Independent journalist and documentarian Abby Martin discusses Earth's Greatest Enemy, an upcoming feature length documentary that examines one of the largest polluters and contributors to global climate change in the world: the United States military,l and why the military-industrial complex is the "elephant in the room" in the political discourse on human-caused climate change.
Martin is an American journalist, TV presenter, and activist. She helped found the citizen journalism website Media Roots and serves on the board of directors for the Media Freedom Foundation which manages Project Censored. Martin appeared in the documentary film Project Censored The Movie: Ending the Reign of Junk Food News (2013), and co-directed 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film (2013).
She hosted Breaking the Set on the Russian state-funded network RT America from 2012 to 2015, and then launched The Empire Files in that same year as an investigative documentary and interview series on Telesur, later released as a web series. In 2019, she released the film documentary, The Empire Files: Gaza Fights for Freedom. Martin is also an artist, and you can find her work here.
She recently moved to Portland with her husband and Empire Files co-producer Mike Pryssner. They hosted a world premiere of sorts--several semi-finished segments of the movie--at the Clinton Street Theater in February.
From the website of Last Born in the Wilderness podcast, episode #359, an interview with Abby Martin:
The forthcoming feature length documentary, Earth’s Greatest Enemy, does something sorely needed in the discourse about climate change and the global environmental crisis. It shines a light on the devastation the US military leaves behind in every landscape it arrives at, every body of water and airspace it traverses, and every community of life—human and more-than-human alike—it disregards with callous imperial hubris.
The United States has the largest military presence in the world. According to David Vine, professor of political anthropology at the American University in Washington, DC, there are about 750 US military bases in at least 80 countries around the world, and according to a 2021 report by Al Jazeera, “the actual number may be even higher as not all data is published by the Pentagon.” The scale and scope of US military installations, from large-scale bases to “lily pads” to clandestine black sites, is inconceivably far-reaching. Hell, the Pentagon may not even be able to account for the entirety of it, having failed it sixth yearly audit in a row this last November. But, who’s counting anyway?
The US military is Behemoth. And with its global status, its role in shaping global affairs is unassailable. So, is it a surprise that as national political leaders discuss how to address the realities of global heating, at times even pointing to some of the obvious perpetrators of this crisis (such as fossil fuel corporations and rampant consumerism), that the military-industrial complex is never even mentioned? That climate policy goals concocted and refined at international summits would even allude to the US military and its benefactors as part of the problem? I think you know the answer to that.
Concurrent with this discussion, both its recording and release, is the ongoing genocide in Gaza being perpetrated by the so-called Israeli Defense Forces. Abby has reported on the realities of the Israeli occupation of Palestine for years.
Learn more about Earth’s Greatest Enemy.
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- KBOO