Published in Environmental History 19: 3 (July 2014)

Abstract: The environmental, economic, and demographic consequences of Anglo-Scottish warfare in the early fourteenth century were far reaching. This article looks at the extent of environmental damage brought about by the ongoing warfare, primarily between England and Scotland from 1296 to 1328. The conflict coincided with a series of ecological and biological crises, most notably the Great European Famine of 1315–17 and the Great Bovine Pestilence of 1319–20. As I argue, the armed conflict aggravated the crisis further and caused immense damage within the war zones of the British Isles.

Abstract: In the North Sea region, the so-called Little Ice Age reached a cold, stormy nadir between 1560 and 1720, with a three-decade interruption of warmer, more tranquil weather between 1629 and 1662. Newly considered ship logbooks, diaries and other documentary evidence suggest that a rise in the frequency of easterly winds accompanied the coldest phases of the Little Ice Age, and these decadal climatic trends had consequences for regional warfare. Fought between 1652 and 1674, the Anglo-Dutch wars at sea were contested in a period of transition between decade-scale climatic regimes and consequently provide useful case studies into the relationship between meteorological trends and early modern military operations. In the first war, persistent westerly winds born of a warmer climate frequently helped crews aboard larger English warships set the terms of most naval engagements. However, during the second and third wars more frequent easterlies stimulated by a cooler climate granted critical advantages to Dutch fleets that had adopted elements of English tactics and technology. Ultimately, the changing climate of the Little Ice Age must be considered alongside human agency and the political, economic or cultural influences typically examined by military historians to explain the course of early modern warfare.

As the ASEH Newsletter reports, “Brown draws on declassified documents and oral histories of government officials as well as workers and their families in the US and the former Soviet Union, capturing the shared experiences of the Soviet and American experience with the production of a nuclear arsenal. Beyond the major accidents, Brown reveals how everyday operations exposed workers and their families to toxic radioisotopes. The cloak of secrecy that permeated the Cold War facilitated reckless attitudes towards nuclear weapons and wastes produced in both the US and the USSR. The very nature of radioactive materials limited tracing back to sources thus producing insidious exposures in workers and their families. Both wastes and exposures can be invisible in nature and invisible in terms of social action. Yet Brown rediscovers their traces in the bodies of the exposed.”

Published in the Oxford Handbook of Warfare in the Classical World (Brian Campbell and Lawrence A. Tritle, eds., 2013)

A broad introductory survey of the environmental dynamics and degradation of warfare in the Fertile Crescent and the classical Mediterranean world from the early Mesopotamian city states through the Roman Empire.

Published in Environmental History 18: 4 (2013)

Abstract: Beginning in the late 1920s, Bolivia’s growing need for petroleum to fuel its mining sector and urban centers led the country on a policy of expansion into the Chaco Boreal, a torrid expanse claimed by both Bolivia and Paraguay. The two countries fought a three-year war over the territory in the 1930s. Postwar nationalist narratives and popular views of the conflict remain clouded in conspiracy theories involving foreign actors that ignore Bolivia’s motives and confuse oil’s role. Emphasizing environmental aspects of the conflict helps us to better understand the underlying causes, the conduct, and the outcomes of the war. The conflict highlights the importance of oil in shaping Latin American social and natural landscapes, and it reveals new relationships between the natural world and collective violence.

Published in Environment and History 19: 4 (November 2013)

Abstract: During the Vietnam War, the United States military declared war not just on Vietnamese peoples, but also on nature itself. Operation Ranch Hand served as the U.S. military’s answer to the Vietnamese Communist appropriation of the natural world into their war plans, as U.S. planes dumped nearly twenty million gallons of chemical herbicides on Vietnamese fields and forests. Examining and comparing the military and ecological effects of Ranch Hand, this essay assesses the military success of chemical defoliation by looking at military appraisals and early U.S. scientific studies of defoliated areas. Planners expected defoliation to provide a distinct military advantage and frequently made claims that they were trading trees for lives – environmental destruction ostensibly saved the lives of U.S. servicemen. Instead, defoliation’s military effects proved very ambiguous and the use of defoliants should be considered a failure in some ways. In trying to characterise defoliation as either a military success or failure, the essay also questions what it means for a piece of technology to succeed or fail and ultimately concludes that the answer to that question depends on the goals for its use, not the technology itself.

Kathryn Morse’s review in Environment and History, August 2014:

“Americans don’t like ruins; they rebuild, memorialize, and forget. Megan Kate Nelson’s cultural and environmental history of the ruins left by the Civil War argues persuasively that physical ruins – of cities, homes, forests and soldiers’ bodies – mattered deeply during and just after the Civil War, but that the disappearance of those ruins and bodies over time reveals much of the penchant within American culture to erase the most jarring physical evidence of violence from the nation’s public and visual landscape, and in some cases, from history itself. This creative, thoughtful, detailed work combines the history of a powerful idea – ruination – with stories of real physical places and compelling individual lives transformed by war.”