Civilian environment maintenance spending instead of the military.
The military portrays itself as having a tough job, the performer of the rough and ugly, yet unquestionably necessary role of national defense, protection of a nation’s integrity, resources, routes and interests. Through those, could perfectly well be the development of local suppliers and cultivation of resources, which if left undeveloped into a community of farms for a stronger overall economy would just get polluted and its potential deprecated by the city, or figuring out how a thriving pond can be sustained next to a pipe in usable way, making sure energy is not leaking out untapped, or that toxicity can be overtaken by how nature is placed and so avoid pressure on the Earth by sophisticated, enjoyable design that logically functions as its own unit too.
If what the military does is by nature difficult, interventionist and sort of hands-on, ‘in-the-trenches’ dirty work, the kind of work that requires an indiscriminate approach, a large amount of manpower, strategic thinking, and an ongoing effort to keep the situation under control, then building living spaces out of unusable areas with enormous waste’d be like that, and so there would always be reasons to go out there and intervene.
That is, in essence why operational military budgets only ever get billions bigger. But all of those masculine properties that the military so proudly exhibits could be very well employed in much more useful, ethical ways at home, like converting old countryside houses into wooden cottages as an idyllic initiative which is being justified as not letting a region’s most natural economic potential go to waste?
If the military mainly cleaned the waterways, built bridges, houses, or wells to diversify landscape, prevent rot, or strong winds, and planted trees to improve air quality, moving systematically from place to place, being deployed and moving material around up and down as needed, then that sort of attitude could be understandable as a better reasoning, because it would be transformative, where no amount of trees is ever good enough as it is, and so much more should be done to utilize the place and make it functional when an area is underdeveloped, or unclean, if only they were to cultivate sustainability there, not just neutralise and mitigate, but circumvent and grow, to maximum potential, housing people in order not to waste their potential, avoid sicknesses that weaken the country, so on.
Using military engineering for civilian purposes isn’t a waste of resources, because there’s in fact nothing simple and nothing easy about building and maintaining a civilian world domestically, because getting wood and natural heat is necessary, or because it it absolutely essential to build cleaner, heat preserving chimneys, or tunnel shortcuts so the country uses its regions in appropriately particular, innerdependant ways to make it sufficient, ensuring it can develop its environment, to thrive in face of industry.
It is true that there isn’t a proper unit similar to the police, military, ambulance, or firefighters that’d instead be concerned with impact, giving places a natural and re purposed healthy look after some incident and restructuring accessibility, speed and shape of how roads are connected, how water goes into nature, that trees and pipes have a meaningful purpose that is connected to other economic mechanisms and productive in its surroundings, or when territorial waters get flooded with too much plastic, then a bigger budget is arguably needed to make it usable.
But imagine for a moment a government-funded, regional efficiency development community task force of that kind of caliber, which is simply seeking out opportunities to build wind turbines and solar panels because of potential, and houses that could store heat, goes and builds fish ponds wherever it goes across the country, establishes camping sites for travel, all as an absolute urgency, relentlessly emphasizing that the current situation just is not anywhere near under control good enough when it comes to managing the environment, and so without question, there need to be more resources allocated to the exploration, design, building and maintenance of what is our inhabiting environment and what we want in it.
You are entitled to your fair share of doubts: a governmental living maintenance agency couldn’t possibly exist, because units like the army, police and others get their funding and part of that governmental, tax-payer backed funding is that way trickled down into the pockets of a few individuals and their supplier companies, which is in essence how the rich get rich — by winning and supplying government, taxpayer contracts and then getting paid handsomely for their services.
The contractor companies are often just convenient ways for their owners, who are either politicians themselves directly, or at the very least political donors, to divert government money into private hands in an official way.
Yet at least in theory, even if rampant corruption was to eventually set in, there’s no reason why there couldn’t be infrastructure contractors, instead of nowadays so predominantly positioned defense contractors, which would operate in a very similar way, only would produce domestic benefit for citizens in their wake, finding every which opportunity and situation to justify the need for new bridges, new houses, new roads, new farms and so on.
Essentially then, those infrastructure contractors and their owners could pull in federal dollars, just like weapons manufacturers now do, and then this governmental body responsible for civilian space maintenance would always find reasons to have new things build, or cleaned, hiring these contractors, as well as relentlessly recruiting new people into the job, like the military now does. Not to say that building at home would keep recruits close to their families and avoid much of the woes now associated with PTSD cases.
The army, as well as the police, always present themselves as being in need of more cash, as being in crisis. But there’s nothing inherent about the fact that this body has to be the military, and all of the taxpayer money relentlessly flowing into armed engagements for resources. Even austerity governments always have new money for the war-racket, because they have ties to its perpetrators. But this revolving door could be tuned towards environmental strategy and rapid build-up of infrastructure, public and living spaces just as well, with the same principles, benefiting a more conventional civilian use-case for a more sophisticated, more varied, nicer world and more jobs too.
Why wouldn’t it be a very patriotic thing to do to build-up the homeland for the benefit of the people with the same fervor, why shouldn’t it evoke the same level of discipline, loyalty and commitment, if perhaps also some level of the usual bureaucratic corruption, which keeps the engagements ongoing.
And if peddling in rare resources is what keeps this up, then who says that those resources couldn’t be wood and stones, and being commissioned to maintain natural sanctuaries where there would be enough wood, for example? In essence, military and police, as well as the firefighters are concentrated on the human life aspect of an operation. To built something similar, but focused on architectural challenges around the environment and environmental planning with emphasis of taking care of nature would also be good, since EPA itself is (and never was) nowhere near up to such planning.
