Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime against Humanity and Nature

Abstract

The last decade has seen a growing interest in the intersection of genocide and ecocide, with calls from scholars and activists to include forms of environmental destruction as crimes against humanity. Scorched Earth enters this discussion with a historically informed analysis of how wars have targeted the environmental basis for human life. Through ten case studies ranging from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, Emmanuel Kreike contributes to current debates by introducing “environcide” as a concept bridging genocide (a crime against humanity) and ecocide (a crime against nature). At the heart of Kreike's argument is an analysis of how belligerents target and weaponize the environment as a widespread and long-standing strategy of war.Kreike defines environcide as intentionally or unintentionally damaging, destroying, or making inaccessible the “environmental infrastructure” on which life depends: the burning or flooding of fields; the destruction of irrigation, food storage systems, and hunting grounds; the requisitioning of food and livestock; and the extirpation of prey animals. For Kreike, environcide is “total war” in that it constitutes the destruction of both society and environment. Wars are not fought over abstract territory but “about, with, and in what animates, fills, and enriches space: the environmental infrastructure that sustains populations, states, and armies” (3). Scorched Earth challenges the separation of social war and environmental war into distinct “fields of inquiry” (197). Indeed, Kreike traces this flawed distinction to the pervasive nature-culture dichotomy, arguing that so long as “nature” and “culture” are ontologically segregated, wars against society will be considered “humanitarian concerns, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide,” while wartime environmental destruction will be relegated to a separate legal domain (395). Kreike goes on to challenge other overlapping binaries, including the Western (modern)/non-Western (premodern) dichotomy that frames European societies as outside or beyond nature, and non-European societies as living within nature (and vulnerable to its caprices).To support its claims, Scorched Earth carries the reader through a sweeping sequence of case studies: the sixteenth-century Dutch Revolt, the Spanish conquest of America, the Thirty Years' War, seventeenth-century Indigenous warfare in eastern North America, the wars of the Spanish Succession and Austrian Succession, settler colonial genocide in North America, genocide in West Africa, environcide in the Dutch East Indies, and colonial conquests in Southwest Africa. These cases reflect an extraordinary body of research, detailed analysis, and clear storytelling. Kreike demonstrates impressive skill as a historian and narrator, mixing familiar and lesser-known cases together in informative ways. Some parts of the narrative are heavy with forensic detail, but the book is at its best when connecting strategies of environcide between distant times and places.Scorched Earth makes a solid attempt to translate this history into theory, but its contributions here are questionable. Despite the intent to transcend the nature-culture binary, much of the historical narrative reinforces this dichotomy by describing a deterministic nature with limited agency and complexity—a mostly passive vessel through which violence is transmitted from one human to another. Rarely are environcidal consequences traced beyond the immediate social effects that benefit perpetrators or destabilize victims. Rather than a socio-environmental history, this is a history of war with an emphasis on the environment.Scorched Earth makes little engagement with political economy or structural factors over the longue durée. Whereas the immediate impacts of warfare on rural agriculture are prominently featured, Kreike generally ignores the underlying imperial, colonial, and capitalist logics of expropriation that animate and justify environcidal violence, along with the political and cultural ecology of the impacted infrastructural systems. To be sure, Kreike limits his subject in time and space to the battlefield. But in so doing, Scorched Earth misses the opportunity to make a compelling theoretical contribution to the structural origins of environcide, in wartime or otherwise.Finally, this structural weakness admits an awkward attempt to merge victims and perpetrators. Kreike details numerous environcidal tactics deployed by non-Westerners; for example, Indigenous Americans against European settlers, or Acehnese rebels against Dutch colonial soldiers. These instances of “native” environcide are intended to destabilize the Western/non-Western dichotomy and buttress Kreike's argument that environcidal warfare was not a purely European invention. But this narrow focus on the symmetry of events and tactics ignores the stark asymmetry of the structures shaping the broader conflict. Colonial invaders and Indigenous peoples burned each other's fields and food supplies under vastly different circumstances. To imply a conceptual equivalence is to overlook each side's profoundly different relationships to land and realities of survival.Scorched Earth contributes to a vigorous and timely conversation on the linkages between genocide, ecocide, and environmental violence with detailed analyses of the impact of war on environmental infrastructure. The book misses opportunities to engage existing theory; indeed, the promise to connect historical analysis with genocidal/ecocidal criminality is never fully realized. But the strength of Kreike's case studies should offer considerable inspiration for others to pick up where Scorched Earth leaves off.