War and the Environment

In 1998, the environmental group Green Cross International sent a team of four scientists to Kuwait to investigate the environmental effects of the Gulf War seven years earlier. What the team found was very different from the surreal inferno of burning oil wells that had been the scene in 1991: a quiet desert, green with waving grasses.As the team wrote in its report, however,“other problems are literally below the surface and one needs only to scratch the desert to find the remains of the continuing environmental damage”—for example, spilled oil that continued to percolate through the porous soil and threaten Kuwait’s meager freshwater aquifers.

Several recent wars in varied environments and different parts of the world reveal that the ecological consequences of war often remain written in the landscape for many years. But the story is not always straightforward or clear. Instead, the landscape is like a palimpsest—a parchment written on, scraped clean, and then written over again—on which the ecological effects of war may be overlain by postwar regeneration or development. Yet looking carefully and in the right places can allow the history of past human conflicts to be read in the landscape.

Of course, wars are not the only events that leave their signature on the land. “This is essentially true of all impacts on ecosystems,” says John Hart, a conservation scientist based in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—floods and hurricanes, for example.“So it really puts conflict into the context of natural history.”