The Greek island of Samos off the coast of Turkey is—and has been since the Mediterranean filled with water—subject to the quintessential Mediterranean climate. Think central California chaparral. Warm, moistish winters, hot dry summers. Very few permanent water sources.
On Samos there was a permanent stream, presumably with a nice wetland dominated by willows and palms, populated by streamside birds, probably with endemic fish and invertebrates. Something of an idyllic Eden, a lot like the wetland adjoining Space Launch Complex 4 at Vendenberg Air Force Base where I used to work. It was an oasis in a desert, rich in life and history. I imagine the spring on Samos was a lot like that.
Unfortunately the capital city was on the other side of a mountain named Kastro, and the leader, formally called a tyrant (presumably without the present-day negative connotations, but you never know) named Polycrates assigned his chief engineer Eupalinos to find a frickin’ way to get the water to the city in a manner secure from opposing armies. Eupalinos wasn’t a simple-minded guy. His method was to start digging at both ends of the one kilometer mountain and hope to match up in the middle. Actually, he used a trick called a dogleg to make sure he could hook the tunnels up. But it was still the bronze age. They dug this tunnel with trowels and crowbars and buckets. And the aquaduct itself, of course, had to run downhill the whole way.
Whoa nelly. They got it done. On time and on budget. Protecting the city’s water supply from military threat.
It also, of course, destroyed the original watercourse and wetland. But the cool thing about dry climates is that biological residue lasts a long time. I’m betting a couple students with sieves and bottles and some cold retsina could find half a dozen extinct species easily by poking around the old watercourse for a week or two, and maybe some living representatives in the tunnel itself. I commend this field work to a master’s student seeking a historical biodiversity thesis project. I only request you let me use the material in my forthcoming book on military environmental history. Good digging!
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What Do You Do if the Weapons Don’t Work? Well, if you’re the United States in the desperation of Vietnam, you go to as many random forms of destruction as you can think of. A nice new book—War and Nature, by Jurgen Brauer (2009, Altamira Press, New York) covers this topic nicely. Actually, the book’s title is a little grandiose. Brauer addresses Vietnam and the Persian Gulf in detail, and pays some attention to Rwanda, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. But not much else. Oh well. I suppose I’ll just have to write that one!
Anyway. Brauer catalogs U.S. non-weaponry: massive habitat bulldozing (same objective as herbicides), attempts to manipulate weather (!) (mostly to increase precipitation along the western border and the Ho Chi Minh trail—this, of course, in a region where the monsoon is absolutely massive…), deliberate flooding by breaching dams and field berms, and antipersonnel gas. For the latter, Brauer reports huge DOD purchases of gas, and does report a lack of evidence or record of combat application. The simple fact of the purchase, though, is pretty damned disturbing.
Brauer also reports that neither the combat effectiveness nor environmental consequences of any of this have been studied in any detail.
Duh!
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That is, the landscape that was degrading…or ready to degrade…before the war. War can devastate landscapes de novo. Although as we’ve seen in prior essays, in otherwise healthy and stable ecosystems, such damage, while it may be noticeable for decades or even centuries (trench systems from the 19th and early 20th centuries are visible in Europe and North America, fortifications and trenches from much earlier in parts of China), has minimal ecological significance.
What about landscapes that are already stressed or susceptible to stress? As with most things in this field, this topic has not received substantive quantitative investigation. There is abundant speculation, hypothesis, and supposition.
Let’s consider the now-desert ecosystems of Jordan. Redman [1] cites references suggesting that the use of lime plaster, which required cooking steps in its preparation, might have deforested an area of 3 km around each village in southern Jordan around 6000 to 8000 BC. Having been to Jordan, I can certainly report that there is little functional soil anywhere in the country, and there is certainly no timber, and no real soil, in the southern part of the country.
In addition, the ground surface in rural Jordan is covered by a patina of goat and, in places, sheep, feces. Redman suggests that the practice of allowing herds to pass through fields, harvested or fallow, late in the season contributed to the degradation of the soil and therefore to the transition from a generally wooded to a desert condition [1].
A final factor cited by Redman and his sources is the generally sharp topography of Jordan, which made the soils that had developed before human agriculture took over the landscape vulnerable to erosion and farming practices might well have contributed to the loss of functional soil.
Redman’s suggestions mirror the damaged landscape hypothesis raised by McNeill for the Mediterranean in general [2], and which has been argued against by others [3]. My point in raising the issue here is that “scorched earth” was a common weapon of war as civilization developed and expanded in the Mediterranean. A particularly harsh example was practiced by Sparta against Athens during the Peloponnesian War. In the spring, the Spartans would march to Attica, force the farmers to abandon their lands and retire to the walled protection of Athens itself, and devastate the land [4]. It wouldn’t have taken many seasons of this treatment—and it went on for years—accompanied by a little drying or, more drastically, wet stormy climate shifts—to erode the soil and make the entire region less arable and less rich in ecological resources.
We may well see, written in the Mediterranean landscape, the environmental effects of wars that took place millennia ago. There is certainly worthwhile research to be conducted to determine if this hypothesis is viable.
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Notes
[1] Redman, Charles L. 1999. Human impact on ancient environments. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
[2] McNeill, James R. 1992. Mountains of the Mediterranean world. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
[3] Grove, A.T. and Oliver Rackham 2001. The nature of Mediterranean Europe: an ecological history. Yale University Press New Haven.
[4] Kagan, D. 2003. The Peloponnesian War. Viking, The Penguin Group, New York.
