Vampire Planet: Of Ecocide and Empire

Joshua Frank

 August 28, 2026

FacebookTwitterRedditBlueskyEmail

Fire at the Shahran Oil Depot in northwestern Tehran following an Israeli airstrike on March 7th, one of several facilities struck in the vicinity while around thirty oil storage and processing sites were attacked across the country. Source: @sentdefender

When we talk about war, it’s usually in numbers. Innocents and soldiers killed. Bombs dropped. Money spent. We hear figures like 7.6 million and 37.5 billion. There are so many like this that they often feel meaningless, even with context. In this case, 7.6 million is the tonnage of bombs the US has dropped on Iran, and 37.5 billion, the cost of this illegal war. 

Intentionally or not, large numbers like these obscure the reality of war’s toll. 

The number of victims of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, for instance, doesn’t do justice to the violence Palestinians have been forced to endure. 

Likewise, the number of bombs dropped and dollars spent in an attempt to destroy Iran’s government says nothing about the true human and environmental costs of US/Israel aggression. It reduces these crimes to statistics that don’t accurately convey the horror on the ground, and so much of the ground in the Middle East is soaked with the pollution and blood of empire.

The US has a long history of waging war on ecologies in the Middle East, dating back to at least Operation Desert Storm in 1991. 

The aftermath of the US’s massive bombing campaigns in Iraq was tangible. Poisoned aquifers. Widespread contamination of soil with depleted uranium and other toxic metals. Air pollution from scorched oil infrastructure. Irreparable damage to marine ecosystems.

Saddam, too, was guilty of committing ecocidal acts. He deliberately drained the ecologically significant Mesopotamian marshlands in southern Iraq, and Iraqi soldiers set fire to oil fields as they fled Kuwait.

Yes, wars are inherently environmentally disastrous, and, on a global scale, the US is far more culpable than most – from carpet bombings to nuclear detonations to Agent Orange. The US/Israeli bombardment of Iran today is a continuation of this belligerence.

We know, from Pete Hegseth’s admission to Congress, how many targets have been hit and how much money has been spent. But what we don’t truly know, and perhaps won’t for many years to come, is what these bombs and munitions have inflicted on the people and land of Iran.

What we already can gather from the US bombing of Iran: The US and Israel have targeted oil infrastructure, releasing millions of tons of greenhouse gases, which in turn have created toxic, acidic rain clouds. Bombing near coastal regions has caused oil spills, and slicks are drifting into biologically important island ecosystems. 

And, if Iraq serves as a guide, there’s sure to be severe soil and groundwater contamination that will plague Iranians for decades to come. It’s difficult to grasp the toll the US war machine continues to inflict, not only on people but also on the ecosystems we depend on for survival.

In their must-see film, Earth’s Greatest Enemy, Abby Martin and Mike Prsyner explore this toll beyond mere numbers. In an emotional and gripping narrative, they explain the scale of the US military machine and its ongoing destructiveness to our burning planet. Ed Rampell wrote a (well-deserved) glowing review for us last spring.

This week, they released a deleted scene from the film, which is now available to stream on the ecocidal history of the US military.

If you want to begin to understand just how devastating the US empire was and remains, I implore you to watch the film and share it with everyone who still believes in the version of America that Donald Trump wants taught in our schools.

+++

A startling study released in July reveals that the carbon footprint of metal production is 10 times higher than previously thought, largely because acid-laden runoff reacts with oxygen-rich surface waters and releases a large amount of carbon. This is sour news for those hoping we can mine our way out of this climate crisis.

As images of a horrific, deadly flood fill our news feeds, it’s becoming clear that our warming climate played a role in dislodging an enormous glacier, triggering a massive mudslide on the Nepal-Tibet border this week that killed hundreds. The deluge of rock and water registered as a 5.2 geological event, equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT.

The Himalayas contain 15,000 large glaciers, and nearly all of them are receding fast, creating conditions in which huge amounts of ice can break off, essentially slicing off the sides of entire mountains. They are expected to lose 70% of their ice by 2100. Nepal emits less than 0.1% of global emissions but is one of the most vulnerable countries to the wrath of climate chaos as glaciers melt.

It’s almost certain that many natural disasters (if you can call them that) will occur in the Himalayas, crushing more communities as our climate continues to warm.

+++

In more upbeat news, rumor has it that Bad Energy is shipping ahead of its September release date, so grab yours, and it’s not too late to bundle with a cool “Data Centers are Disasters” t-shirt designed by Roger Peet. If your town is on this list, I’d love to see you.

