CULTURELAB
48 | NewScientist |8 June 2013Arming Mother Nature: The birth of
catastrophic environmentalism by
Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Oxford University
Press, $29.95I HAVE often
wondered why
NATO holds
environment
conferences. Now
I know the answer.
Back in the 1960s,
the Western
military alliance coined the term
“environmental warfare” and for
years actively considered how to
wage such wars. More than that,
argues Jacob Darwin Hamblin in
this startling account, much of
modern environmental thinking
originated with the scientists
and military strategists during
the dark days of the cold war.
And you thought the first
environmentalists were muesli-
eating, sandal-wearing hippies?
Far from it, Hamblin says. Before
them was a generation of scary
Dr Strangelove types, “scientists,
military leaders and politicians
who believed they would have to
manipulate and exploit nature”
in a war against the Soviet Union.
The original doom-mongers
were not sounding the alarm;
they were riding into battle.
During the Korean war, US
advisers considered spraying
waste from plutonium
reprocessing across Korea to
create a “dehumanised death
belt”. In their view, a third world
war could involve using H-bombs
to trigger earthquakes; millions
of tonnes of soot to melt the
Arctic ice cap; and spraying
yellow fever across Soviet cities.
Hamblin’s case is that the
links between such military
fantasies and environmentalthinking are far closer than we
might imagine: without the
cold war, we might not now be
gripped by fear of environmental
catastrophe.
Seminal environmental texts
are often stuffed with military
metaphors and Pentagon-funded
research, notes Hamblin. Paul
Ehrlich chose the title The
Population Bomb for his 1968
bestseller, airing concerns about
overpopulation that were fodder
for national security scenarios
years before. Research into
chemical and biological warfareunderpinned many claims in
Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring.
Earlier Charles Elton, the British
ecologist who alerted the world to
the perils of alien species, began
his 1958 book, The Ecology of
Invasions by Animals and Plants,
with the observation that “it is
not just nuclear bombs and wars
that threaten us... this book is
about ecological explosions”.
Hamblin’s stories of individuals
on the front line are equally
telling. MIT’s Jay Forrester
modelled defence systems for the
US military before constructing
the model behind the doomsday
analysis in the Club of Rome’s 1972
book, The Limits to Growth.The Congressman who proposed
the radioactive “death belt”
in Korea was Albert Gore, father
of former vice-president and
climate-change campaigner
Al Gore.
On the other side was Herman
Kahn, who developed post-
holocaust doomsday scenarios
for the Pentagon-backed RAND
Corporation and was possibly
the model for Dr Strangelove
from the “Bland Corporation” in
Stanley Kubrick’s 1967 film. Kahn
was an environmental optimist,
and fiercely critiqued The Limits
to Growth.
Military scientists were good
at their jobs. They theorised abouta “nuclear winter” before Carl
Sagan popularised the idea in the
1980s. They considered how NASA
rockets damaged the ozone layer,
and let others pick up the Nobel
prize for research published years
later. And early post-war research
into climate change was largely
funded by the US military.
As news editor at New Scientist
in the 1980s, the first reports I
saw on climate change came not
from environmentalists but from
the US Department of Energy.
Scepticism about environmental
fears is more popular today in
much of the US. Hamblin argues
this followed the fall of the Soviet
empire, when the US military
lost its interest in controlling
the environment. The Faustian
pact dissolved. And that, to say
the least, is another surprising
message from this thought-
provoking book. n“The original doom-
mongers were not
sounding the alarm they
were riding into battle”Cherishing nature was a spin-off from
the desire to turn it to military endsAn unholy alliance
The first environmentalists would have abused nature to wage war, finds Fred Pearce
KEnnETHGARRETT/nGS/GETTy13060_Op_Clab.indd 48 31/5/13 14:37:23