The Ecology of War: Environmental Impacts of Weaponry and Warfare - Hardcover

Lanier-Graham, Susan D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802712622 ISBN 13: 9780802712622

Publisher: Walker & Co, 1993

Synopsis

Looks at the environmental impact of munitions testing, maneuvers, storage of chemical and biological weapons, nuclear testing, and nuclear-powered ships

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Reviews

Saddam Hussein's oil fires during the Persian Gulf War were only the latest example of the environmental costs of warfare. In this useful survey, Lanier-Graham goes back to earliest recorded times--Samson burning the crops of the Philistines, King Archidamus cutting down fruit trees to form a palisade in the Peloponnesian War--to show how armies have incidentally or deliberately been destructive of the natural environment. Scorched-earth warfare, bombing, shelling, trenching, defoliation and other activities have destroyed forests, deprived animal populations of habitat and fostered extinctions, she writes. Her survey is especially strong on modern American wars, offering examples ranging from the devastation of live corals to build Pacific runways in WW II to the creation of some 30 million bomb craters in the Vietnam War. The author's The Nature Directory was named a Top Reference Book of 1991 by the New York Public Library.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A superficial and simplistic overview of the environmental havoc wreaked by war through the centuries. Possibly intending this as a classroom text for junior-high readers, Lanier-Graham (The Nature Directory, 1991--not reviewed) employs no-frills prose and bald-faced foreshortening to create a ``history'' of conflicts in which ecological damage was sustained, moving erratically from the Third Punic War--which led victorious Romans to sow the ruins of rival Carthage with salt so that it would remain a wasteland--to the intentional oil-based devastation of the recent Persian Gulf showdown. Contretemps involving the US receive the most attention, with various ancillary aspects of modern warfare--particularly weapons production and testing, and postwar weapons disposal--considered at length. With land laid waste by deliberate defoliation and ``scorched-earth'' policies from Sherman's March to the war in Vietnam, seas poisoned by chemical weapons dumped after WW II, and air filled with radiation from nuclear blasts, the record of ruin is a consistently grim one, although Lanier-Graham makes an effort to look on the bright side by noting postwar reclamation projects that attempted to lessen the ravages of armed conflict. A sobering and worthy subject--but an inadequate, at times almost trifling, treatment. (Twenty-four b&w photographs--not seen) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Walker & Co
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802712622
• ISBN 13: 9780802712622
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 185