20Nicholas von Tunzelmann, Steam Power and British Industrialization to 1860, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
21Eric A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 40.
22Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming, London: Verso, 2015.
23Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, 3.
24Joel Tarr and Clay McShane, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
25David E. Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998, 82.
26Alexis Madrigal, Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology, Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2011.
27Robert Righter, Wind Energy in America: A History, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
28François Jarrige, ‘“Mettre le soleil en bouteille”. Les appareils de Mouchot et l’imaginaire solaire au début de la Troisième République’, Romantisme, 150, 2010: 85–96.
29Frank T. Kryza, The Power of Light: The Epic Story of Man’s Quest to Harness the Sun, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003, 229.
30Ibid., 234–7.
31Daniel A. Barber, ‘Tomorrow’s House: Solar Housing in 1940s America’, Technology and Culture, 55:1, January 2014: 1–39.
32Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
33Paul David, ‘Clio and the Economics of QWERTY’, American Economic Review, 75:2, 1985: 332–7.
34H. W. Singer, ‘The Coal Question Reconsidered: Effects of Economy and Substitution’, Review of Economic Studies, 8:3, 1941: 166–77, table B.
35Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 45–85. No equivalent study is available of the peculiar choice made by France to develop electric heating in the 1970s.
36Glenn Yago, ‘The Sociology of Transportation’, Annual Review of Sociology, 9, 1983: 171–90.
37David J. St. Clair, The Motorization of American Cities, New York: Praeger, 1986; Glenn Yago, The Decline of Transit: Urban Transportation in German and U.S. Cities, 1900–1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. For a different point of view, see Donald F. Davis, ‘North American Urban Mass Transit, 1890–1950’, History and Technology, 12:4, 1995: 309–26; Dominique Larroque, ‘Apogée, déclin et relance du tramway en France’, Culture technique, 19, 1989: 54–64.
38Zachary M. Schrag, ‘“The Bus Is Young and Honest”: Transportation Politics, Technical Choice, and the Motorization of Manhattan Surface Transit, 1919–1936’, Technology and Culture, 41:1, 2000: 51–70.
39Stephen Goddard, Getting There: The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail in the American Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, 102–37.
40Frédéric Héran, Le retour de la bicyclette. Une histoire des déplacements urbains en Europe de 1817 à 2050, Paris: La Découverte, 2014, 50–1.
41Yago, The Decline of Transit.
42Patrick O’Brien and Caglar Keyder, Economic Growth in Britain and France, 1780–1914: Two Paths to the Twentieth Century, London: Allen and Unwin, 1978.
43John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 140.
44Edmund Newell, ‘Copperopolis: The Rise and Fall of the Copper Industry in the Swansea District, 1826–1921’, Business History, 32:3, 1990: 75–97.
45Bruce Podobnick, Global Energy Shifts: Fostering Sustainability in a Turbulent Age, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006, Figure 4.1.
46Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, London: Verso, 2011.
47Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
CHAPTER 6
Thanatocene: Power
and Ecocide
As the twentieth century progressed, wars became both deadlier and more frequent.1 The First World War killed more than all the wars of the nineteenth century had together, while the Second World War alone made up half the number of dead in the past 2,000 years of warfare.2 Advances in productivity and in destructiveness went hand in hand: the cost of destruction steadily decreased throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In relation to its destructive power, military technology has never been so cheap. Besides, from the eighteenth century on, West European states considerably expanded their tax-raising powers. Historians estimate that Great Britain, particularly precocious in this field, already mobilized 20 per cent of its GDP for war-making in 1800.
War has thus become more affordable, particularly for rich states. Statistical analysis of wars shows that in the twentieth century the richest countries have tended to be at war more often than the poorest: the top third of countries in terms of wealth have been responsible for half the wars of the twentieth century. Before 1914, on the other hand, the richest countries tended to be less frequently involved in armed conflicts. The United States, for example, was involved in 9.3 per cent of all wars between 1870 and 1945, and 11.2 per cent in those since then.3
In the twentieth century, moreover, the rich states waged wars of a totally different kind from any in the past. Their troops were supported, and to a certain degree replaced, by extraordinarily powerful machines fed by colossal industrial, technological and logistic systems, war machines that required growing quantities of raw materials and energy and had an unprecedentedly heavy impact on the environment.
