The long shadows of war

Book review by Julia Fahrenkamp-Uppenbrink
ECG Committee member
[email protected]
ECG Bulletin July 2017

The human horror of the Second World War has been the subject of a multitude of books, films, and personal narratives. The book The Long Shadows, edited by Simo Laakkonen, Richard Tucker, and Timo Vuorisalo, shows that the war’s environmental impacts were also pervasive, not only in countries involved in the war but also in others that supplied resources for the war effort. Some of these long shadows of the war still persist today.

Perhaps the first image that comes to mind when thinking of the environmental effects of the Second World War is the devastation caused by aerial bombing, particularly at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a series of insightful and well written essays, The Long Shadows  highlights some less obvious environmental effects, from forest clearing and ethnic conflict in Burma to the industrial supply chains that linked forest destruction in British Guiana to chemical pollution and hydropower construction in Canada. The common thread is the pervasive nature of modern industrial war, which leaves no part of society or the environment untouched.
 
For example, Paul Josephson explains that as the Soviet army retreated from the German advance in 1941, they took most resources with them and destroyed what they had to leave behind. Over the next four years, an area of about five million square kilometres of the former Soviet Union became a constant battlefield, with most major cities levelled, woods burned, infrastructure destroyed, and the debris of modern industrial war, from unexploded ordnance to spilled chemicals, polluting the countryside. Industrial production and settlement shifted permanently to previously sparsely regions in the north and west of the country. After the war, concern for the environment was brushed aside. Particularly in the production of plutonium, the Soviets paid “little attention to the grotesque environmental costs,” with impacts that were still felt when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991.

In the forests of Northern India and Burma, the war also left environmental scars with persistent impacts. As Richard Tucker reports, from 1937, road building across regions of the Himalayas previously largely inaccessible to modern transport, opened up vast tracts of forest to exploitation. In India, displaced people cleared hill forests for survival. Throughout the region, the postwar period was marked by increased ethnic conflict; in Burma, conflict between newly armed local tribes and nationalists led to a decades-long civil war. The resulting disruption of resource management systems caused substantial and ongoing environmental degradation.
 
But the tentacles of modern industrial war reached even further. As Matthew Evenden describes, ever increasing amounts of aluminium were needed as the Second World War progressed, principally for aircraft production. Large tracts of forest were cleared in British Guiana to mine bauxite; according to Evenden, the resulting landscapes were “best described as lunar.” The mineral was then transported by fossil-fuelled ship to Canada, where a vast system of hydropower dams was built to generate the power needed to smelt bauxite and produce aluminium metal. Effects on fisheries were seen as unavoidable collateral damage; chemical pollutants from aluminium production continue to linger in the fjord beds. After the war, new uses for aluminium in domestic products were quickly found, showing the links between wartime and peacetime production.
 
Perhaps the most unexpected angle is that taken by Outi Ampuja, who discusses what he terms the acoustic ecology of war, based in part on interviews with Finnish veterans. Ampuja finds that when asked about wartime sounds, veterans quickly talk about their feelings, particularly their fears, rather than recounting events. Many soldiers and civilians have lasting  memories of wartime sounds. One veteran talks of how a breaking branch can mentally take him back to the front; thunderstorms can cause panic, and wartime sounds infiltrate the veterans’ dreams. I was reminded of my mother’s panic when she heard the sound of low-flying aircraft, even decades after her wartime childhood. As Ampuja writes, the wartime experiences of sound can live on in the minds of the following generations. In this as in many other ways, we are still living with the environmental effects of the Second World War.
 
The Long Shadows: edited by Simo Laakkonen, Richard Tucker, and Timo Vuorisalo, OSU Press, 2017. ISBN 9780870718793