By DUANE SCHRAG

Salina Journal

The official justification for the war with Iraq is that the United States wanted to spread freedom and democracy.

Stan Cox doesn't buy that.

"The word 'oil' is almost never mentioned in the decision of the Iraq invasion, but it is an essential part of it," Cox told a small group who attended a workshop Monday organized by Salina People for Peace.

Such military conflicts seem likely to erupt with increasing frequency as countries scramble for dwindling resources, Cox said. "Resource wars" is the term used to describe the phenomenon.

Even the Department of Defense is predicting that, as climate change disrupts agricultural production worldwide, wars will more often be over food, water and energy than ideology, he said.

The workshop was part of a two-day conference, "The Heartland Speaks: A Peace Coalition Action Glimpsing the Beloved Community," organized in response to the Hawgsmoke fighter jet competition that begins Wednesday in Salina.

The group plans to stage a vigil -- and perhaps give A-10 fighter pilots banners advocating peace -- at the airport Wednesday.

The conference resumes today at the Quality Inn and Suites, 2110 W. Crawford. Workshops will explore war in the 21st century, peacemaking, depleted uranium (which is used in the A-10's ammunition), the environmental impact of war and building community with complementary currency.

Cox, a plant geneticist with the Land Institute in Salina, noted that one of the most far-reaching inventions of the 20th century had profound implications for the military -- the Haber-Bosch process, which takes nitrogen from the air and turns it into ammonia. The discovery revolutionized agriculture because it created a new source of fertilizer.

It also greatly facilitated the manufacture of explosives.

Cox said that environmental damage from the military is pervasive. He noted that Salina still is grappling with groundwater contamination left over from the 25 years that the military operated an air base here. Trichloroethylene, a compound that was commonly used as a solvent, was dumped in huge quantities into ditches of the former Schilling Air Force Base.

Authorities still have not decided what to do about the contaminant, which is now under homes in southwest Salina.

TCE contamination is a problem at more than 1,400 current and former military sites around the country, Cox said.

The growing appetite for energy is only going to raise tensions, Cox said. He dismissed the hope that biofuels such as ethanol can realistically be a substitute for gasoline: if all the world's grain production were turned into ethanol, it would roughly meet America's gasoline needs.

"There simply isn't enough land to feed us and our automobiles at the same time," he said.

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