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Arming Mother Nature - The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (Paperback)
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Arming Mother Nature - The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (Paperback)
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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.
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