Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime against Humanity and Nature By Emmanuel Kreike *

Abstract

Book review by Charlotte Mohr, ICRC Reference Librarian for the collections on the ICRC's history and activities.Despite its title, Scorched Earth is not a book about the environmental cost of waror, more accurately, it is not a book focusing on how war harms the environment rather than on how it harms humans. Surveying over four centuries of environmental warfare in the modern era, the book looks instead at the destructive effect of war on the society and environment nexus. The natureculture dichotomy casts a long shadow, Emmanuel Kreike argues: for too long, the effects of war on human societies, on one side, and on the environment, on