Peacetown Asheville and Local 099 Veterans for Peace are asking Asheville City Council to pass a resolution stressing the importance of “bringing our war dollars home,” where they are needed to rebuild our infrastructure.
Future wars aren’t justifiable with their killing masses of our own and other people leading to devastating unintended consequences. We are not able to afford the massive costs incurred in preparations for, waging of, or dealing with the aftermath of wars. We fail to even contemplate wars’ environmental degradation.
This is documented in Barry Sanders’ book, The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism, which asserts, among other things: “The military produces enough greenhouse gases by itself, to place the entire globe, with all its inhabitants large and small, in the most imminent danger of extinction. … Military activity, from fuel emissions to radioactive waste to defoliation campaigns, is the single-greatest contributor to the worldwide environmental crisis.”
Current efforts to roll back cuts to the Pentagon budget only represent a small first step toward moving our country away from a foreign policy based on fighting wars and are essential to reduce the deficit.
— Lew Patrie
Asheville
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