Arming Mother Nature The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism

Famines. Diseases. Natural catastrophes. In 1945, scientists imagined these as the future faces of war. The United States and its allies prepared for a global struggle against the Soviet Union by using science to extend "total war" ideas to the natural environment. Biological andradiological weapons, crop destruction, massive fires, artificial earthquakes and tsunamis, ocean current manipulation, sea level tinkering, weather control, and even climate change - all these became avenues of research at the height of the Cold War. By the 1960s, a new phrase had emerged:environmental warfare. The same science - in fact, many of the same people - also led the way in understanding the earth's vulnerability during the environmental crisis of the 1970s. The first reports on human-induced climate change came from scientists who had advised NATO about how to protect the western allies fromSoviet attack. Leading ecologists at Oxford also had helped Britain wage a war against crops in Malaya - and the Americans followed suit in Vietnam. The first predictions of environmental doomsday in the early 1970s came from the intellectual pioneers of global conflict resolution, and some haddesigned America's missile defense systems. President Nixon's advisors on environmental quality had learned how to think globally by imagining Mother Nature as an armed combatant. Knowledge of environmental threats followed from military preparations throughout the Cold War, from nuclear winter to the AIDS epidemic. How much of our catastrophic thinking about today's environmental crises do we owe to the plans for World War Three?

Jacob Darwin Hamblin is Associate Professor of History at Oregon State University. His books include Poison in the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age, Oceanographers and the Cold War, and Science in the Early Twentieth Century: An Encyclopedia.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Total War and Catastrophic Environmentalism

Part I Pathways of Nature
Ch. 1 War as a Clash of Civilizations
Ch. 2 Bacteria, Radiation, and Crop Destruction in War Plans
Ch. 3 Ecological Invasions and Convulsions

Part II Forces of Nature
Ch. 4 Earth Under Surveillance
Ch. 5 Acts of God and Acts of Man
Ch. 6 Wildcat Ideas for Environmental Warfare

Part III Gatekeepers of Nature
Ch. 7 The Doomsday Men
Ch. 8 Vietnam and the Seeds of Destruction
Ch. 9 The Terroristic Science of Environmental Modification
Ch. 10 Adjustment or Extinction

Conclusion The Miracle of Survival
Notes
Index