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3 - War and the environment: fault lines in the prescriptive landscape

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2010

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Summary

[W]e must face the fact that war and its forms result from the ideas, emotions and conditions prevailing at the time.

Carl von clausewitz

The rise of normative consciousness

Throughout history, man has caused tremendous damage to the environment during armed conflict. In the seventeenth century, for instance, the Dutch flooded their own lands by destroying dikes to arrest the onslaught of foreign invaders. More recently, Allied attacks on Romanian oilfields and facilities during World Wars I and II – in particular those at Ploesti – seriously damaged the surrounding terrain. Despite these and the countless other incidents that could be cited to illustrate war's oft-devastating environmental impact, only with the Vietnam conflict did the international community begin to focus seriously on this reality. Von Clausewitz's classic maxim about the context of war was soon to be validated vis-à-vis the environment and the normative architecture that would emerge to protect it.

It was not the scale of environmental destruction caused during that struggle which attracted attention; indeed, far greater devastation had been wrought in earlier conflicts. Instead, general anti-war fervor, growing environmental awareness, and the vivid images of what was occurring made possible by televised mass media operated synergistically to awaken much of the collective conscience. The normative result was twofold: (1) the conclusion of the Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD), a treaty limiting use of environmental modification as a method of warfare; and (2) inclusion in the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 of two provisions that limit the environmental damage permitted during international armed conflict.

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Chapter
Information
The Environmental Consequences of War
Legal, Economic, and Scientific Perspectives
, pp. 87 - 136
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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