McNeill, author of Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 Scorched Earth provides new insights into dozens of campaigns in European and colonial warfare, and will shape debate for years to come."-J. "The culmination of decades of painstaking work, this book is a crowning achievement. Scorched Earth is a significant and important book that offers a major reframing of conventional assumptions about the nature of war and even nature itself."-Mark Levene, author of The Crisis of Genocide "Kreike's analysis is novel, compelling, and provocative. "Might this be the most important topic that most smart, very well educated people have never read a book on? treatment is excellent and engaging." -Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution "Waging war against the Earth is an old business, and this book provides ample-and dispiriting-evidence for it." - Kirkus Reviews Waiting for the fourth horseman would seem unwise." -Tatiana Schlossberg, New York Times Book Review In this book, catastrophic warfare is a third. Climate change is one pandemics are another. Kreike offers a stark corrective and an implicit warning: Humanity is not distinct from nature, and assuming it is can have tragic outcomes. Shedding light on the premodern origins and the lasting consequences of total war, Scorched Earth explains why ecocide and genocide are not separate phenomena, and why international law must recognize environmental warfare as a violation of human rights. His panoramic narrative takes readers from the Thirty Years’ War to the wars of France’s Sun King, and from the Dutch colonial wars in North America and Indonesia to the early twentieth century colonial conquest of southwestern Africa. Kreike demonstrates how environmental warfare has continued unabated into the modern era. He describes how Spanish conquistadores exploited the irrigation works and expansive agricultural terraces of the Aztecs and Incas, triggering a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions. In this sweeping global history, Emmanuel Kreike shows how religious war in Europe transformed Holland into a desolate swamp where hunger and the black death ruled. Scorched Earth traces the history of scorched earth, military inundations, and armies living off the land from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, arguing that the resulting deliberate destruction of the environment-”environcide”-constitutes total war and is a crime against humanity and nature. The environmental infrastructure that sustains human societies has been a target and instrument of war for centuries, resulting in famine and disease, displaced populations, and the devastation of people’s livelihoods and ways of life.
0 kommentar(er)
