Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism

by Jacob Darwin Hamblin

When most Americans think of environmentalism, they think of the political left, of vegans dressed in organic-hemp fabric, lofting protest signs. In reality, writes Jacob Darwin Hamblin, the movement--and its dire predictions--owe more to the Pentagon than the counterculture.

In Arming Mother Nature, Hamblin argues that military planning for World War III essentially created catastrophic environmentalism: the idea that human activity might cause global natural disasters. This awareness, Hamblin shows, emerged out of dark ambitions, as governments poured funds into
environmental science after World War II, searching for ways to harness natural processes--to kill millions of people. Proposals included the use of nuclear weapons to create artificial tsunamis or melt the ice caps to drown coastal cities; setting fire to vast expanses of vegetation; and changing
local climates. Oxford botanists advised British generals on how to destroy enemy crops during the war in Malaya; American scientists attempted to alter the weather in Vietnam. This work raised questions that went beyond the goal of weaponizing nature. By the 1980s, the C.I.A. was studying the
likely effects of global warming on Soviet harvests. Perhaps one of the surprises of this book is not how little was known about environmental change, but rather how much, Hamblin writes. Driven initially by strategic imperatives, Cold War scientists learned to think globally and to grasp
humanity's power to alter the environment. We know how we can modify the ionosphere, nuclear physicist Edward Teller proudly stated. We have already done it.

Teller never repented. But many of the same individuals and institutions that helped the Pentagon later warned of global warming and other potential disasters. Brilliantly argued and deeply researched, Arming Mother Nature changes our understanding of the history of the Cold War and the birth of
modern environmental science.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Science, Environment, Climate Change, Politics

310 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2013

About the author

Jacob Darwin Hamblin is a historian who writes about science, technology, and the environment. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, and many publications devoted to the history of science, technology, and the natural world. He currently resides in the American Pacific Northwest, where he is a professor of history at Oregon State University.

Reviews

[Sarah Clement · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you are interested in the history of the Cold War, and nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in particular, then I think you would like this book. However, to say it is about the environment is quite a stretch. It seems to me that Hamblin is a historian who had collected a lot of interesting documents about biological warfare, etc. from the archives, and then devised a way that he could stitch it all together to form a narrative for a book. The summary of the book contends that it shows how the Cold War gave birth to modern day catastrophic environmentalism, in part by demonstrating what profound effects humanity could have on the planet. In reading the book, for the most part, you'd be forgiven for just thinking the book is about the history of the Cold War. There are a lot of books from the past 5 or so years about "catastrophic environmentalism", and how we got here. While it is fun to hypothesise why there is so much emphasis on calamity in mainstream environmentalism, it's probably due to a culmination of factors, and the idea that there's causality between the Cold War and today's narrative is a bit of a stretch. At any rate, there were quite a few interesting tidbits of information in the book that made me "well, I never knew that!" so even though it wasn't what I expected, it does deliver as an interesting historical account. The effects on the environment were just a side effect, however, and the effort to make it take centre stage in the latter half of the book felt contrived.

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hamblin demonstrates not just that the the rise of modern environmentalism was intimately linked to the specters of holocaust created by the Cold War, but that in fact there were many institutional linkages between environmental science during the Cold War and military planner — from bioweapons development, the chemical weapons during he Vietnam war, to the linkage of climate modeling to modeling the global impact of large scale nuclear war. The environmentalist culture of apocalyptism would not have developed the same way absent the Cold War. In short environmental reasoning was both a “first order” effect of Cold War science (e.g direct investments in research), as well as a second order effect (e.g. prompting or framing questions in Cold War inflected terms, e.g. modeling techniques). Finally, it provides a prehistory of climate change denial, noting how erstwhile Cold Warriors continue to see in climate apocalyptism an echo of “nuclear winter” and anti-Agent Orange campaigns — that is: fraudulent, politically motivated perversions of science to promote anti American ends.

The only flaw is that it is rather loose on the causal connections between different bodies of ideas.

[Philski · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting at first but completely biased, for example he cites/quotes Ehrlich's 'The Population Bomb' and Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring' without divesting how wrong they were: Ehrlich's math was completely off, our food supplies increased exponentially while population increased linearly (opposite of his argument) and he wagered on certain consumer goods of his choice increasing in price over time, he lost that bet (Simon–Ehrlich wager). Carson's book is not scientifically based and her claims have not come to fruition. Hamblin also talked about Gruinard Island and how it became infested with Anthrax as a UK testing cite, and left open the question whether it would ever be re-inhabited. He didn't acknowledge that the anthrax has been gone for years, and sheep now graze there for generations without any negative consequence.

[Stella]

oy

[Stephen Shapiro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hamblin makes a really interesting argument here: that it was the global scientific monitoring begun for military reasons in the 1950s (radiation monitoring, oceanography, etc.) that made possible the 1970s-80s fear of environmental catastrophe - a process that eventually culminates in Nixon abandoning the US offensive bioweapons program, creating the EPA, signing an (toothless) arms control treaty on environmental modification, and making environmental policy a major NATO project.

[Sue Harshbarger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Frightening.

[Andrew Degruccio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good historical basis for understanding environmentalism, and the intended and unintended affects on the world we live in of political and economic decisions.