War by nature: the nexus of war, environment and society

Few historical studies systematically consider the nexus of war and environment and society. Conventional military history and the field of environmental security focus on the environment as a weapon and cause of war, respectively. The ‘war and society’ literature pays little attention to the environment. Environmental history takes the environment-society nexus as its premise. An overview of how war, environment and society have been perceived to interact highlights why and how these gaps persist. Two major factors that shaped and continue to shape the relationship between humanity and environment bear much responsibility for the omissions. First, the nature-culture dichotomy paradigm segregates human society from the (natural) environment. And second, a long tradition casts the relationship between humans and nature in terms of a war-like zero-sum game. In less than a century ‘nature’ has transformed from a God-given wild natural resource for human development through domestication and dominance, to a hapless victim of unbridled human progress, exploitation and greed, to a monstrous threat to humanity’s survival. Thus, the dominant view of the relationship between human culture and nature has moved from the death of nature to death by nature. Yet, what has remained virtually unchanged is that the relationship between human society and ‘nature’ is largely depicted as war.