Search results
This book traces the creation, maintenance, and contestation of the militarized environments from the establishment of France's first large-scale and permanent army camp on the Champagne plains in 1857, to military environmentalism in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In doing so, it focuses on the evolving and profoundly historical relationship between war, militarization, and the environment. The book treats militarized environments as simultaneously material and cultural sites that have been partially or fully mobilized to achieve military aims. It focuses on the environmental history of sites in rural and metropolitan France that the French and other militaries have directly mobilized to prepare for, and to wage, war. They include such sites as army camps, weapons testing facilities, and air bases, as well as battlefields and other combat zones, but not maritime militarized environments, which arguably deserve their own book. First World War cemeteries and the memorial landscapes of the D-Day beaches remain places of international importance and serve as reminders of the transnational character of many French militarized environments. And although the book focuses on the environmental history of militaraization within metropolitan France, it speaks to issues that mark militarized environments across the globe, such as civilian displacement, anti-base protests, and military environmentalism. By focusing on the French case, the author aims to encourage reflection and discussion on the global issue of military control and use of the environment.
such sites as army camps, weapons testing facilities, and air bases, as well as battlefields and other combat zones, but not maritime militarized environments, which arguably deserve their own book. The militarized environments under study are striking in their multiplicity. They are variously sites of combat, experimentation, internment, death, protest, biodiversity, modernization, and memorialization. They are also international places. At various points, North American, British, colonial, German, and Italian troops have mobilized, occupied, fought, and trained in
offshore, in the North Sea and further afield in Norway, Algeria and Nigeria. BUTEC, a torpedo and submarine testing range, was established in the 1970s in Kyle of Lochalsh, with the result that fishing was banned in some of the area. Now it is operated by the private company Qinetiq, along with many other weapons testing facilities. I was told that Qinetiq was the largest employer in the Highlands after the local government. Salmon farms were established in lochs along the Scottish coast in the 1980s, in what many hoped would provide stable jobs for years to come. Yet
Iraqi racetrack. This is broadly in line with the estimate made after the war by IAEA inspectors, who placed the probable annual output of Al Tarmiya at 12–15 kg of weapons-grade uranium.26 Evidence from weapons testing facilities, furthermore, indicates that this quantity might have sufficed for one bomb a year since, rather than the crude gun barrel device of the Manhattan Project, the plan was to design a uranium bomb using the compression method originally developed for plutonium.27 Reminiscent of the Manhattan Project, the Iraqis had planned to develop a gas