Environmental destruction—more than a war crime?

The UN's International Law Commission currently has on its agenda an item concerned with protecting the environment in times of war. The commission has drawn up 28 draft principles, the purpose of which is, according to Principle 2, "enhancing the protection of the environment in relation to armed conflict, including through preventive measures for minimizing damage to the environment during armed conflict and through remedial measures."

Pursuant to this effort, 22 scientists from countries around the world have published a letter in the journal Nature which calls on governments to "incorporate explicit safeguards for biodiversity, and to use the commission’s recommendations to finally deliver a fifth Geneva Convention to uphold environmental protection during [armed conflict]." In effect, they are asking the international community to make environmental damage during military confrontations a possible war crime.

One signatory to the letter, Professor Sarah Durant of the Zoological Society of London, states, "The brutal toll of war on the natural world is well documented, destroying the livelihoods of vulnerable communities and driving many species, already under intense pressure, towards extinction." The "brutal toll" Professor Durant refers to has been well illustrated by the Americans' use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam war, Saddam Hussein's igniting hundreds of oil wells during the Iraqi retreat from Kuwait, and the collapse of animal populations in recent wars in Africa.

I wish the letter-writers luck in promoting an international convention to protect our fellow species during armed conflict, but why limit protection to wartime? Why not a Universal Declaration of Animal Rights to parallel the UN'S Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After all, we are not the only sentient beings on the planet. Reading books such as Beyond Words by Carl Safina and Mama's Last Hug by Frans de Waal has forced me to recognize not only the sentience other species possess but also what rich emotional lives many experience. And to recognize further the ridiculous inadequacy of the morality with which we treat them.

When the monsters among us exterminate a tribe of our fellow humans we refer to it in horror as a holocaust, yet we are exterminating entire species of our fellow animals—a cascade of holocausts—and are barely suffering a moral twinge. Since we invented agriculture, we have eradicated over 80 per cent of our fellow mammals on land and in the oceans, and the eradication accelerates. It is a sad thing to say about your own species, but it is a hard fact that if we were to become extinct it would be a welcome day for just about every other species on the planet. It is long past time we fully extended our moral sensibilities to our fellow species, our neighbours on this lonely planet.