Transcripts For CSPAN3 World War I The Environment 20240712

CSPAN3 World War I The Environment July 12, 2024

India, turkey, across europe and kansas city. He most recently finished the coeditor of the coeditor of First World War. And doctor t keller is a National Certified instructor. When you ask those questions, make sure they have a question mark at the end of them. Now, please help me welcome him. [applause] good evening. I am thrilled to be here and happy you could join me. I will talk about my current research, a Global Environmental history of the First World War. I am interested in Energy Geopolitics that link the battle lines on the home fronts with agricultural and industry in ways that fundamentally shaped the 20th century. So i will talk about the main battlefield many of us are familiar with, then hop, skip, and jump around the globe to point out areas that had an incredibly profound Environmental Impact. Now, few human endeavors have altered the Natural World as much as agriculture industry and warfare. In 1914, these came together in ways that were incredibly destructive. When someone mentions war, they think battlefields, and soldiers did change environment on every battlefront. Military planners took the environment into account, considering climate and terrain. Soldiers often talk about battling it concealments. On the western front, we see western soldiers dealing with the mud. If you have ever read all quiet on the western front, you know the battle against rats, disease. Here is a group of soldiers dealing with that mesopotamian sun. That furnacelike setting made for diseases, you name it, tuberculosis, the plague. There was something call the baghdad boyles. It sounds awful. Here again, we see english soldiers. They are in africa. Mostly confronting disease, the jungle setting, but also contending with wild animal attacks, lions and elephants mainly. There was fighting happening in the alps, frostbite, avalanches, hypothermia, isolation, and not surprising, depression, something most soldiers had to contend with. Armies altered ecosystems on every front. I found in many ways that warfare accelerated environmental changes that had begun in the previous century. Let me give you a few examples. The most pressing problem for soldiers fighting in mesopotamia was water. Given the environment, that probably seems obvious. Troops complained about an over abundance of water. The marshlands and ponds would flood during the spring snow melt, water from the highlands and asia minor with swell the rivers and lakes which would turn mesopotamia into a morass. Local civilians had traditionally piled loose dirt along the banks, but in a bad flood, those were not effective, so soldiers alter the land with trenches, protective dams, change water flows, and redirected the course of rivers. The mobilization of armies in the alps intensified industrialization, with a massive expansion of roads, railways, and a electricity, like here. Guerrilla warfare in africa expanded infrastructure with roads and railways, but nowhere was the concentration of forces so great as on the western front, where the stalemate brought ecological of people. Here are french soldiers struggling across no mans land. Scenes like this letter devastation ruined landscapes pitted and cracked with craters and trenches and quickly became a metaphor for the great wars waist. Opposing forces fired over one billion shells, and now it formed a substratum of soil, slowly making their way back to surface. It is typical for farmers to unearth these relics, many of which are still dangerous, still explosive. They will collect them, set them by the side of the road, and then Government Agencies back him up. I had a chance to meet with some over the summer who took me to the collection depot. Here is some of the stuff they recover over the course of a year. It is incredible. They first have to identify what sort of shell, chemical, gas. Is it still alive . We will come back to that. Dont look. These hard minutes haunt the land, may and murder. Occasionally bombs caught in tractor plows will explode, claiming more victims of the war. They saturate the ground in some regions and authorities have designated these lands red zones, too dangerous for cultivation, tourism, or human habitation. We can see traces of this war when we examined the aerial photographs and the way in which crops grow. The different soil is as they are recovered, left to these growing patterns you can trace out where trenches were. Here are a few inches of this, taking from the flanders field museum. That is pretty incredible. Destruction has shaped our view of the ecological impact. Beyond the front lines, major damage to nature on the battlefield was shortlived. Here is a picture of a famous path from france into belgium. It was memorialized with this painting. Today, this is what we would see. Greater environmental change occurred behind the lines. The lands that suffer the most stood pretty far from the fighting. We can think of armies as biological entities which depended on a military ecology of energy. To maintain the biological welfare of soldiers, states commandeered resources, expanding the footprint. Coal was a principal source of Industrial Energy in 1914. The fear was there would be call shortages. To offset potential shortages, they rationed it. This is a british pamphlet instructing citizens. Many places dont burn coal, burn wood instead. There is a massive expansion of timber extraction, and deforestation accelerated in an uneven fashion. Great britain cut down nearly half of its forests. The opening of the panama canal lowered the cost of imports in British Columbia and the u. S. Became leading timber exporters. This is from British Columbia. French and german timber fared well. Both countries had long institutionalized for street practices, and most of the manpower had been diverted to the army. The german sibley took trees from other countries. We see how similar it