Lockheed Martin’s Violent Definition of “Green”
Posted by keith on June 16th, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
LOCKHEED MARTIN ANNOUNCES NEW GREEN INITIATIVES FOR 140,000 EMPLOYEES, THEIR FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES
BETHESDA, Md. – Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) today announced new green initiatives to reach its 140,000 employees, their families and communities. The orchestrated effort is rolling out in conjunction with National Environmental Education Week (EE Week), the largest organized environmental education event in the United States.
Held each year during the week before Earth Day, EE Week coordinates environmental education outreach nationwide to increase Earth Day’s impact. Lockheed Martin will celebrate EE Week and Earth Day by introducing several new company-wide employee initiatives to encourage environmentally-friendly behavior at work, at home and in local communities.
“At Lockheed Martin, it is our goal to raise awareness of natural resource conservation and to help our employees take an active role in their communities,” said Dr. David J.C. Constable, vice president, Lockheed Martin Energy, Environment, Safety & Health. “With the reach of our organization’s network, we have the opportunity to inspire hundreds of thousands of individuals – starting with our employees, their families and communities – so that as a corporation, we can make a big impact one small action at a time.”
A program of the National Environmental Education Foundation, EE Week reaches millions of students with environmentally-themed lessons and activities. In further support of EE Week, Lockheed Martin donated $5,000 to create the EE Week Nature Center Map, which includes contact information for more than 2,000 nature and environmental education centers nationwide, and is a perfect way for educators to find local natural areas for field trips and outdoor study.
“We’re grateful to Lockheed Martin for making National Environmental Education Week’s nature center map possible,” said Diane Wood, president, National Environmental Education Foundation. “Giving children unstructured time to explore nature benefits both their physical and mental health. This nature center finder enables families to find nearby outdoor space easily so they can explore nature and have fun learning about local plants and animals.”
Lockheed Martin’s employee-based initiative surrounding EE Week is just a portion of the corporation’s overall Go Green business strategy. Lockheed Martin is committed to reducing its overall energy usage by building and operating greener, more-efficient buildings, embarking on Green IT activities, constructing on-site renewable energy projects and purchasing renewable energy credits. The Corporation also ranks among the top 50 organizations in the country in green power purchases based on kilowatt hours of power used, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency Green Power Partnership. The Corporation’s long-term absolute goals through 2012 are to reduce carbon emissions, waste to landfill and water usage – each by 25 percent.
In addition to reducing its own environmental impact, Lockheed Martin is working with its customers in the areas of energy efficiency, management, next-generation alternative energy generation, and climate monitoring, Lockheed Martin provides a full range of energy solutions to the government and regulated industry, including the Department of Energy, state and regional energy organizations, utilities and businesses.
Headquartered in Bethesda, Md., Lockheed Martin is a global security company that employs about 140,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services. The Corporation reported 2009 sales of $45.2 billion.
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For additional information, please visit: http://www.lockheedmartin.com
Media Contact: Matthew Swibel, 301-214-3178, matthew.swibel@lmco.com
When I received the above press release I realised it was beyond parody – I could have just posted it and left it at that; but then we moved house and the email was lost. Yesterday I discovered it again, and realised what needed to be done. The result of this you see below:
This is nothing more that the promotional video for Lockheed Martin’s “Going Green” initiative, interspersed with a range of Lockheed Martin’s own product videos, along with the Wikileaks Collateral Murder scene in which two children are severely injured in an Apache Helicopter attack in Iraq.
According to LM’s own website: “Arrowhead is the advanced electro-optical fire control system that Apache helicopter pilots use for safe flight in day, night, or bad weather missions.”
The link for the video is http://www.vimeo.com/12613450. Please distribute widely.
June 16th, 2010 at 8:25 pm
I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or vomit.
Greenwashing at its finest.
June 23rd, 2010 at 2:04 am
I’m not checking because I’m pretty sure of this fact: Lockheed-Martin is (or very recently was) THE biggest corporate recipient of U.S. government defense (“defense”) contracts.
The first sentence of the video made me pause (||) and ponder: “At Lockheed-Martin, we’re committed to sustaining people, places, and products to ensure the long-term viability of the corporation and enduring mission success for our customers.”
This corporation illustrates vividly the contrast between the processes of life (cyclical; every substance and part of the system to be used and transformed by other parts of the system, as the whole mutually sustains itself) and the processes of industry (linear; transforming items or substances found in the environment [“natural resources”] to waste, some of it temporarily useful to humans, most of it indigestible or poisonous to the planet). It’s blunter and just as accurate to contrast them as the processes of life and the processes of death.
Military hardware consumes staggering quantities of energy, all based on fossil fuel, with associated emissions, in its manufacture and in its use. That use is most often brief, and you don’t recycle a tank; you leave it where it became useless for others to clean up if they will (or can). Maybe first you collect its depleted-uranium ammunition for use in other tanks. Even without that source, the battlefield — sorry, the theatre of action, the site of your struggle against the forces of evil — is probably already laced with massive quantities of the depleted uranium, enough to poison many future generations from conception, sentencing them to gruesome death, early or late.
Military hardware virtually equals the most efficient waste of resources, effort, and cash that might otherwise help transform the lives of people everywhere, even transform the energy basis of societies everywhere. Those who wish for a new vision by which humans might continue living on this planet could do worse than face squarely the challenge to turn swords into plowshares.
This video may take me a loooong time to watch.
August 10th, 2010 at 6:58 pm
First of all, the entire US Government is a near total waste. If Lockheed wants to be badass at inventing cool stuff and save a little bit of money at the same time (LEED and environmentally friendly stuff), why are you guys bitching about it? They were going to do all this stuff anyway, now they are a little cleaner about it. Take it with a grain of salt and move on.
What drives me nuts is the fact that you yahoo’s are on this message board complaining about things in the US while China is putting up hundreds of thousands of factories and chemical plants that don’t have 1/10th the environmental safeguards that US manufacturing does. We (the US) even have methods of doing things that are cheaper and better for the envirnment. We’d be happy to share this with China but they could care less.
I’m not going to tell you how you should thank your lucky stars that that military has earned you the right to complain about it. I don’t need to, becuase if you don’t have any sense of that, you are a total waste and hopeless cause.
I agree that the military is a huge expender of energy and much of it is just wasted energy. But at the same time, watching a propaganda video about a defense contractor is just a big waste of time (Lockheed doesn’t even make bullets or about a dozen other things that you wish it did so that you could hate them some more).
So, to all you fake environmentalists that complain about small steps not being big steps, I hope it worked on that girl with the dreadlocks and the armpit hair because that is about all it’s good for. But if you really care about doing some good, this certaintly isn’t the place.
Jake
Energy Efficiency Engineer
August 11th, 2010 at 3:40 am
Ok, Jake, thanks for all my free speech, military.
Now, about this colonialism…