Even in peacetime, military-industrial complexes destroy. The Cold War, for example, saw a peak in the environmental footprint of armies. By the late 1980s, military training camps, often polluted with radioactive waste, munitions, etc., covered 1 per cent of the Earth’s surface (including 2 per cent of the United States). The maintenance and training of Western armed forces consumed enormous quantities of resources: 15 per cent of West German air traffic, for example, was linked to NATO military exercises. In 1987, the American army was responsible for 3.4 per cent of the nation’s oil consumption, comparable figures being 3.9 per cent for the Soviet Union and 4.8 per cent for the UK, as well as 1 per cent of all coal and 1.6 per cent of electricity. If we add to this the carbon dioxide emissions bound up with arms production, then between 10 and 15 per cent of American emissions during the Cold War were attributable to the military.4
Efficiency has a very different meaning when the object is to kill rather than be killed. The development of contemporary weapons systems illustrates the tendency to energy exuberance that is intrinsic to the military. During the Second World War, General Patton’s Third Army consumed one US gallon of petrol (3.7 litres) per man per day. This figure reached nine gallons during the Vietnam War, ten gallons for Operation Desert Storm, and fifteen gallons during the Second Gulf War. Present-day military technologies have reached unheard-of levels of energy consumption. An Abrams tank in the US Army burns four litres per kilometre. A B-52 bomber burns 12,000 litres of jet fuel per hour, and an F-15 fighter 7,000 litres, comparable to the consumption of an average family car in a whole decade. In 2006, the US Air Force consumed a total of 2.6 billion gallons of jet fuel, as much as was used overseas during the whole of the Second World War.5
The basic transformation of the Western way of making war, its deep integration in the industrial system, the way in which the military are embedded in research and development,6 all underlie the argument of the present chapter that the Anthropocene is also (and perhaps above all) a Thanatocene.7
A natural history of destruction
On 27 July 1943, at 0100 hours, the Allies dropped 10,000 tonnes of incendiary bombs on Hamburg. By 0120 the city was consumed by a fire-storm that rose to a height of 2,000 metres. The writer Hans Erich Nossak, in one of the rare eyewitness accounts of the immediate post-war years, emphasi
zed the ecological consequences of the Allied ‘strategic bombing’. During autumn 1943, in Hamburg,
rats and flies ruled the city. The rats, bold and fat, frolicked in the streets, but even more disgusting were the flies, huge and iridescent green, flies such as had never been seen before. They swarmed in great clusters on the roads, settled in the heaps to copulate on ruined walls.8
In 1945, after visiting the ruins of Cologne, Solly Zuckerman, a zoologist and one of the founding fathers of British operational research, had the idea of writing an article on the environmental consequences of strategic bombing. In his memoirs, he explains that he abandoned this because the absolute desolation that he had witnessed ‘cried out for a more eloquent piece than I could ever have written’.9 Zuckerman had proposed to his publisher an intriguing title: The Natural History of Destruction.
Perhaps out of respect for human victims, historians have generally not taken up this project. So, if specialists in warfare study the environmental circumstances of battles (the role of terrain, the Russian winter, the impenetrable Ardennes Forest, etc.), the environmental consequences of war are far less well known, i.e., the effects of bombing, trench warfare, artillery or incendiary devices. Besides, the distinction is scarcely satisfactory: mud, for example, all-pervasive in the European wars of the twentieth century, is more an effect of the destruction of soil by the passage of military vehicles than a pre-existing characteristic of the terrain.10 Likewise, it is because forests played a fundamental defensive role (from the war of position in the Ardennes in 1914 to the guerrilla tactics of the Viet Cong) that they have suffered so much from warfare.
Contemporary observers of wars were well aware of the environmental devastation these caused. In France in the 1820s, for example, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were blamed for the reduction in forest cover as well as for the cooling of the climate. If the armed forces of modern times were always very greedy in terms of timber for ships and guns (around 50 cubic metres of wood were needed to smelt one tonne of iron, or the annual sustainable production of ten hectares of forest),11 the industrial wars of the twentieth century devoured still greater quantities: in 1916–18, when German U-boats interrupted Britain’s trade routes, the country had to fell nearly half of its commercial woodland in order to satisfy military needs.12 Similarly, during the Second World War, Japan lost 15 per cent of its forests.13
Because it came into the calculation of war reparations, French engineers of the 1920s studied very closely the woodland devastation of the First World War. They distinguished between losses due to exceptional felling (two years’ production), losses by direct destruction (50,000 hectares),14 and losses of woodland made unusable by gunfire.15 A total of 3.3 million hectares of agricultural land were also affected by battles. Trench warfare left a soil that was sterile, full of metal fragments and unsuited for agriculture, though it would be the object of reforestation in the 1930s. The volume of earth churned up by artillery (up to 2,000 cubic metres per hectare) was equivalent to 40,000 years’ natural erosion.16
On top of these palpable consequences, deliberate environmental destruction and its tactical and strategic role is a subject still in need of exploration. The ‘scorched earth’ practices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whether offensive (during the American Civil War, the US invasion of the Philippines, the Boer War, the second Sino-Japanese War) or defensive (the German Operation Alberich of 1917 in the Somme, the opening of the Yellow River dikes by Chiang Kai-shek’s troops in 1938, Stalin’s destruction of Soviet resources in 1941), should be analysed as environmental phenomena.
The Vietnam War is certainly the most well known and best documented case in which destruction of the enemy’s physical environment constituted a pre-eminent military objective. It was at this time that Barry Weisberg coined the term ‘ecocide’.17 The American infantry could only advance with the aid of ‘Rome plows’, powerful bulldozers that grubbed up forests and crops. A special six-tonne bomb, the Daisy Cutter, was also developed, with a shock wave that could instantly create zones for helicopter landing in the middle of the jungle. An estimated 85 per cent of the ammunitions used by the US Army were targeted not at the enemy but at the environment sheltering them: forests, fields, cattle, water reserves, roads and dikes.18 In 1972, the French geographer Yves Lacoste showed how the US Air Force bombed the dikes of the Red River Delta at its widest part in order to maximize the devastating effect on the population.19 As he put it, geography and environmental sciences were used above all to make war.
