Connecting Creation Care and National Security
On January 17, 2023, 96 people gathered on Zoom for a forum co-sponsored by Interfaith Creation Care of the Triangle, Highland United Methodist Church Micah 6:8 Team, and others. Joe Burton from Highland planned and hosted the forum.
There are many reasons people of faith and conscience adopt Creation Care practices. But to consider Creation Care from the (somewhat alien-seeming) perspective of national security is to recognize an additional value: its life-affirming practices will contribute profoundly to peace on Earth.
The forum featured Prof. Neta Crawford, the Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford in the U.K. She also co-directs the Costs of War Project of the Watson Institute at Brown University. In the forum she focused on the Pentagon as the world’s largest single greenhouse gas emitter. Tracing the U.S. military’s growing consumption of energy, she called for a re-conceptualization of foreign policy and military doctrine. Only such a rethinking, she argued, will break the link between national security and fossil fuels.
Prof. Crawford is the author of The Pentagon, Climate Change and War as well as Argument and Change in World Politics (winner of the best book award from the American Political Science Association), and Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post -9/11 Wars.
Although there is no recording of the January forum, there are two video recordings on YouTube with Neta Crawford talking about this book. One event you can see here was presented by the Quincy Center for Responsible Statecraft with former California Governor Jerry Brown and moderated by former Congressman John Tierney. Its focus is on what can be done to improve things and includes more political discussion between the two former politicians and a brief synopsis of the content of her book from Crawford.
The other video you can see here was an event at the Harvard Mahindra Humanities Center in which Crawford describes the findings in her book in a fairly detailed and academic way.
