Earth’s Greatest Enemy gets its Philly premiere at a Fallser Club screening on January 28

Martin’s 2025 film exposes the military’s global environmental impact through firsthand accounts of communities devastated by imperialism and the US empire. As a journalist myself, I appreciate how Martin lets her own perspective drive the doc’s narrative. Mainstream corporate media discourages journalists from embedding our personal experiences into our storytelling for the sake of so-called “objectivity”, a myth that has been debunked by movement journalists like Lewis Raven Wallas, who argues that we can “come from a particular perspective, and still tell the truth.”

A stake in our future

“I am a product of the War on Terror,” Martin’s narration begins four minutes into the film. Her outrage toward the government and media’s collusion to sell the Iraq war motivated her to become a journalist. Through creating her own independent media, she met anti-war activist and veteran Mike Prysner, now her husband, and the film’s codirector. Through a shared passion, they founded The Empire Files, a documentary and interview series with a “central core truth that is right in front of our faces but is never really acknowledged, that the United States is a global military empire, bigger than any in history, and put us on the ground with those affected by it.”

The film also covers Martin’s own life transition, as she and Prysner welcome a baby boy amid the climate crisis.

“I needed to assert why I'm telling the story and why you should trust me,” Martin explains in an interview with Broad Street Review. “I have invested a stake in this planet and in the future. It's not about hating the military. It's about holding the military accountable.” Since her husband is an Iraq war veteran, she feels it’s important for viewers “to understand who I am, who my family is, and why we're all connected in this fight.”

Beyond the environment and the military

Earth’s Greatest Enemy is not just a story about the environment. It’s not even solely about the military as an institution, but the larger theme of US imperialism—policy of extending a country's power and influence through diplomacy or military force—and its implications on the planet.

For instance, Martin identified the US partnership with Israel as an imperialist tool to protect and maintain capitalism and referred to the war in Gaza as an ecocide. The Stop Ecocide Foundation identifies ecocide as a potential war crime characterized by “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.” Framed this way, environmental destruction cannot be divorced from imperial power, exposing ecocide not as collateral damage but as a structural feature of the US empire.

“You have entire machinery exposing the nature of the interconnectedness of these struggles, whether it's the degradation and destruction of Indigenous habitats abroad, veterans being poisoned here at home, or the water contamination [that] affects every single living person on this planet,” Martin adds. “We see ICE executing a woman in the street doing something that any of us can do.” On January 7, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mom of three living in Minneapolis, after she dropped her son off at school. She was a legal observer of ICE activities.

Revolutionary optimism

Instead of feeling a sense of doom about the knowledge her reporting uncovered, Martin describes the opposite. “I feel like more revolutionary optimism than I ever had before because seeing how many millions of people in a multigenerational kind of class struggle understand that this is about the billionaires who have robbed us and they're not gonna go down without a fight,” she elaborates. “It's pretty amazing to see that.”

My first viewing of the film evoked difficult emotions including fear, frustration, and rage, but by the end, those feelings transformed into gratitude and hope. I was struck by how many people around me have been radicalized through environmentalism and the fight against climate change; anti-war politics can no longer be treated as a separate concern. This convergence presents a powerful opportunity for American environmental and anti-war movements to build coalitions and oppose US interventions in solidarity with adjacent social movements in the Global South, which bear the brunt of environmental destruction wrought by the US military.

“The fight against the war machine and the fight to save the planet is the same fight,” Martin says at the end of the film. “Linking these issues together gives us more strength.”

The Philadelphia premiere of Earth’s Greatest Enemy will be followed by a Q&A with director Abby Martin on Wednesday, January 28 from 6-9pm at the Fallser Club in East Falls. Tickets are available now.