Edmund Russell

Richard P. Tucker

Contributors to this 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 colonial India and 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.

Toward an Environmental History of Warfare

Natural Enemy, Natural Ally

Thomas Robertson

Peter Mansoor

Nicholas B. Breyfogle

"World War II was the largest and most destructive conflict in human history. It was an existential struggle that pitted irreconcilable political systems and ideologies against one another across the globe in a decade of violence unlike any other. There is little doubt today that the United States had to engage in the fighting, especially after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The conflict was, in the words of historians Allan Millett and Williamson Murray, "a war to be won." As the world's largest industrial power, the United States put forth a supreme effort to produce the weapons, munitions, and military formations essential to achieving victory. When the war finally ended, the finale signaled by atomic mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, upwards of 60 million people had perished in the inferno. Of course, the human toll represented only part of the devastation; global environments also suffered greatly. The growth and devastation of the Second World War significantly changed American landscapes as well. The war created or significantly expanded a number of industries, put land to new uses, spurred urbanization, and left a legacy of pollution that would in time create a new term: Superfund site"--

American Environments and World War II

Nature at War

J. R. McNeill

Martin Schmid

Tait Keller

Surveys the ecological impacts of World War I, showing how the war had a global impact on the environment.

Environmental Histories of the First World War

In the late 1800s American entrepreneurs became participants in the 400-year history of European economic and ecological hegemony in the tropics. Beginning as buyers in the tropical ports of the Atlantic and Pacific, they evolved into land speculators, controlling and managing the areas where tropical crops were grown for carefully fostered consumer markets at home. As corporate agro-industry emerged, the speculators took direct control of the ecological destinies of many tropical lands. Supported by the U.S. government's diplomatic and military protection, they migrated and built private empires in the Caribbean, Central and South America, the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and West Africa. Yankee investors and plantation managers mobilized engineers, agronomists, and loggers to undertake what they called the "Conquest of the Tropics," claiming to bring civilization to benighted peoples and cultivation to unproductive nature. In competitive cooperation with local landed and political elites, they not only cleared natural forests but also displaced multicrop tribal and peasant lands with monocrop export plantations rooted in private property regimes. This book is a rich history of the transformation of the tropics in modern times, pointing ultimately to the declining biodiversity that has resulted from the domestication of widely varied natural systems. Richard P. Tucker graphically illustrates his study with six major crops, each a virtual empire in itself—sugar, bananas, coffee, rubber, beef, and timber. He concludes that as long as corporate-dominated free trade is ascendant, paying little heed to its long-term ecological consequences, the health of the tropical world is gravely endangered.

The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World

Insatiable Appetite

Simo Laakkonen

Timo Vuorisalo

The fate of towns and cities stands at the center of the environmental history of World War II. Broad swaths of cityscapes were destroyed by the bombing of targets such as transport hubs, electrical grids, and industrial districts, and across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, urban environments were transformed by the massive mobilization of human and natural resources to support the conflict. But at the same time, the war saw remarkable resilience among the human and non-human residents of cities. Foregrounding the concept of urban resilience, this collection uncovers the creative survival strategies that city-dwellers of all kinds turned to in the midst of environmental devastation. As the first major study at the intersection of environmental, urban, and military history, The Resilient City in World War II lays the groundwork for an improved understanding of rapid change in urban environments, and how societies may adapt.

Urban Environmental Histories

The Resilient City in World War II

Harold K. Steen

Changing Tropical Forests begins with an overview of the history of deforestation in tropical America and the tasks facing Latin American environmental historians. Based on proceedings of a 1991 conference sponsored by the Forest History Society and IUFRO Forest History Group in Costa Rica, the contributors offer detailed accounts of the enivornmental history of specific forest conditions, grasslands, and changing ecosystems of Costa Rica, Mexico, Surinam, and Brazil. the role of human intervention in this process of change is also discussed. Contributors. William Balée, James R. Barborak, Peter Boomgaard, Larissa V. Brown, Gerardo Budowski, John Dargavel, Warren Dean, Silvia del Amo R., Elizabeth Graham, J. Régis Guillaumon, Rhena Hoffmann, Sally P. Horn, Sebastião Kengen, Herman W. Konrad, Mary Pamela Lehmann, Robert D. Leier, Murdo J. MacLeod, M. Patricia Marchak, Elinor G. K. Melville, David M. Pendergast, Susan M. Pierce, Leslie E. Sponsel, Richard P. Tucker, Terry West

Historical Perspectives on Today's Challenges in Central & South America

Changing Tropical Forests

This book presents a comprehensive and critical historical overview of the role played by the US as a developer and consumer of tropical nature.

Richard P. Tucker

Books

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