Toward An Environmental History of War

How has war changed and damaged the environment? How has nature influenced war? As the first collection of essays on war and environmental history, Natural Enemy, Natural Ally heralds the advent of a major new field of study.

Contributors to the volume explore the dynamic between war and the physical environment from a variety of provocative viewpoints. The subjects of their essays range from conflicts in pre-colonial India and early colonial South Africa to the U.S. Civil War and twentieth-century wars in Japan, Finland, and the Pacific Islands. Among the topics explored are:

• the ways in which landscape can influence military strategies;
• why the decisive battle of the American Civil War was fought;
• the impact of war and peace on timber resources;
• the spread of pests and disease in wartime.

Contributors
Judith A. Bennett, Kurk Dorsey, Mark Fiege, Stewart Gordon, Simo Laakkonen, Roger Levine, Edmund Russell, William M. Tsutsui, and Richard P. Tucke