Ecology Breaking Bad: Jake Hamblin's Arming Mother Nature

In the last few years we've learned much more about the history of environmental science and the military.  Donald Worster set an early tone in his classic 1977 history of ecology: "The age of ecology opened on the New Mexican desert near the town of Alamagordo, on July 16, 1945, with a dazzling fireball of light and a swelling mushroom cloud of radioactive gases."  Ron Doel, Scott Kirsch, Angela Creager and others have since expanded our understanding of the links between environmental science (including ecology), and the military, including atomic energy.  I've written a little myself, about ecology at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

So environmental science hasn't just been a guide to a better planet, and ecology is more than collecting butterflies.  But Jake Hamblin has taken the story further, in Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism.  His book is about the history of efforts to use nature as a weapon.  Hamblin's view is that to understand how humans came to believe they could change the global environment, one should look at the people who tried to do it.  Knowledge about the catastrophic consequences of human-caused global environmental change was jointly produced by science and the Cold War.  Whether by disease, radioactivity, or bad weather, by destroying crops, cities, or people, by working through the oceans, the atmosphere, or the soil � there's been no limit to the creativity applied to mass killing.  It's a wonderful book about intelligent people making horrible plans, far beyond Walter White's imagination.

As J. R. McNeill notes on the back cover, Hamblin's account gives new meaning to the old adage that it is a miracle anyone survived the Cold War.  It's also a great model of how to do contemporary history.  I learned a lot from it.

One lesson was about how far military concerns reached into environmental science.  Techniques of monitoring and modeling, concepts of vulnerability and diversity � all now central to environmental study and thought � also had military currency.  In fact, ideas about everything from climate change to human population growth have been interwoven with concerns about gaining the edge over adversaries.  This includes some of the most famous data sets in history, such as the trend in atmospheric CO2 (the Keeling Curve), measured since the mid-1950s at Mauna Loa.  This is now a foundation of climate science, but it began with Cold War concerns about measuring radioactivity.

The Keeling Curve (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

 Another lesson is about how the terms of current environmental debates often predate the specific issues discussed.  Climate change is a good example here too: climate skeptics opposed to action are echoing older arguments about how society should respond to environmental catastrophe � whether through government leadership or market forces.

It's also interesting to see how this "global" story had many local consequences.  Certain regions were identified as central to Cold War military planning.  The Arctic was especially: it became the focus of research in the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year.  Meanwhile, British scientists studied crop warfare in colonial contexts, seeking to undercut rebel insurgents.  Drought in Africa's Sahel was linked to interpretations of regional vulnerability to weather change.  Some suspected that severe weather (including episodes like Hurricane Hazel in 1954, which is famous around here) was the product of weather modification experiments.

This global-local dimension also shows how this book presents opportunities for further study.  Hamblin focuses on global developments and their local impacts, but it would be worth turning this view around, to look at how the global Cold War took its character from local places.  Even ideas about how to fight (and win?) World War III must have reflected the specific places and institutions where these nightmares were dreamed.  This especially applies to the history of environmental science: even while studying the globe, this science took on the characters of many local places.

But finally, one has to wonder.  Vast resources were devoted to ever more efficient ways of killing everyone, and nature too.  And all this happened in "democracies"?