Imake two assumptions in this article: First, that a few BioScience readers, but not many, will have had some involvement with the ecology of war and will want to know more about the current literature; and second, that some readers, perhaps many, may be interested in becoming active in this field. So this article has two facets: (1) a quick introduction for the uninitiated to the field of impacts of war and (2) a description of the books under review. My aim is to tell you whether these books will help you understand what war does to the environment. A Google search on “war and ecology” netted 448,000 hits in just 0.17 seconds on 21 July 2003. An unscientific, visual sample suggested that the offerings range from the rational to the ridiculous, from the fact-based to the facile. The vast majority are short articles. It is far beyond the scope of this review to do a bibliometric analysis of these results; it is possible that a few facts and ideas are repeated with a high frequency, vastly outweighing the generation of genuinely valuable information. No doubt excellent material is buried in the avalanche. In my own work, I noticed that this past April and May brought a surge of articles reporting on the intent of nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations to conduct research and mitigation projects in the marsh areas of Iraq. Books and monographs on that work are likely to appear in the coming months and years. Before the Vietnam War, with its defoliation and dioxin dispersal, few people discussed ecological destruction by warfare. It was generally accepted as a necessary evil of a necessary evil. Taking that as a graphical 0,0 point and moving forward to today, we see a definite rise in the trend line of concern over war’s environmental effects. Since the Persian Gulf War in 1991, increasing recognition of the ecological footprint of conflict has joined with other rising concerns about the global environment. We look for help in grasping the nature and intensity of the effects of war to aid the development of appropriate ethics and policy. It was possible in 1996 for me to tell the Federal Forecasters’ Conference, an annual meeting of statistical and normative forecasting specialists from most of the prominent US government agencies, about a discernible worldwide trend toward inclusion of such issues in future decisionmaking on whether and when go to war and when to terminate war. Four years later, two books were published on that trend of thought (Austin and Bruch 2000, Hastings 2000). Today, 7 years after the conference, concern and discussion about the ecological effects of war are even more widespread.