Every year on April 22nd, people celebrate and honor Earth Day through neighborhood clean-ups, community festivals, and projects to educate the public about the need to reduce our carbon footprint. Veterans For Peace has honored Earth Day by discussing how militarism impacts the environment. We hope to spread the message about the environmental costs of war, a topic that isn’t often discussed when leaders debate climate change and enact environmental policies. Instead of working for a cleaner, cooler future, our tax dollars are being spent on human death and environmental destruction.

Following an introductory presentation showing the links between militarism and climate change, a panel of experts will discuss how to proceed in uniting the peace and climate movements to avoid increasing militarism and worsening the climate crisis.

Moderator: Marcy Winograd of CODEPINK

Panelists:
• Ann Wright, author, activist, retired U.S. Army Colonel and U.S. State Department official
• Dr. David Vine, Professor, Department of Anthropology, American University and author of The United States of War
• Erik Edstrom, Afghanistan war veteran and author of UN-AMERICAN: A soldier’s Reckoning of Our Longest War

Presented by the Veterans For Peace Climate Crisis & Militarism Project: CCMP warns that an arms race resulting from the invasion of Ukraine will hinder efforts of major polluting countries to lower their CO2 emissions and will doom any meaningful international agreements later this year at COP27. In other words, we are no longer “sleepwalking to climate catastrophe,” we are running.