not in as the oil will sink you right by saddam hussein's traipse but also spilling of vast amounts of oil in fact tens of millions of barrels of oil into the patient gulf region and this had it terrible effect on the marine environment on bird life in the area by supply criteria and night if birds. once was in that is it had his fun and they have it and it is it is not just a collection of millions of padded who's of sand it is that is an ecosystem and

a poor vast amounts of oil into a consistent that is terribly destructive for. all's fair in love and war as they say and that's why. aircraft will hit chemical industries will sink tankers will hit a nuclear power plants will hit anything that might bring a society or city or wherever you're fighting it to its knees as quickly as possible with tremendous amounts than likely of environmental damage such deliberate targeting of the environment during the vietnam war prompted the addition of article fifty five the protocol one to the geneva conventions article fifty five of protocol one additional to the geneva conventions of nineteen forty nine states that care shall be taken in war to protect the environment against widespread long term and severe damage the

united states. although it is accepted almost all of the provisions of protocol one has taken exception to that in our bombing campaign and nineteen ninety nine most of which did not capitulate and just a few days as we had anticipated and we bombed for seventy eight days we bombed oil refineries resulting in a mile long oil slicks that extended down the danube through remaining into the black sea. we bomb petro chemical plants and fertilizer factories spreading mercury. other carcinogens on the landscape and into a canal that lead into the danube river it will take the eco systems decades to

recover. forests are among the ecosystems that are most often damaged or destroyed in combat itself the main reason for that is because they're very useful for guerrillas trying to find concealment from forces with superior firepower forty years ago when the united states was trying to prevail in vietnam and its enemies the viet cong were using the forests for concealment the american forces tried through fire and chemical defoliants to clear large parts of the forests of vietnam. not invulnerable. they think of themselves as wrong and they have.

seven days in the week fifty two weeks a year most days in the base to spew out the total of nearly eighteen thousand gallons of diesel. from one nine hundred sixty two in one nine hundred seventy one the u.s. military conducted a large scale defoliation drive code named operation ranch hand planes helicopters and tanker trucks sprayed nineteen million gallons of herbicides on south vietnam. i should mention agent orange which was also one of the main ways that the land was ravaged a place that had been sprayed would would die and the sometimes the reverse of say banana plants would become enormous and then they would die. and it looked like a ghost landscape almost everything had been killed agent orange was

developed actually in world war two at that time it was not thought that this had any effect on human beings so this became a wonderful commercial product but also a very potent product that could be used to destroy jungles to destroy food crops to be able to be used as a tactical weapon of war without being considered chemical warfare in the sense of poison gas fifty percent of the agent orange consisted of a chemical called two four five tea which. unless the conditions of manufacture were carefully controlled would become contaminated with dioxin which is an extraordinarily potent toxic chemical so much of the agent orange or this her facade that was sprayed in vietnam was heavily contaminated and the americans do not need to hold your mom's humans more. on the right on the wrong level

questions like whether the game will be aging vietnamese will fight even more anyway these on applebum i don't just don't moment but it makes no more than all of a mission accomplished. in one thousand nine hundred for us veterans who were attributed a variety of adverse physical symptoms to agent orange exposure settled out of court with the manufacturers twenty years later their families fock to have a plaque added to the vietnam veterans memorial it states in memory of the men and women who served in the vietnam war and later died as a result of their service on and remember their sacrifice. knew that the united states government nor the manufacturers of agent orange have compensated the vietnamese people. when we first started working in afghanistan and one of the things that surprised me was that it it actually was an area where natural and wild

pistachio woodlands grew i didn't know that they actually existed there before and in fact they were a significant part of the pre-war economy people picked the pistachios and actually exported them that was worth millions of dollars as a source of income to people. in the deforestation we see in afghanistan is a product of three forces first of all you have the mujahideen that were using the forests for cover the soviets destroyed some of the force to prevent that second of all you have the afghans themselves harvested the forests. and stockpiled the wood because they feared that they'd be taken away during the collectivization process. and third you had land mines that were put in agricultural areas by putting the land mines agricultural areas that forced people to find other areas to grow food and the most obvious where the forests and woodlands of the country so those three factors have led to virtual one hundred percent deforestation in some areas this

footage was taken during a field study for the united nations environment program holes in the soil indicate where trees have been uprooted to plant crops. or after three decades of war only the smallest patches of forest remain in northern afghanistan barely detectable by satellite and the reason we don't see some of these woodlands and forests regenerating is also complex at the moment if the seedling happens to take root and start growing you actually have grazing of goats and sheep over virtually the entire landscape and those goats and sheep obviously simply eat anything that comes up so what we saw in a in a number of different sample areas was not a single seedling had taken root. when you have such fragile soils and you have such heavy grazing on them you really amplify and cause soil erosion to the point

where recovery is going to be extremely difficult if not impossible. this photo actually started with my barber when i was probably ten years old he was a marine. who had fought in the battle of guadalcanal solve island storm world war two and i'd heard the stories of his experiences of storing the beaches running out of supplies and. sword fighting with the japanese soldiers on the islands just for . they saw their supply ship people on up by japanese aircraft to try to explain that feeling of of seeing their food and their source of self-defense just completely destroyed from their eyes. i was doing some research on oil spills in general off the australian coast and that that story came back to

