Just who or what is Earth’s greatest enemy?
Here are some spontaneous answers, duplicates not included, from recent interviews at The Covert Café, a bar in northeast Portland, Oregon, the city proud of its slogan, “Keep Portland Weird”:
- Greed – humans – entropy – narrow-minded people
all the wars going on
cars – itself – time – not knowing your neighbors
They never got to mentioning pollution, climate change, industrial waste, human disregard, nuclear weapons, or corrupt leaders.
But, please, pause a moment and think what you might spontaneously express as your idea of the Earth’s greatest enemy. I’d be happy to know in the FB comments. Let’s see if your thoughts agree with this film.
…Pause, Think, Record…
This film comes up with an answer I had auto-excused
Abby Martin, investigative journalist and filmmaker, comes up with an answer I hadn’t thought about. As if she were a high-class corporate lawyer, she proves her answer with point after point until we have to accept that the sinister, cruel truth is what we’ve known all along, the obvious, which we never ever counted because we are so pre-programmed, through evolution or political rhetoric.
Let me explain. The earth’s greatest enemy is in plain sight. We all know about it. But most of us spontaneously excuse it. Yes, even many environmentalists excuse this particular source. We’re so ironically worried about safety that we inadvertently condone and support a process of self-destruction. What is it?
Abby Martin’s answer
Abby Martin, mastermind of this completely Everything-All-At-Once kind of film on the reality of an unstoppable lethal danger, proves, with extensive examples, that it is the United States Military, all branches, in all ways and in all places.
I told this to all my Portland bar interviewees, and they all grimaced and nodded in acknowledgement, though the guy saying “all the wars going on” already knew he’d been right.
But why and how?
Martin makes her case in multiple ways, proving that with our support our government exempts our armed forces from all the environmental protective rules we hold for corporations, industries and even other countries.
Martin asserts that the U.S. military is the world’s largest institutional polluter and because of that the global universal climate goals are unattainable without dismantling the systems of capitalism and imperialism that support and are supported by the military. She contends that the US Pentagon, as the top consumer of fossil fuels, operates with impunity, causing global environmental destruction and toxic contamination.
One current example
Let’s just take the recent bombs falling on Gaza and Lebanon as an example. That Israel launched the bombs is undisputed. They readily own that. Though they deny using white bombs, the shell casing markings and manufacturing codes recovered from operational sites in Gaza and southern Lebanon directly trace back to defense production facilities within the United States and are identified as American-made 155mm M825A1 artillery projectiles which are designed to airburst and deploy wedges soaked in white phosphorus (multiple sources: The New York Times, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International).
White phosphorus bombs are not conventional explosives; rather, they are incendiary weapons that cause catastrophic destruction through extreme heat, chemical reactivity, and persistent toxicity to the land.
The World Health Organization further reports that when burning pieces of a white phosphorus bomb fall into wet soil, deep mud, or underwater, the lack of oxygen temporarily extinguishes them. However, the substance does not dissolve or safely decompose. The unspent, toxic chemical fragments can sit dormant in the ground for months, years, or decades. If a civilian, farmer, construction worker, or child later disturbs the soil—exposing the hidden fragments to the air—the white phosphorus will spontaneously catch fire all over again, making areas bombed by white bombs unusable, potentially, forever.
Martin’s Five Revelations
Martin details five areas of impact, with examples from explicit access to the US military:
- 1) Massive Carbon Footprint: The military is the planet’s single largest consumer of fossil fuels, burning roughly 270,000 barrels of oil per day and emitting 55 million metric tons of CO2 annually.
2) Exemption from Climate Accords: The Pentagon operates with complete lack of accountability because it is largely exempt from federal pollution safeguards and international climate agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol.
3) Toxic Base Contamination: Severe water and soil contamination on bases affects the bases as well as local communities.
4) Global Ecosystem & Defense Infrastructure Damage: Active ecological destruction, including the melting glaciers of Alaska, massive military training drills like the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercises, and the heavily protested construction of a marine military base over Oura Bay in Okinawa, Japan are documented.
5) The Long-Term Ecocide of War: The toxic residues, heavy metals, and landscape scarring left behind on international battlefields last long after active combat operations have ceased.
November Election Consideration
The Sierra Club (est.1892) has been offering free showings of “Earth’s Greatest Enemy” throughout America. I saw it hosted by local SC leader, Mark Leed, in Vancouver, WA.
The Sierra Club monitors our US representatives’ votes and gives each elected official a score based on how much they support environmental preservation and safety. Here is a list of their national recommendations for the 2026 November election.
The Bottom Line
“Earth’s Greatest Enemy” is a sensory-crushing two-hour expose on the self-destructive nature of our military policy. While it seems beyond stopping, it gives us information important to know.
Credits
Directors: Abby Martin and Mike Prysner
Writers: Abby Martin and Mike Prysner
Producers: Mike Prysner, Abby Martin and Taylor Gill
Executive Producer: Taylor Gill
Editor: Taylor Gill [1, 2, 3]
Cinematographers: Will Dickson and Taylor Gill
Composer: John Prysner
Sound Department: Eric Stolberg and Michelle Stolberg
Narrator: investigative journalist Abby Martin
Release: Sept. 25, 2025
Website: https://earthsgreatestenemy.com
. . .
Join us on Facebook at
http://www.facebook.com/itsjustmovies!