looks to these wartorn regions all kinds of propaganda encouraging extraction since manpower had been diverted, and archetypal male profession, the lumberjack, now had a gender identity switch. This is an image from the Womans Land Army in Great Britain, where women were sent out to chop down trees. The u. S. Established the forced record for Street Forest ry corps. Timber was crucial. You needed it for everything. This is accelerating the deforestation. Generals when they return from the western front to the southeastern United States or the northwest and saw these clearcut patches, it reminded him of the western front. There was a the discussion for the need for for Street Forestry policy to create Sustainable Forestry practices in the name of national security. The progression of the war accentuated the importance of it. It was the u. S. And mexico that supplied more than 80 of the worlds petroleum, most out of california, but a fair amount along the veracruz coast in mexico. That is where i will focus. To drill there, companies had to move mangroves, draining swamps along the coast. They would dig these deep pits to hold the petroleum once it was pumped out, and it disturb the soil in the way we saw with schelling on the western front. The petroleum was contained at high levels with Hydrogen Sulfide at high to matures. It was common for these blazes and explosions to happen that would devastate land, some of which have not recovered. In Great Britain, there is concern on foreign oil, u. S. Oil , and it was driving british ambitions in mesopotamia. One of the reasons we saw british troops in the deserts, in provinces of the ottoman empire, and sound familiar today, were because the prudish wanted to control the newly discovered oil fields in that region. Coal, oil, but the Crucial Energy resource was food, food scarcity was a defining feature of the war. Countries blockaded by the british and french navies, germany, austria, hungary, faced alarming energy deficits that required authoritarian regulations. It is not at all surprising that germany lost, what is shocking it sustained 1. 7 million soldiers on multiple fronts for over four years as long as it did. Germanys defeat reveals the ecological constraints of waging war. Germans imported 25 of food, dairy, meat, much of the fodder came from russia, argentina, the u. S. And high agriculture yields relied on chilean nitrates for fertilizer. With the british blockade and the poor domestic harvest is, german Agricultural Production plummeted. There is this massive attempt to mobilize food. This is a german placard. It says hold out. It is a potato with a strangely human face. Desperate to increase Agricultural Production, germans plowed church yards, school grounds, forest blades, even the soccer fields, which was telling. German soccer clubs went crazy. Oh no, not the soccer fields. Think of the children. It didnt work. Food shortages exacerbated class tensions in cities where Workers Councils complain the parks and socalled Luxury Gardens in the more affluent neighborhoods were not being used for cultivation. The response was those were two shady to grow anything. The German Government attempted to arbitrate inequalities with ration cards and price controls. Didnt work. Just created a vibrant black market. It did control every phase of Agricultural Production, but often bureaucratic clumsiness or shortsighted policies resulted in food shortages. Here is an example. State officials determined gluttonous pigs were competing with humans for grain. The government decreed the great pig massacre, claiming over 9 million victims. What they did is produce a momentary glut of pork. Sausage every night, but did nothing to alleviate the grain shortage. More detrimental is what the death of those pigs did to the ecology. Takes were not only consumers of fodder, the great producers of fertilizer. Their departure had dire longterm consequences. Regulations proved ineffective in the face of disaster. In 1915, a locust plague of biblical proportions exacerbated a famine in greater syria. All those dots are locusts. They stripped the vineyards, croplands, and orchards. Food markets were bare. We know how dire the situation was. Here is a before and after picture. A nice solid tree, and the next day. People resorted to eating roasted locusts, then burning the husks to heat their home on vince ovens. Rather than enforce food rationing, the u. S. Food administrator, herbert hoover, encouraged citizens to eat less, with the slogan, food will win the war. This is one of many propaganda posters catering towards recent immigrants. Waste nothing. It actually worked. There was a 15 reduction in domestic food consumption. The government would issue all kinds of pamphlets encouraging people to say food. One encourage them to dry food. They would send pamphlets to homeowners, here is how you can drive vegetables, recipes for turning something delightful, like dried carrots, into something delicious. The brochures conceded that some flavor might be lost, but so much remains. The constant bombardment of literature suggests most people were not being fooled by this. They were not keen on dried dishes, but did practice other forms of selfrestraint. Uber cold on patriotic americans to participate in meatless mondays or wheatless wednesdays, and it worked. All kinds of pamphlets like this, a way to save, so this is patriots fruit trees with reserves. There is wasted fruit, rotted fruit, not patriotic. A lot of this is directed towards housewives, towards producers, saving that food. Or how to prepare your meals. There was the creation of a number of agencies during this war to regulate or somehow direct these resources. One was the National War Garden commission. We see these sorts of commissions in most belligerent countries, the cultivation of home gardens anywhere you can come backyards, vacant lots, school grounds. By 1917, the cultivation of nearly 3 million gardens, these numbers may be