By Daphne Barroeta
April 23, 2025

There are two important and overlapping holidays on April 22: Earth Day and Vladimir Lenin’s birthday. Perhaps this is just a coincidence, but it is also a wonderfully important overlap given what capitalism has done to the planet. Of all the economic systems devised by humans, capitalism is by far the most devastating in terms of its environmental impact. And when capitalism produces colonialism as well as imperialism, these effects are exponentially amplified.

Let’s examine a few examples to understand this issue and what we can do to change the situation.

Massive destruction in Gaza

Currently, the U.S. and its Zionist proxy “Israel” are waging a genocidal military campaign against the Palestinian people so the U.S. empire can maintain a base of operations in the petroleum-rich zone of West Asia and Northern Africa. There have been U.S. military operations over the past century in the region and beyond, ranging from attacks on Iran to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the repeated military campaigns in Syria and the bombings of Yemen.

Zoom in on just the most recent leveling of Gaza following the historic and brave Al-Aqsa Flood operation led successfully by Palestinian liberation fighters on October 7, 2023. For geographic context, according to the humanitarian aid organization ANERA (American Near East Refugee Aid): “The whole of Gaza (aka the Gaza Strip) is about twice the size of Washington, D.C., and three times the population. Bordering the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt and Israel, Gaza is a 25-mile long stretch of coastal land (141 square miles, 365 square kilometers). Gaza’s coastline is 40 kilometers (24 miles) long. The Gaza Strip is geographically about the size of Philadelphia, Detroit or the country of Grenada.

The overwhelming majority of cities built in Gaza in the past 100 years use building materials that have high levels of the chemicals silica and alumina — which make up sand, concrete and clay — and carbon sources like wood, plant fiber pulp or chalk dust. When these things explode, the environmental impact is devastating.

Silica and alumina compounds, when turned to dust, become lung irritants which will stay in a living being’s lungs — as long as it lives on land — until it dies. The burning of furniture, floors and carpets, clothing, wood structure or framing components, etc., releases massive amounts of greenhouse gases which contribute to climate change.

The explosives and ammunition used in excess by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) also produce massive amounts of contaminants, ranging from vaporized heavy metals like lead or cadmium to greenhouse gases including sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide to microplastics and PFAS — the so-called carcinogenic “forever compounds.”

Ammunition supplied by NATO member countries often include depleted uranium, which introduces increased risks of radioactive contamination to the health of all who live there as well as the ecosystem.

Tallying up all this destruction, the environmental damage, as reported in the Yale Environmental School’s online journal, amounts to “more than 40 million tons of rubble, containing human remains, asbestos and other hazardous materials and unexploded ordnance.”

The article continues: “Meanwhile, the collapse of waste collection services has resulted in a proliferation of makeshift dumps — 141, according to a United Nations Development Program count in October 2024 — while open-air waste burning regularly sends black smoke and hazardous pollutants through densely populated areas.” Furthermore, the collapse of the water supply as well as the burning of trees “will make the land vulnerable to desertification.” (yale.edu, 2025)

Amnesty International reported on March 20 that Israel cut off the electricity supply to a desalination plant for drinking water in Gaza, effectively reducing the water supply by 85%.

The impact of this genocide enacted for the purposes of Zionist settler colonialism and regional imperialist military power go beyond the horrible cost to Palestinian lives and scars the land in a way that may take generations to address.

NATO’s global damage 

Zooming out, on a global scale NATO’s environmental damage is even more severe. Just the greenhouse gas emissions alone —  from fuel to run all the ships, planes, armored vehicles, etc. — combined with the manufacturing of military supplies and munitions, plus the habits and needs of the troops, and adding in the use of munitions, mean that  “according to estimates, NATO’s $1.34 trillion expenditure [in 2023] generated a staggering 233 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent (tCO2e) greenhouse gas emissions. This amount surpasses the annual emissions of several countries, including Colombia and Qatarl” (downtoearth.org.in, 2024)

The Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs at Brown University in an article entitled: “Environmental Costs of War” likewise has documented the heavy environmental impact of NATO and U.S. military interventions in various parts of the world. Within the context of Iraq, the Institute explains: “Heavy military vehicles have raised more dust than usual, particularly in Iraq and Kuwait, and service members’ exposures to inhaled toxins from that dust have correlated with respiratory disorders that often prevent them from continuing to serve and performing everyday activities such as exercise.

“The water supply in the war zones has been contaminated by oil from military vehicles and depleted uranium from ammunition. Along with the degradation of the natural resources in these countries and a radical destruction of forest cover, the animal and bird populations have also been adversely affected.

“Iraqi medical doctors and health researchers have called for more research on war-related environmental pollution as a potential contributor to the country’s poor health conditions and high rates of infections and diseases.” (October 2024)

Capitalist-driven ecological damage

Even the core of the U.S. empire is not spared the impacts of capitalist-driven ecological damage. Consider the repeated natural disasters fueled by the petroleum companies’ greed; the unsustainable farming practices used for big agriculture; the impacts of microplastics and all the detergents and fertilizers dumped in the waterways; the continued assault on Indigenous nations for resources like oil tar sands or timber; the wholesale extinction of species; and the damage done to Black and Brown communities through forced exposure to lead or plastic compounds and other industrial and highway waste.

There is so much harm just from an ecological perspective done because of the capitalist and settler-colonial system that I could go on for hundreds of pages if I had the time to write and space to put it in. Suffice it to say the problem is at an existential threat level — not just to humanity but also to hundreds of thousands of species which are at the mercy of the capitalist world order.

So how do we address this? Well, this is where Lenin’s birthday offers us an important reference.

Lenin’s blueprint for socialist revolution

Through his writings, V.I. Lenin expanded upon the work of Marx and Engles and provided us with a blueprint for socialist revolution. It is precisely socialist revolution which can provide the political and economic conditions necessary to combat environmental degradation and climate change.

When bourgeois leaders are no longer competing over scraps of land and the working class is no longer duped into consuming without conscious purpose behind what we make, we will finally be on the right path to environmental restoration.

However there is one key element essential to our success and which Lenin discussed in his writings on “the national question.” Simply put, those who are from a historically oppressing national grouping must respect the right to self-determination of those from a historically oppressed group. Within the context of wrestling with the legacy of the duality of colonial and imperialist world history, this includes allowing people to exercise their knowledge over a given area.

For example, in many societies in West Asia where it is hot and dry for much of the year, architects have developed a way of making holes in buildings in a special pattern designed to force desert winds through buildings to artificially cool them without the need for electricity. In much of Turtle Island, before colonialism there were many different systems of managing forests dating back for many millennia which were self-sustaining and did not require modern chemical fertilizers or pesticides.

The importance of ‘the national question’

There is an entire body of textbooks and writings examining the entwining of current ecological sciences and various Indigenous practices and schools of thought for land management. Furthermore, many Black farmers who are descended from enslaved African plantation workers have written about the knowledge they gained from combining various Pan-African practices with practices that were fine-tuned during enslavement and/or later during the period of sharecropping.

The context of socialism, when properly armed with an understanding of the national question, provides us with a perfect context to learn from each other and grow our society as equals — not as co-competitors for survival or dominance as is the case under capitalism. Furthermore, it provides us with the context to respect those whose ancestral land literally sustains our lives as well as heal the land that was taken.

All of this is only possible if we abolish NATO and U.S. imperialism, the IOF, settler colonialism and ultimately abolish capitalism, so we can build a socialist society that is truly equitable on a multinational basis.