Environment as a Weapon examines  how environment and warfare have been perceived in works of history,  geography  and literature. The volume commences with the accounts of ancient warfare, medieval age perceptions and early modern oceanic wars contained in the Epic of Gilgamesh,   books of  Genesis,  and Exodus,  the Táin, and Beowulf,  before examining the period between the Pax Mongolica  to the wreck of the Spanish Armada in 1588.  The role of winter, seasonal warfare and emergence of Total War in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is then explored in rebel and redcoat pamphlets and weather logs of the American Revolutionary War,  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Charles Minard’s  Carte figurative graph of Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia. The role organic-industrial assemblages played in the U.S. Civil War is then parsed  with Emily Dickinson’s poetry, followed by a discussion of Global War in the twentieth century and the use of flood and fire as weapons in the works of Samuel Beckett, Kurt Vonnegut and James Dickey.  The volume then explores  how North Vietnam’s Environmental Military Complex, as depicted in literature by Vietnamese and American veterans, stalled the American Military Industrial Complex in the jungles and monsoons of the Vietnam War. It concludes with a discussion of Robert J. Oppenheimer’ deployment of sub-atomic environments at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that contextualizes  James Lovelock’s concept of ‘Gaia at War,’ with David Mitchell’s Cloud-Atlas and current discourses framing global warming and climate change as national security threats to the United States.  Indeed, war has been declared as a benchmark of human history by the United Nations (U.N.) Secretary António Guterres in his most recent report: “seventy-five years ago, the world emerged from a series of cataclysmic events: two successive world wars, genocide, a devastating influenza pandemic and a worldwide economic depression. Our founders gathered in San Francisco promising to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”  A 2016 U.N. resolution called for special attention to “be given to countries in situations of conflict, as well as countries and territories under foreign occupation, post-conflict countries, and countries affected by natural and human-made disasters.”  Furthermore, the U.N. recognizes that “sustainable development cannot be realized without peace and security; and peace and security will be at risk without sustainable development.” Thus, a holistic approach to studying and mitigating  the human and environmental impacts of warfare and its methods must involve recognizing and understanding how the Earth’s  planetary environments and systems have been historically perceived,  deployed and arguably within the context of global warming,  possess agency and are deploying the lithosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, biosphere and atmosphere as weapons. This book will be of interest to geographers, historians, and scholars in environmental, climate change, and military studies, in addition the emerging fields of the  digital and environmental humanities. weiterlesen