Armed Conflict and Environment

Abstract

How are wars, their course and conduct, influenced by human and natural environments?Furthermore, there has long been a manifest complaint about the devastation of war, for example in Europe in relation to the Thirty Years' War. However, a more systematic approach to the consequences of the war did not emerge until much later. With a view to the destruction of the human environment, especially since the First World War, in relation to the natural environment, not before the 1950s, initially in the context of the debates on the consequences of the nuclear winter. The first historical war in which a specific combination of peace research and pacifism combined with modern scientific methods was the American War in Indochina and the resulting damage to human and natural environments deliberately caused by the USA. These approaches were then further elaborated in the analysis of the Second Gulf War. The result is a current state of research that has put the actions of the most warlike nation of the second half of the 20th century, the USA, at the centre of attention, particularly in the field of the destruction of nature. How can we understand war as a human-natural interaction system?This approach begins to prevail only in recent years and it is based on system theory and on adoptions of ecological concepts on war. The basic idea of an ecology of war puts Micah Muscolino very well. I quote from him: "Environmental factors mold the experience of war for soldiers and civilians alike, while war and militarization transform people's relationships with the environment in enduring ways." 3 This means that, especially under the conditions of total war, complex war-landscapes emerge, which -compared to times of peace -are based on completely different relationships of mankind to the natural and manmade environment. Or vice versa: that natural and man-made environments predispose human behaviour in a different way than is the case in peacetime. The war, as Kurt Lewin had already recognized in 1917, 2.3.