Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War (review)

Reports indicating that the U.S. military accelerated its attack on Iraq in 2003 in order to prevent the destruction of Iraqi oilfields and avert ecological disaster suggest that sensitivity to the possible environmental impact of war is now widespread. Yet the editors of Natural Enemy, Natural Ally note that there have been few systematic academic efforts to explore the historical relationship between war and the environment. Indeed, the lack of scholarly study nearly stymied their attempts to produce a book on this topic. After eight years of work, however, they have drawn together a collection of interesting case studies that provides a useful introduction.

Richard Tucker and Edmund Russell's primary purpose is "to argue for the importance of understanding war as a major and distinctive force in environmental change, as well as the environment as a force in shaping warfare" (p. 2). The majority of the nine case studies focus on how war has altered the natural environment. A few, such as Roger Levine's discussion of how different perceptions of the landscape affected the way Zulu and Xhosa speakers conducted war in nineteenth-century Africa, consider how the environment has influenced war.

Tucker and Russell's second goal is to illustrate the current state of scholarship in the field. Tucker's historical survey of the impact of warfare on the natural world is intended to serve as a guide to the existing literature, but his melodramatic prose and antitechnology bias weaken its utility. For example, he describes how the superior weaponry of Western nations enabled them to overwhelm their "human prey" by the mid-nineteenth century, and he seems to believe that the principal product of technological advance is greater savagery and destruction (p. 25).

The third objective of the book is to encourage further research, and both the high quality of the case studies and the current relevance of the topic should help achieve this goal. Although the editors stress the need for more geographic and temporal diversity in the future, their case studies already cover a wide range of periods and locales. Some of the most interesting address the impact of war on the relationships between government institutions seeking to regulate the environment and private companies. Tucker argues that the intensive demand for forest resources during the world wars greatly expanded public control over those resources in many of the combatant nations. Because the exigencies of war forced governmental forest services to work closely with private-sector timber firms, commercial priorities dominated postwar forest management. Similarly, coeditor Russell suggests that the world wars forged ties between chemical companies and the military that fostered the development of insecticides and chemical weapons, thereby increasing the ability of human beings to kill both insects and other humans on a large scale.

Several contributors point out that war has not always had a detrimental effect on the natural world. William Tsutsui's insightful examination of the environmental history of wartime Japan reveals that the impact of war can be "uneven, contradictory, and often equivocal" (p. 210). Japanese mobilization for World War II intensified the cutting of old-growth forests and the hunting of seals, and wartime scarcity encouraged the "harvesting" of songbirds. Simultaneously, however, the destruction of Japan's fishing fleet had the effect of swelling fish-stocks, and energy resource shortages encouraged research in alternative fuels. Simo Laakkonen describes similar effects in Finland, where wartime demands paralyzed environmental policy but also protected forests, reduced the discharge of pollutants into the water, and increased use of local, renewable resources.

Another case study tells how the central government's role in developing and preserving the environment in precolonial India depended on its ability to manage its relations with militarized families and prevent destructive local wars. Others reexamine the Battle of Gettysburg and the American Civil War through an environmental lens, recount efforts to stop the spread of pests and...