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Guest Essay

By Sunil S. Amrith

Dr. Amrith is a history professor at Yale and the author, most recently, of “The Burning Earth.”

The unrelenting Russian war has poisoned the soil, air and waters of Ukraine. Leaking ruins of chemical factories and exploded debris litter the landscape. Fires have burned across thousands of square miles, visible from space.

In Gaza’s ecological catastrophe, toxic dust was unleashed into the air by continued Israeli bombing and raw sewage contaminated coastal waters after the region’s treatment plants were damaged or destroyed by the bombardment.

The environmental damage in both war zones fits neatly into a history of militarism over the past 200 years. In pursuit of empire and domination, of territorial conquest or racial and religious supremacy, wars over this period stand as a stubborn driver of planetary harm.

Much of the recent science sees the roots of the climate crisis in transformative technologies and their concurrent phases of capitalism: the plantation, the steam engine, late 20th-century globalization. But there has been surprisingly little said of late about the centrality of war in the narrative of global environmental threats.

When World War I consumed Europe, its industrialized destruction was on such a scale that it seemed only comparison with a natural disaster could capture it. In the letters written home by Indian soldiers on the Western Front, the scale of devastation was conveyed through extended similes. Sowar Sohan Singh wrote home, in July 1915: “There is conflagration all round, and you must imagine it to be like a dry forest in a high wind in the hot weather, with abundance of dry grass and straw. No one can extinguish it but God himself — man can do nothing.” ⁠

By the war’s end, the order of metaphor had reversed. In search of an image to describe their theory of how mid-latitude cyclones formed, a team led by the Norwegian meteorologist Vilhelm Bjerknes likened the narrow boundary between contending warm and cold air masses to battle fronts between contending armies. With Europe fresh from trench warfare, the Bjerknes theory of “polar fronts” proved as durable as its central analogy was memorable. The war had unleashed human powers of destruction that exceeded even an earthquake or a cyclone. It made sense, in its aftermath, for powerful atmospheric forces to be seen to resemble human armies.

This was only a prelude to what was to come. The German and Japanese quests for domination in World War II destroyed the homes and lands that had sustained their victims. Fires burned across the frozen waste of Stalingrad, leaving what one German officer described as “an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke.” Fires fed the crematories of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where a million or more Jews were killed, among the six million murdered in the Holocaust. For the writer Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, the faint hope of human freedom amid such inhumanity lay in the natural world. “Today, in this place, our only purpose is to reach the spring,” he wrote, describing a day in the camps, when “the........

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