| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of Warfare. Ed. by Richard P. Tucker and Edmund Russell. (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004. viii, 280 pp. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 0-87071-047-8.)
When I started this reader I was a tad suspicious that an environmental take on war would be an exercise in novelty related to the belated discovery of this generally ignored topic. In fact, this collection of essays adds to our theoretical and substantive understanding of how the environment and warfare interact. Most of this eleven-article collection deals with the impacts of war on the natural environment. The coverage is variegated, with topics ranging from war in precolonial central India, to precolonial and colonial African warfare, to the role of organisms in the battle of Gettysburg and the Civil War, to timber, pests, whaling, and broad environmental impacts of World War II on Japan and Finland. The introduction lays out the main themes clearly and is followed by a historical survey of the impact of war. (An irritant here is that the chapters are not numbered.)	1
The key to an environment-war linkage is "to demonstrate that environmental approaches can yield valuable insights into fields of history that might not concede any potential connections at first glance" (p. 88). Most of the articles afford interesting insights and circuitous and sometimes surprising connections. Whereas images of battle-scarred landscape are commonplace in movies and sometimes photographs, the reach of war is far more extensive and often indirect. Economic and military mobilization (including new technologies), scarcity and attendant conservation activities, and diminishing trade can all have deep and persistent ecological consequences.	. . .

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