JOSHUA FRANK is co-editor of CounterPunch and co-host of CounterPunch Radio. He is the author of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, and the forthcoming, Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who are Selling Off Our Future, both with Haymarket Books. He can be reached at joshua@counterpunch.org. You can troll him on Bluesky @joshuafrank.bsky.social

Moral Witnessing in an Age of Unprecedented Corporate Power

Henry Giroux

 August 21, 2026

FacebookTwitterRedditBlueskyEmail

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Moral witnessing has largely retreated into billboards, podcasts, a commodified and hate-filled media ecosystem, and relentless gestures of liberal empathy emptied of consequence. Too few artists, intellectuals, and cultural workers are willing to risk their careers by confronting the genocidal wars of our time and the governments and institutions that sustain them with weapons, money, and silence. Where are the voices for the children being slaughtered in Gaza and for those subjected to the horrors of war, displacement, and hunger in Iran, Lebanon, Sudan, and elsewhere? Where is the outrage against the masked thugs patrolling America’s streets, terrorizing communities, violating the law, and turning state violence into a spectacle of fear? Where is the international movement of artists, academics, and cultural workers willing to organize, strike, and refuse complicity with the corporate barbarians who flood the culture with hatred, purchase elections, and seize control of the commanding institutions of public life? Where is the collective outrage over what Joel Whitebook calls “humanity’s headlong race toward an ecological cliff and the accelerating global spread of neo-fascist movements”?

Under the reign of neoliberal trillionaire fascism, the planet burns, cities are militarized, inequality deepens, war becomes a governing principle of politics, racism returns as a celebrated language of power, and young people are robbed of both a future and a place in history. Cruelty is normalized, ignorance is weaponized, and the machinery of death is dressed up in the language of security, efficiency, and national greatness. Border madness feeds white nationalism and colonial fantasies. What once provoked shame is now performed as spectacle. What once demanded outrage is absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life.

This collapse of moral courage is nowhere more visible than among the liberal establishment of the Democratic Party, whose fear of an emerging democratic socialism among young people and an increasingly organized DSA appears at times more intense than its opposition to the militarized gangster capitalism of the Trump era. The contempt is revealing because it exposes what liberal centrism fears most: not authoritarian power, but a politics willing to challenge the economic order on which that power feeds. Even the liberal press often reproduces this panic, framing the resurgence of democratic socialism less as a response to grotesque inequality, corporate rule, and the political exhaustion of neoliberalism than as a threat to the Democratic Party itself.

The question posed by Rolling Stone, whether the democratic socialist surge might “doom the party,” gets the crisis exactly backward: the more urgent question is whether a party wedded to corporate power, militarism, and neoliberal capitalism has already forfeited its capacity to speak to millions of young people who no longer believe the existing order has a future. This fear is manufactured through a sterile self-serving ideological language. In Rolling Stone, Bernie Sanders becomes a “Trojan horse” who “infiltrated” the Democratic Party, democratic socialism is associated with Animal Farm and a “bitter worldview,” while Trump’s politics, despite its acknowledged racism and cruelty, is described as “eminently salable.” Democratic socialism is treated as a pathology to be contained, while authoritarian politics is translated into the bloodless language of electoral viability.

Jon Cowan and Matt Bennett, co-founders of the centrist group Third Way, declared in a Washington Post op-ed that the DSA’s ideas are “electoral poison.” But what exactly is the poison they fear? A politics that demands economic equality, universal social protections, racial justice, democratic control over concentrated wealth, and an end to a political order in which billionaires purchase elections while the poor and working class are abandoned and public life is hollowed out. This political betrayal runs through the Clinton and Obama years, when the Democratic establishment made its peace with neoliberalism, Wall Street, corporate power, and the permanent war state, leaving it increasingly incapable of confronting the economic forces that nourish authoritarianism.

What haunts the party’s centrists is not simply the DSA but the return of a radical democratic tradition they had hoped history had buried: the ghosts of Eugene Debs, Michael Harrington, Stanley Aronowitz, and, more recently, the insurgent democratic socialist politics associated with Zohran Mamdani. This tradition invokes a language the liberal guardians of the existing order find increasingly intolerable: class power, economic justice, solidarity, public goods, racial capitalism, and the radical democratization of wealth and power.

At a moment when fascism is gathering force and ecological catastrophe is accelerating, defending capitalism against those demanding a more just society is not political realism. It is moral surrender dressed in respectable suits and cowardice repackaged by the media as common sense. And nowhere is this moral bankruptcy more grotesque than in the continued flow of American weapons to Israel as tens of thousands of Palestinian children have been killed or wounded in Gaza. The centrists who recoil at democratic socialism as “electoral poison” have remarkably little difficulty accommodating themselves to a political order in which children are bombed, starved, and buried beneath rubble. Apparently, demanding economic justice is considered too radical; underwriting mass death and militarized gangster capitalism is not.

At a moment when silence has become a form of complicity, where are the voices willing to make power tremble? Where are the heirs to W. E. B. Du Bois, Arthur Miller, James Baldwin, I. F. Stone, and Angela Davis, alongside contemporary artists such as Roger Waters and Javier Bardem, who understand that art and intellectual work surrender their moral force when they turn away from human suffering? The question is no longer simply who will speak. It is who is willing to risk something by speaking, to refuse the safety of silence, and to transform moral witnessing into collective resistance and outrage into organized power. The task is no longer merely to bear witness to the darkness, but to build the movements capable of confronting and defeating the forces producing it.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.