New from Ode Magazine, whose tagline is "news for intelligent optimists"
ENGLAND. The people at BAE Systems, Europe’s biggest weapons manufacturer, have joined a host of other companies in adding a department of corporate social responsibility. The result is environmentally friendly ammunition, including missiles that contain fewer toxic chemicals such as lead. According to BAE’s website, lead in bullets can “pose a risk to people.” The British Defence Ministry supports the company’s initiative and has proposed manufacturing missile heads that make less noise and grenades that produce less smoke in an effort to curtail noise and air pollution respectively. Money is also being spent to develop bombs that turn into manure.
“This is laughable,” Symon Hill of the Campaign Against Arms Trade told The Sunday Times (Sept. 17, 2006). “BAE is determined to try to make itself look ethical, but they make weapons to kill people and it’s utterly ridiculous to suggest they are environmentally friendly.” But the Ministry of Defence has the last word. “The concept of green munitions is not a contradiction in terms. Any system, whatever its ultimate use, can be designed to minimize its impact on the environment.”
4 comments:
One of my consultants is the executive editor of Ode. He's also the former editor of Utne and does consulting work with Project for Public Spaces.
Small world.
It would be laughable if it weren't so sad.
Yeah, they might as well make them green if they're gonna make them but that seems too defeatist (realistic?) to me. I think the problems will always be there because the kinds of people in charge of those weapons are the kinds of people who would use them. That's my mass generalization for the evening. Plus, do we really have to spend so much time, effort, money, energy, intelligence to design better ways to kill people?
Yeah, I agree that the people in charge of weaponry probably won't ever be the kind of people who should be in charge of it. Those who seek power are precisely those who shouldn't have it, and all that.
And I wish we didn't have a need for weapons, but the sad truth of the matter is that if we don't arm ourselves, we're ripe for bad people to come along and fuck us up. There are always going to be people like Hitler and Hussein, and I think we really do need to be able to protect ourselves.
And even if humanity gets to the point where there aren't sociopaths and power-hungry fucks in our midst (which I don't see happening anytime soon), what if some alien race comes along and wipes us out because we have no way to fight back?
But maybe I'm just a paranoid pessimist. ;)
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