MILITARIZED LANDSCAPES AND MILITARY ENVIRONMENTALISM IN BRITAIN, FRANCE, AND THE UNITED STATES

This article draws together empirical case studies from Britain, France, and the United States to develop the nascent history of landscapes used to prepare for war and national defense. Although environmental historians have explored the environmental impact of war, the military training areas and weapons manufacturing sites that form the focus of this comparative study remain peripheral to the discipline, despite the vast landholdings that militaries deploy in the preparation for war. This essay approaches these important but understudied sites through the lens of four major themes—protesting militarization through eviction, the emergence of military environmentalism, the status and role of nonhuman occupants of militarized landscapes, and cooperation between civilians and the military—in a broadly chronological comparative study. As these themes reveal, more subtle analysis of the evolving relationship between the military and the environment is required as an antidote to the binary approaches that currently dominate scholarship. Existing perspectives not only tend to lack sensitivity to both time and space but either uncritically claim that military activity is ecologically harmless (or even beneficial) or dismiss the claims of military environmentalism as mere “greenwash.”