An Anglo-American Ecology of Militarism: Marzec's Militarizing the Environment

My first exposure to the intersection of militarism and environmentality was in the summer of 1995. I was at debate camp and the instructor gave us photocopies of Heidegger and Criticism by William Spanos. I knew there had been a war in Vietnam and I knew vaguely that Heidegger was a German philosopher. I could not for the life of me figure out what these two things had to do with one another. The first section I read started with a long block quote from Michael Herr's Dispatches about the clear cutting of Ho Bo Woods. The scene was not one of combat but rome plows, fire from the sky, and deforestation. The page was spilling over with a counter-intuitive, can-do, American machismo and it fundamentally changed the way I thought about war. Borrowing heavily from Herr, Spanos created a truly arresting moment in philosophy. After a year spent mostly with Descartes, Locke, and Ayn Rand in equal parts, reading Spanos was like hearing Iggy Pop for the first time. Philosophy could be Raw Power. Rather than detail arguments about standing reserve or enframing, Spanos' book on Heidegger and criticism lead with a detailed account of the metaphysics of violence that rendered the very Vietnamese soil an enemy during the American occupation. According to Spanos, the animus of the war in Vietnam went well beyond human enmity. The conditions of life itself were targets of carpet bombing, Agent Orange, counter-insurgency, agricultural assistance, and strategic population concentration—name a vital life process and, according to Spanos, the American military found a way to fold it into the Vietnam war. After reading Spanos, any division of labor between military studies and continental philosophy was, for me, laid to waste.

The ecological way of war, inspired by Spanos's still powerful reading of Heidegger and Foucault through the War in Indochina, is the jumping off point for Robert P. Marzec's Militarizing the Environment: Climate Change and the Security State. Marzec takes inspiration from those like Spanos, Pease, and Rob Nixon, who locate the control over the environment as an essential component of the American exceptionalist settler-colonial project cum empire. For Marzec, like those who came before him, the process of making the environment knowable and useful figures significantly into the rise of the modern security state, and the continued mutations of the security/insecurity apparatus in the age of climate change. The tradition he continues is crucial, timely, and extraordinarily difficulty. What follows is what I hope to be a critique that shows where this book fits intellectually and politically at this moment and that explains why I eagerly await Marzec's next book on the basis of the argument this book begins, but only begins.

Each chapter of Militarizing the Environment introduces us to a different set of environmental projects brought under the gaze of statecraft and ultimately national security. The first chapter gives us a tour of the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) project as a kind of frame for understanding the increasing attention to the environment amongst strategic thinkers and war planners. The chapter divides the environmentality of 20th century American geopolitics into four periods: 1) nuclear weapons development; 2) energy security, with a focus on Middle East oil; 3) the post-Cold War interest in environmental management by branches such as the US Navy; and, 4) the interest in climate change after September 11, 2001. It ends with an account of land struggles in Amazonia. The second chapter weaves the history of the English enclosure movement together with the Green Revolution, and subsequent projects of Western agricultural development throughout the Global South. Chapters 3 and 4 detail the development of what Marzec calls a "compulsive and phantasmatic mode of reasoning" that develops in American strategic culture through the Cold War and Post-9/11 era (195). In these last two chapters, the stakes of environmentality are most apparent. Marzec makes...