DESTROYING EARTH DEFINITIONAL : MASTER GLOBAL OPINION

Scientists have estimated that wartime fires emitted more than half a billion kilograms of soot into the atmosphere in 1944 and 1945. 

Enough, in theory to reduce the solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface, though it has not been possible to demonstrate any clear impact on the global climate.

Even so, that such colossal impact is even plausible marks the dawn of a planetary power beyond comprehension.

Years after the war, when a Japanese committee of scientists searched for words to describe the atomic bombings they chose '' genocide, '' '' ecocide, '' '' biocide '' and '' earthocide. ''

In this combination of horrors lies a new way to see World War II as the dark culmination of more than a century-long history of the twinned acceleration of human and environmental destruction.

In the 1960s and 70s, scientists and peace activists came together to argue that militarism now had the power to destroy the very basis of life on Earth.

The Yale University plant biologist Arthur Galston adopted the term '' ecocide'' in 1970, by which time the United States military had spent about nine years raining chemical defoliants upon Indochina's forests in an escalating and failing war.

Several million Vietnamese civilians, were exposed, and the lasting harm suffered by Vietnamese people - cancers, diabetes, immunological disorders, children born with lifelong disabilities - carried across generations.

The highly toxic and durable chemical dioxin, a component of the defoliant Agent Orange, pervaded the soil around U.S. storage depots in Bien Hoa and Da Nang.

Over the years it would accumulate in the fat of animals and in the fish that formed the bulk of people's diets.

Dr. Galston had made a conscious allusion to the crime of genocide in his charge of ecocide. He demanded whether ''any cause can legally or morally justify the deliberate destruction of the environment of one nation by another.''

His question haunts us still.

A June 2024 report by Israel's Arava Institute for Environmental Studies documents wholesale environmental and humanitarian devastation in Gaza, with bombardments releasing clouds of noxious smoke-and toxic dust that may put Gazans at risks for years to come.

This Master Opinion and Essay continues. The World Students Society thanks Professor Sunil S. Amrith, a history professor at Yale, and an author, most recently of '' The Burning Earth.''