H. Patricia Hynes Informed Comment
The methodical destruction of Gaza and its people – in little over 1000 days – has taken the crime of genocide to an extreme unprecedented in history. This was preventable if the will to prevent were there. That is, if the genocide enraged the world enough to stop it, principally, the UN; the sister countries of the Middle East; and the western countries, chief among them the U.S., selling their weapons and souls to Israel.
Since 1948, the United States has given more than $300 billion in military aid to Israel, and Israel relies on US-made weapons and has been given access to the most advanced U.S. technologies and military platforms. In June 2026, Prime Minister Netanyahu announced to a US Republican representative that he proposes to move from “aid recipient to partnership” with the United States, and he repeated the proposal on Fox News. Such an unprecedented collaboration promises to be an immense boon to US weapons companies.
While writing this piece, I came across Mary Oliver’s poem:
In the film of Dachau and Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen
the dead rise from the earth
and are piled in front of us, the starved
stare across forty years,
and lush, green, musical Germany
shows again its iron claw, which won’t
ever be forgotten, which won’t
ever be understood, but which did,
slowly, for years, scrape across Europe.
∞
while the rest of the world
did nothing.
And still the world does nothing to stop this current genocide.
Israel has systematically and thoroughly obliterated “every foundational pillar of human survival” in Gaza: food security; drinking and bathing water access; schools and universities; hospitals, clinics and medical workers; housing; and psychological and mental well-being. Israel’s deliberate targeting of children in Gaza exposes, to a horrifying degree, their intention of destroying the future of Gaza. Jews in Israel – having established themselves brutally in Palestine during the 1948-1949 Nakba – are the only people who have suffered the catastrophe of genocide and then perpetrated it against another people for their self-serving fantasy of a Greater Israel.
In another moral failure in these times, western media has cloaked record-breaking heat as an ill-timed weather event, most recently for FIFA, “instead of what it is – a predictable consequence of decades of fossil fuel dependence and political inaction.” Why are governments treating a slow-moving disaster that is accelerating, as an extreme weather event rather than a soon-to-be irreversible climate crisis? The climate disaster, in which no part of the world in untouched, is the fault of corporate criminals, namely, the oil industry and governments’ ignoring scientists’ warnings since the late 1950s. Moreover, Europe has been warming twice as fast as the global average and, simultaneously, stoking the Ukraine/Russian war, which like all wars uses exorbitant amounts of fossil fuels.
If leaders of most countries of the world had the fortitude, even if it set back growth now for a sustainable future, to stop relying on fossil fuels and immediately embrace renewable technologies, energy efficiency, and ecological forest renewal, it could save our planet or at least set back imminent climate crisis. Some countries have done so recently but not nearly rapidly enough; others, principally the United States have done worse than nothing, shutting down US wind turbines as they control the export and revenue of Venezuela’s oil.
The same cowardice that contaminates lawmakers in the US and Western Europe, which enables them to support the genocide of Gazans and the drive toward war with Iran, feeds the sluggish response toward the climate crisis. Consider the folly of countries who continue to burn fossil fuels for electricity to run air conditioners overtime in a heat wave that is caused primarily by burning fossil fuels.
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Through the work of Canadian forest researcher Suzanne Simard, we have learned that forests are a community that encompasses a web of thick below-ground fungal networks, which connect tree roots and feed each other nutrients and share communication. Called the World Wide Web, these networks prioritize sharing resources with kin but also distressed neighboring trees and adapt their responses to environmental conditions. Forests have evolved over millions of years and foresters are beginning to understand, what Indigenous peoples have never lost sight of, that instead of treating a forest as a collection of trees to be managed, their mission is to preserve the network of soil fungus, insects, understory plants and microbial communities that support the towering trees above. Even in death, a forest tree feeds new life with its nutrient-rich tissues as they decay. Chemical signaling above ground is another above form of communication between trees, both warning neighboring trees of insects, such as caterpillars, but also attracting pollinators.
Photo by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash
Recognizing the quiet language between trees holds lessons for humans, namely that a sense of community offers resilience in our own lives. In a forest, whose complexity encompasses a variety of trees and their entire ecosystem from worms and soil microbes to hawks in its canopy, “no tree stands alone.
Unlike the forests, Gaza stands alone during its destruction. If we humans could learn and emulate their lessons of mutuality towards each other and resilience, forests – by their example – may save us all. Provided we do not destroy them.
H. Patricia Hynes is an ardent feminist who has worked for environmental justice for communities of color and women’s rights for years. An environmental engineer, she was Professor of Environmental Health at Boston University’s School of Public Health and author of 6 books, among them The Recurring Silent Spring, which was nominated for the 1990 Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights Award and A Patch of Eden: Community Gardens in Inner Cities which won the 1997 National Arbor Day Foundation Award. She is a member of the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice, which she directed for 11 years.
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