Noting the inability of incendiary bombs and napalm to destroy the humid Vietnamese forests, the US Army finally sprayed defoliants developed from agricultural herbicides (Monsanto’s ‘Agent Orange’), the mutagenic effects of which on the human population still persist nearly half a century after the end of the war.20
It is estimated that 70 million litres of herbicide were sprayed between 1961 and 1971, contaminating 40 per cent of Vietnam’s arable land, while the country also lost 23 per cent of its forest cover.
Vietnam was also the theatre of a major project of climate engineering. Between 1966 and 1972, in order to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail running from China to South Vietnam, the US Army carried out more than 2,600 aerial missions with the aim of inducing artificial rain by cloud seeding. At a time when America was mired in the Watergate scandal, revelation of this secret climate war aroused great emotion, and the USSR pressed home its advantage by taking the question to the UN. In 1977, the General Assembly adopted a convention, still in force, forbidding ‘the hostile use of environmental modification’. Despite its basic focus on military use, this convention also prohibited ‘deliberate manipulation of natural processes – the dynamics, composition or structure of the Earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space’. This text is the most solid legal basis for banning experiments of climate engineering that are currently projected with a view to countering climate change.21
Figure 9: Defoliant spraying in South Vietnam, 1961–1971
If the case of the Vietnam War is the best known, it is far from being unique: the destruction of enemy resources and environment was a constant in Cold War conflicts. In 1950, the British Army began to experiment with defoliants in Malaysia, to prevent their Communist opponents from carrying out agriculture in the jungle. During the Korean War, the US Air Force systematically bombed dams and irrigation systems. North Korea lost 75 per cent of its water supply. In Afghanistan, Soviet forces also targeted irrigation systems, and close to half the Afghan cattle were killed during this war.22
Napalm, an incendiary mixture of oil and gelling agent invented by the Harvard chemist Louis Fieser in 1942 with support from the DuPont company, played a central role in the ecocides of the Cold War, by its capacity to burn vegetation – as well as the people this sheltered – over large areas. Used already in the Pacific War, it was employed on a massive scale in Korea (32,000 tonnes), by the French army in Vietnam and in Algeria (where two-thirds of French planted forests were destroyed) and by the British against the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya.23
Brutalizing nature
Generalizing somewhat, we could hypothesize that war, by creating a state of exception, has justified and encouraged a ‘brutalizing’ of relations between society and environment.24 If nuclear weapons are the most palpable example of this, the ‘scorched earth’ policy of modern war should also be studied as both ideology and practice. In 1940, British MPs pressed Kingsley Wood, the air minister, to destroy the Black Forest by incendiary bombs. And it was likewise in terms of biotopes that Churchill explained the meaning of the total war he was waging: to ‘make Germany a desert’.25 It is a revealing fact that the most severe punishment envisioned for Germany was an environmental one: Henry Morgenthau, the US Treasury secretary, proposed to convert Germany into a country ‘primarily agricultural and pastoral in character’.
Besides the immediate theatre of operations, war preparations and the organic link between the milita
ry, R&D and technological choices have played a fundamental role in the arrival of the Anthropocene.
Certain connections are so self-evident that they have scarcely been studied up till now. By learning to kill humans in an efficient fashion, the military have also learned to kill living things in general.
In the second half of the twentieth century, for example, fishing techniques were indirectly revolutionized by the military. Nylon, which made it possible to manufacture nets several kilometres long, was closely linked with the Second World War – developed by the DuPont company to replace Japanese silk in producing parachutes, bulletproof vests and special tyres. After the Second World War, mechanisms for detecting enemy ships and submarines were applied to industrial fishing. Acoustic detection, radar and sonar, followed by GPS (a Cold War creation), multiplied fishing capacities exponentially and made deep waters and ocean trenches accessible. Moreover, this expensive equipment started a vicious circle, as it was necessary to capture ever more fish to make it profitable.26 World catches increased by an annual 6 per cent in the 1950s and ’60s before declining from 1990, when the application of technology no longer compensated for the reduction in fish stocks. In the early 2000s, stocks of large fish were down to a mere 10 per cent of their level before the Second World War.27
Military machines, by their particular power applied to destructive capacity, constitute archetypes of what Paul R. Josephson proposes to call ‘brute force technologies’. Tanks, for example, provided a developmental model for a range of tracked vehicles used in forestry (clear-cutters, harvesters, forwarders)28 or civil engineering (bulldozers). Indirectly, therefore, they contributed to damaging the lithosphere: mining, the proliferation of forest tracks to render the natural resources of Siberia or Amazonia accessible, the development of suburbias, etc. An interlinked history of mining and military technologies could be written: from the black powder used by German miners in the seventeenth century through to Alfred Nobel’s dynamite which made mountain-top removal possible.
The Shock of the Anthropocene Page 14
