Scorched Earth Environmental warfare as a crime against humanity and nature

This book's global scope and careful documentation challenge readers to engage with its complex thesis on how war crimes impact both humanity and the environment. Kreike (Princeton Univ.), a distinguished environmental historian of Africa, goes beyond this foundation to elucidate recurrent patterns of European aggression based on the destruction of local environmental structures, including productive settlements, social ties, food supplies and water sources, and the extensive environmental havoc wrought over time by large-scale destruction and the resulting displacement of refugees. Each chapter offers a detailed case study from the 16th through the 20th centuries, ranging from the Spanish conquest of the Americas to Dutch colonization in Indonesia and wars in southern Africa. Kreike also rereads Euro-American expansion in the western US through this lens. Chapters vary in scale--one focuses on flooding as a weapon in struggles for Dutch independence in the 16th century; another examines European genocide and environcide across the Global South in the 18th century. Though each case can stand alone for framing class discussions, the panorama makes an even more powerful statement of what people often fail to see amid the horrors of war. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals. --Gary Wray McDonogh, Bryn Mawr College

A Princeton historian examines the shameful destruction of the environment as an instrument of war. Ecocide, the destruction of ecosystems in order to bring suffering upon the people living within them, is not an international crime--not yet, anyway, although Kreike notes that "several individual states have defined ecocide as a crime." Aggressor states that employ scorched-earth techniques of battling enemies can always plead military necessity--and so they often have in places such as the grain belt of the Ukraine or the Brabant in Holland, looting what they could carry and then destroying what they could not to deny provisions to other armies or even civilian populations. As Kreike notes of territories destroyed during the Thirty Years' War, when seed corn and corn for eating were stored and then burned together, an aggressor force can deny another population food for two years--which, of course, amounts to genocide. The author recounts numerous episodes of just that: the use of eco-terror tactics against the people of Sumatra by the Dutch at the turn of the 20th century, the twin roles of plague and starvation in crushing the Inca Empire, the "Famine of the Dams" wrought on Indigenous peoples in South Africa by the actions of the White government, which placed economic development above their survival. "Loss of the environmental infrastructure was disastrous in the semi-arid floodplain. During the wet season, it meant exposure to cold, humidity, and disease. During the dry season, it meant hunger, thirst, and blistering heat," writes Kreike--and that instance of "environcide" was by no means confined to the floodplain of a South African river, but has instead been repeated in places such as the Amazon basin. Famine, plague, destruction of food and water supplies: It all adds up to a heady catalog of crimes that warring states have too often applied and show no signs of eschewing in future conflicts. Waging war against the Earth is an old business, and this book provides ample--and dispiriting--evidence for it. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.