Military Geographies and the Environment

Abstract

Conventional military geographies have tended to approach the environment as military operational space. However, a growing body of critical scholarship has focused more on the complex political ecologies produced by militarization, the environmental effects of military activities, and various forms of political contestation. These interventions have come from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Military environmental impacts include widespread and persistent ecological degradation and toxic contamination, global climate change, public health problems, and damage to cultural resources. These military environmental impacts occur at various types of sites across multiple geographic scales, including combat zones; training and testing areas; installations and logistics infrastructures; and circuits and sites of production, distribution, consumption, and disposal. Modern military tactics have intensified the manipulation, and even weaponization, of environmental conditions through the application of physical, chemical, and biological technologies. Negative military environmental impacts have been most concentrated in regions with histories of imperial and colonial domination or racialized subaltern populations, which demand an environmental justice analysis attentive to asymmetrical power relations. Some military landscapes have become de facto conservation areas due to the exclusion of human activities due to environmental hazards. In response to challenges by environmentalists, modern militaries have adopted environmental protection policies, procedures, and bureaucracies as part of their standard operations. In some cases, under the rubric of “greenwashing,” militaries have partnered with conservationists to preserve undeveloped landscapes as conservation buffers for military activities. However, critics point out that military environmentalism may be a form of capture and biopolitical control by the State. Scholars working with “new materialist” sensibilities have also drawn our attention to agential effects of other-than-human actants and more-than-human assemblages on military operations. This bibliography consists of seven sections. The first includes selections critically examining Military Environmentalism. Section two offers a diverse selection of readings examining different aspects of what we call Ecologies of War, which encompass the wider assemblage of social and environmental relations that condition and are conditioned by war. The third section provides an overview of studies on the widespread problem of Military Contamination. The fourth section focuses on a special subset of military contamination: the environmental impacts of nuclear weapons and Nuclear Landscapes Section five includes selections of new literature on the relationship between Climate Change and War. The sixth section includes readings that situate militarization in relation to imperial formations, or Empire and Colonialism. Section seven, Environmental Justice and the Military, features literature about the vibrant environmental justice social movements that confront the inequitable distribution of the military’s environmental harm.