me and i thought well his ship is still there. and i bet the oil still aboard. their nearly four thousand world war two ship wrecks in the south pacific right now and over three hundred of those are oil tankers. if no measures are taken on this these ships will collapse they will release their oil one side oil answers them or in a vironment will be very difficult to remove it. the pacific's highest concentration of world war two wrecks can be found in the federated states of micronesia. service forward to anchorage for the japanese imperial fleet until an air attack by american forces sank sixty ships and more than two hundred planes the way that the reefs are struggling around the world due to coral bleaching global warming overfishing and dynamite fishery added to those stresses a massive oil spill would just be the last nail in the coffin for these raves that

were navios to regenerate and. to think that a war that we have. in the last century could still be destroying our future is really pretty shocking. and it's distracting things of that current more fair is set by our base just meant to proximately not to be seen as the victims of welfare candy ass opinions and this is a real turn around trend that bad one hundred at the static the last century when it was said that there who spent ten percent in the terms of poor civilians and about ninety percent in a treatment now see opposite. and what's in chrissy may pain upset particularly since world war two he is that we using more and more me nations to get the same military effect the invasion of kuwait by iraq in the clean up of kuwait after the

one thousand nine hundred one gulf war is a very good example of the problems and the challenges of cleaning up the battlefield. after the war there was an enormous amount of refuse from the battles that took place these were trucks tanks aircraft also it's of ordnance a lot of it unexploded and what happened was the allied troops came in and they basically picked up all this metal debris and piled it in giant piles the size of a football field in various parts of the kuwaiti desert and left it there i feel like i'm not going to have a lot of fun and so from time to time these piles go up in flames and from time to time they explode here and there and no one really knows what to do what to do with unexploded ordnance what we call you x. of those in a case like that. among the most enduring legacies of modern warfare is unexploded ordnance or you x o the

grenades shells and bombs that failed to detonate during combat you xo remains on the battlefield long after the battle often hidden by vegetation or covered by soil. as weapons continue to grow more lethal the casualties of war are no longer confined to combatants nor to the duration of armed conflict one example is the cluster bomb a hollow shell that ejects multiple smaller nations called. up to a third of these bombs can fail to detonate on impact affectively becoming landmines . not all unexploded ordinance is accidental eighty two nations are contaminated with

landmines landmines that kill or maim fifteen to twenty thousand civilians per year in afghanistan there are ten to twelve landmine casualties each day the issue of landmines is a critical one in afghanistan and there are two ways that you can tell if they are they are present the first is of course if the grass hasn't been grazed if the grass is tall and standing and there's no evidence that it's been eaten there are probably landmines in the shepherds are keeping their animals away but the second when the local people find land mines they tend to paint rocks and they paint them red on one side and white on the other on the red side is where the land mines are located. ok. ok. the problem is when you have a landslide or a flood which washes through a landmine area first of all the land mines are actually picked up and distributed

across other areas and second the rocks become obviously mixed in jumbled up so we've been in a situation before we were driving down a road we came across a creek bed where flashflood actually washed landmines across the road so it was a major security risk and we couldn't actually move beyond the road until we got some mine clearance people to come in. don't touch them i sing these children and listen to them so it's part of an awareness program run by the british team that is favored for their low cost and long jeopardy land mines were laid heavily by both sides during the cambodian vietnamese war today the un estimates that ten million mines remain in cambodian soil. i had occasion to visit unarmed pan a few years ago it was probably the most depressing scene. that i've ever encountered someone there were countless cambodian man

with their legs blown off above the knee who were scooting through the dirt begging in the market places. and they were for the most part mine victims. war is not healthy for anybody the combatants or the people who are caught up in it recent studies in iraq and mortality come up with the range of excess mortality in the tens of thousands. children have to teach relief on the boat the effects of poor in a number of free space. on a semester stepping studies that indicate sea impact a whole on children was

a team of experts from have it which went to iraq in the wake of the nine hundred ninety one call for the study tame estimated that the war and the sanctions that followed resulted in existence of fifty to seventy thousand iraqi children these children were dying in large numbers from simple and fake she's to say such as typhoid color hepatitis it said and the reason for that was a deliberate decision that was taken in the ninety ninety one war to destroy iraq's electricity generating capacity and without the electricity sanitation water purification it's kind happens as children are dying of epidemics of infectious to say so. it would not take very long just a matter of weeks for washington d.c. or new york city to become pretty unlivable and if we didn't have electricity for water purification if we didn't have gasoline for our sanitation trucks to remove

the garbage we would be overrun by rats and other vermin our water would become contaminated we would develop cholera and dysentery he would have typhus we would have plague and we have forgotten all of this especially when we go out and destroy the end. the structure of other countries. far away. where human life is ruled by nature. the. planet earth is scarcely preserved by the clear. lie hidden in the deep permafrost. and for those who deal with them. stored times are still.

running.

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