Abby Martin’s latest documentary, “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” takes stock of the environmental damage caused by the American war machine, following the trail of destruction left by military bases all the way to the melting of polar ice caps.
The American army is a massive organization that spans almost the entire planet. The extent of the damage it inflicts on the environment is hard to conceive. The American military emits more CO2 than any other institution, and, according to estimates, more than many countries combined. As the world hurtles towards a climate catastrophe, the military apparatus disproportionately contributes. “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” a new documentary by journalist and activist Abby Martin, ensures you won’t forget.
Abby Martin, host of “The Empire Files,” a series of independent documentaries and interviews, has long spoken out vehemently against American imperialism and militarism. By 2020, Abby Martin’s focus had shifted. She and her co-director, Mike Prysner, had a baby and began to worry about the future and the threat posed by the climate crisis. “How will the world be when our son is our age?” Abby Martin wonders. These young parents have connected the dots between the war machine they had fought against their entire professional lives and the climate crisis endangering their son’s future.
This film denounces the American military’s disregard for the environment and its responsibility in its destruction—on both a macro scale and in individual villages, towns, and ecosystems around the world. Everywhere Abby Martin and Mike Prysner go, from Maryland to Hawaii, from Georgia to Gaza, evidence accumulates of the harmful impact of the military on Earth and its most vulnerable inhabitants: military families poisoned by contaminated drinking water, Iraqi civilians breathing toxic air, and activists like Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, known as Tortuguita from Atlanta, paying the ultimate price for opposing the system. (Manuel Esteban Paez Terán was an environmental activist shot by a police officer in Atlanta while opposing the construction of a police training facility in place of a forest.)
Towards the end of the film, Abby Martin notes how she and her team were “constantly confronted with the overwhelming scale of all the destruction” during the documentary’s production and how “the more we looked, the bigger it got.” But “Earth’s Greatest Enemy” is particularly chilling not just in its description of the environmental destruction caused by the military but in highlighting the ideological orientation of military leaders towards the planet.
In one notable scene, Abby Martin attends a roundtable of the Air & Space Forces Association titled “Guarding the Northern Tier: Domain Awareness and Air Superiority in the Arctic.” Images from the conference show a uniformed officer telling the “businesses present” that Alaska, due to the rapidly disappearing ice, is “a place to come and experiment.” The melting glaciers are not seen as a warning but as an opportunity to continue the endless plundering of Earth’s natural resources. Conference participants are unable to fathom any value in keeping Alaska’s ecosystem intact.
The link between capitalism and militarism is crucial in understanding why the military seems so unserious about reducing its CO2 emissions. The American military was largely created to protect the accumulation of capital through resource extraction. The first national military bases were established to protect fur and mining industries, while overseas bases were set up to give the military access to coal.
According to Abby Martin, the primary motivation of the American military is to maintain a global economic system dominated by the United States, based on the disproportionate exploitation and consumption of natural resources. Climate change may be a concern for the military, but addressing it would likely require overturning this system. This could explain why many leaders of powerful countries like the United States seem more interested in preparing to dominate a warming and increasingly uninhabitable planet than in solving the climate crisis.
The documentary provides insight into how this logic operates at the highest levels of power. When Abby Martin travels to the 2021 UN climate conference (COP26) in Glasgow, she notes the presence of over four hundred fossil fuel lobbyists. She describes the UN conference as a “corporate tradeshow.”
During the conference, Abby Martin questions Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House, about how she can justify increasing the Pentagon’s budget when the military significantly contributes to climate change. Nancy Pelosi responds that “national security advisers all tell us, one by one, that the climate crisis is a national security issue.” Climate change is a trigger for conflicts related to resources and migration flows. Thus, the crisis exacerbated by the military becomes a justification to increase military funding—a vicious circle.
“Earth’s Greatest Enemy” is not just a political documentary; it is also driven by personal themes. The shadow of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq looms over the film. Mike Prysner, an Iraq war veteran turned vocal critic of American war and militarism, served in Iraq. Abby Martin’s political awakening came when she protested against the invasion as a student.
The film opens with the words of a war veteran living in a tent on the streets of Los Angeles, determined to spend his days playing the piano before losing sensation in his hands. Later, the film revisits the devastating, intergenerational effects of war on health in Iraqi cities, as well as on American soldiers and their children.
The focus on the small-scale consequences of the military’s disregard for the environment and the populations living there is another recurring theme of the documentary. One of the most poignant parts concerns the story of Camp Lejeune, a US Marine Corps base in eastern North Carolina, where military personnel and their families have been drinking and bathing in contaminated water since the mid-1950s.
However, the film sometimes struggles to encompass the entirety of the problem, jumping from COP26 to ocean pollution, then to building a base in Okinawa, without always maintaining a clear narrative thread. But the task is monumental: examining the environmental effects of the American military with precision – even when it comes to very specific, small parts of it in very specific locations – is crushing, as Abby Martin herself acknowledges. “Earth’s Greatest Enemy” does its best to convey the extent of the damage caused by the American military and urges us to take action while there is still time. (Article adapted from Jacobin, translated by LAVA Belgium, 2026)