inflated, but was still telling, nearly 25 of american households had what were popularly cold war gardens. We see schoolchildren during recess put those kids to work planting peas. You can grow food. We see them plowing up the fields. You know the war has come home. The propaganda is fantastic. Pumpkins, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, carrots charging over the top. The farmer has become a soldier. Not a rifle, but a tool. Will you have a part in victory . I point this out because even as the war massively expanded patterns of exploitation, it also set standards for conservation. Incentives for mass production were large. You had to feed these massive industrialized armies. To do that, the government guaranteed prices of over two dollars a bushel for wheat for the duration of the war. That is high. Adequate rainfall, soaring prices, created bonanza farms on the american and canadian prairies. Optimistic farmers borrowed heavily, taking out second mortgages on their farm to break sod on marginal lands to reap profits. Most of this is done across prairies, suited for gasdriven tractors, plows, and combines. Wheat farming was so lucrative that financial profits outweighed the environmental costs, but what we find is the environmental and economic consequences that distorted Agricultural Production were severe. Those fields we sell devastated on the western front, predominantly farming lands, we know they recovered productivity quickly, within a few years after the armistice those yields liquidityrewar levels. Problems for those indebted farmers. It left hundreds of thousands destitute and what we find is foreclosure rates hit record numbers, the like of which we have not seen since. Ok, i will take you somewhere else now. The situation was even worse in africa. What we find is that energy deficits and massive population displacement created famine conditions. Most of the fighting in africa took place in germany. Predominantly tanzania, kenya, down in portuguese east africa, same in mozambique. There was fighting elsewhere, but those were pretty much done by 1915. Here it lasted the entire time and was mostly guerrilla fighting. Now, since pack animals in that region fell prey by the thousands from the tc fly, it produces the parasite that causes sleeping sickness. It meant European Forces relied on Energy Bodies as energy reserves. Both sides carried out their campaigns on the backs of africans. Millions were mobilized for this. The british recruited one million porters from populations across subsaharan africa. Pursuing the germans required two or three african carriers for british soldiers. They often view their african recruits or conscripts as a tactical advantage. What we find is there was a high death rate among african recruits, much higher than for british or german soldiers. Food shortages is one explanation for this disparity. By 1917, most laborers received less than 1000 calories per day. Food shortages plagued most of the african continent during the war. Thousands of hungry soldiers outstripped local supply. Soaring prices compounded struggles to obtain limited provisions. Guerrilla warfare created negative feedback loops, troops that would take cattle, and that allowed for tsetse fly expansion, pushing the flies into the bush, lowered the incidences of sleeping sickness, with the cattle gone, then the bush expanded and it had the opposite effect. The reduction of livestock correlated to an increase in animal attacks on humans. Cows were easy prey for old, lazy lions. We find that the lions were looking for people instead. People would desert villages for safer places, allowing the bush to recover and those tsetse numbers to swell. Poor weather and blight in 1916 and 1917. To make matters worse, there were laws that restricted the sale of firearms and ammunition, meaning if were around to prevent animals from ravishing plantations with impunity. That population displacement in africa meant ecological dislocation. Here we find another image, further into the belgian congo with african porters. I will skip across the atlantic to latin america. Hardly anyone thinks about latin america during this war, but it played a pivotal role. South american neutrals, often neglected and First World War scholarship nourished and fueled european armies throughout the war, like mexico or argentina or chile. For chile, that role was in Sodium Nitrate in chile. They had a near monopoly over trade. Over soda trade. Nitrate was essential for fertilizer and a major constituent of explosives, thus served two vital needs of any belligerent country. What we found with the war, however is it accelerated the processes that would exhaust their nitrate deposits. It also revealed the systemic weaknesses in relations between labor and capital. Chiles main trading partner was germany, so it plummeted chile into severe depression. The nitrate districts were the hardest hit. There was little other than mining nitrate in the desert. Unemployed nitrate workers were sent south to the agricultural lands, but their arrival exacerbated already dire conditions. Only with economic recovery in 1915 and the continued reliance on nitrates prevented total mayhem. At the same time, scientists in germany had developed a process of nitrogen fixation which doomed chiles nitrate industry. There we go. Some nitrate mining. In this area, it was one of the 10 wealthiest countries. It reinforces changes happening on that land. Great britain, for example, fly imports supplied 40 of Meat Consumption and 80 of that is coming out of argentina. South americas relationship with Great Britain was viewed in a negative light, labeled as part of Great Britains socalled informal empire. The south american economies were entirely dependent on european whims. We switch that a little bit in view argentina in this larger Transatlantic Energy exchange. It is a different view. It gave argentina a strate

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