Environment as a Weapon

Environment as a Weapon  considers how the confluence of war and nature from the time of the Agricultural Revolution (10,000 BCE) to our present day has been represented in works of history, geography, and literature. In the Epic of Gilgamesh,  the Torah and Greco-Roman myths,   warfare is a trope commensurate with environmental disasters, extreme climate, and plague.  In the medieval age myths the Táin,  and Beowulf  environments become allies and enemies.  The equestrian steppeland as foundation of Genghis Khan's and his heirs  Pax Mongolica  is chronicled in The Secret History of the Mongols and The Travels of Marco Polo.  The West African Griot legend of Sundiata and the Little Ice Age wreck of the Spanish Armada in 1588 speak to oceanic and atmospheric dimensions of warfare.   American Revolution political pamphlets, poetry, diaries and weather logs,  reflect the severe weather and terrain deployed by George Washington's early campaigns in the war of independence.  Napoleon's midwifing of Total War is captured in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Charles Minard's Carte figurative carto-graph of the disastrous 1812 French invasion of Russia.  The  U.S. Civil War and the organic-industrial assembles of its battles, arguably the first Anthropocene War,  is parsed by the clarifying poetry of Emily Dickinson.   Geopolitik  and geo-hazards of flood and fire feature in the Global War  works of  Samuel Beckett,  Kurt Vonnegut and  James Dickey. The literature of Vietnamese and American war combat veterans reveals how North Vietnam's Environmental Military Complex stalled the American Military Industrial Complex in the jungles, and R&R districts of southwestern Asia. Finally, he sci-fi of H.G. Wells' World Set Free and David Mitchell's Cloud-Atlas frame Oppenheimer's sub-atomic deployments at Hiroshima and