After the oil spill on Nov. 7, it isn't uncommon to find dead birds and dark, sticky tarballs on Bay Area beaches.

The remnants of oil are currently contaminating Pacific shorelines, but it’s the long-term effect of environmental pollutants that gave an author and retired Pitzer College professor, Barry Sanders, the material for his latest essay, “The Green Zone: The Worst Lie of All.”

Sanders, who has authored 14 books on politics and environment, spent six months digging through military manuals, government Web sites and reference books in an effort to expose what he said is "the greatest atrocity to Earth at present: war.”

“The subject of pollution and war needs to be folded into political conversations,” Sanders said.

The idea for the essay came on a lark, Sanders said, who thought to himself one morning, the use of war vehicles, bombs and ammunition in guns must leave behind erasable traces of radioactive material on the ground and release chemicals into the air. Afterwards, he decided that war, as polluter, needed to be researched and presented to the public.

“I want there to be clamp put on America’s greatest polluter—the American military,” Sanders said.

What he found was the U.S. military used 40 million gallons of oil in the first three weeks of combat, more than what the Allied Forces used during all four years of WWI and about 80 times the amount spilled in the San Francisco Bay. Sanders said he also discovered that bombs, like the 15,000-pound “Daisy Cutter,” contain high amounts of uranium.

"A United Nations report, dated 2005, estimates that four million pounds of low-level but radioactive dust, the residue from spent munitions made with depleted uranium, has settled over the deserts and cities of Iraq," Sanders said in his essay. "Which means that a good deal of the country is now radioactive."

Sanders’ essay, while bringing attention to pollution and war, has also spurred some criticism in regards to the numbers he has collected.

Michael Goldfarb of the opinion magazine, "The Weekly Standard," drew attention to some number inconsistencies regarding how much carbon dioxide Navy planes are actually producing.

On the "Weekly Standard" Web site Goldfarb said, "Sanders makes a bunch of over the top claims about the amount of CO2 and other pollutants produced by the United States military."

Until inconsistencies over certain numbers-like the ones Goldfarb recognizes-are cleared up, the Huffington Post Web site, an online news and opinion blog site, will no longer post Sanders’ fuirthering work regarding war and pollution.

But despite some backlash, he is not alone in his dismisses of the US military. SF State associate environmental studies professor Carlos Davidson said he too finds the pollution war creates to be intolerable.

"To curb this and create change, it will involve changes in diplomacy as well as economics," Davidson said. “The US and other wealthy countries are going to need to cooperate."

But for such changes to be implemented, citizens need to do stay informed about issues such as US military actions and its pollution production, Sanders said.

As an environmental studies senior and treasurer of ECO Students, a student organization involved in promoting social and environmental issues on campus, Albert Kochaphum said it is important to create and maintain a healthy environment.

“The effect of war on the environment is always negative, and it destroys or contaminates habitats,” said Kochaphum, 21.

SF State professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Pete Palmer agreed that radioactive materials like oil and uranium could cause serious health problems.

“Radiation emitted from particles inside lungs can cause serious damage,” Palmer said.

While researching, Sanders found a report from the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in 2002 to support such claims.

“Researchers found that even though the alpha radiation from depleted uranium may be relatively low, breathing in depleted uranium as a metal can damage a person’s DNA.”

With the war now staggering into its fifth year, Sanders said he wants citizens, including college students, to find material on the internet, in books, and from professors, to educate themselves and create a base of knowledge about how pollution is damaging the Earth. Sanders said he just wants to be one part of the information U.S. citizens collect on learning about the earth and the health of their environment.

“I hope my essay inspires others to research more about the effects of war on the environment,” Sanders said.