The US Military and the Pacific Environment

The Making of an American Lake

Andrew C. Isenberg, Beth Bailey, Paul Landsberg

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9780700638703
• eBook ISBN: 9780700638710
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The environmental consequences of the US military presence from World War II through the end of the US war in Vietnam.

Oceans and deserts, jungles and plains, mountains and rivers, monsoons and blizzards, fertile grounds and diseased lands; all have shaped how strategy and technology has been deployed and developed, and all have supported unexpected victories and decimated even the best-laid plans. Conversely, warfare and militarization have shaped the environment, scarring landscapes, accelerating the global spread of disease, unbalancing ecosystems, and contributing to climate change.

Reflecting on the inextricable, reciprocal, and often surprising relationship between the natural world and human warfare, these essays offer a new perspective on power, knowledge, and the environment in US military history.

The history of US military engagement in the Pacific powerfully demonstrates the profound and diverse impacts that regions’ extraordinarily diverse environments have wrought on warfare. US military action has also had profound impacts in the Pacific, from the nuclear weapons testing programs of the Cold War to the use of chemical defoliants in Vietnam. The contributors to this volume consider how the physical environments of the Pacific shaped the process and outcome of battles and wars, and discuss the effect warfare and other military actions had on these physical environments.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: An American Lake?
• 1 “A Lifetime of Bad Dreams”: Military Base Construction in the Tropical Environment of Port Moresby, Papua, in 1942
• 2 Animal Histories and the Pacific War: Decentering Violence and Destruction
• 3 War and Ecological Imperialism in the Alaskan Indigenous Environment
• 4 A Fire Came Down from Heaven: Destroying Natural and Built Environments with Napalm During World War II
• 5 Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust: Radiation and the Environment in the Marshall Islands
• 6 The Ring of Fire: How Underground Nuclear Explosions in Alaska Unleashed the Catastrophic Imaginary of the Pacific World
• 7 Atomic Currents: The US Military and Nuclear Energy in the Alaskan Pacific
• 8 “We Are Freed from the Tyranny of Terrain”: Airmobility and the US Army’s Global Environment
• 9 Imagined Environmental Warfare: Vietnamese Experts, the French Military, and American Herbicides in the Red River Delta, 1952–1954
• 10 Kidnapped on the Beach: Global Grids and Communist State-Building in a Cold War Borderland
• 11 The Neglected Role of Oceans and Marine Resources in the US-Vietnam War
• 12 Militarized Harvests: Rice and Revolutionary Warfare in South Vietnam
• Editor and Contributor Biographies
• Index
• Back Cover