What was the environmental impact of World War II.

by roryfl

With Factories going day and night, damaged ships hemorrhaging oil, radioactivity from A Bombs and a million other things, I can't imagine WWII was very good for the environment. Has anyone looked into it?

The_Alaskan

You're asking a question that's really at the cutting edge of historical research. Environmental history has only just, in the past couple of decades, come into its own as a subcategory (there's an environmental historian here on the board, but I don't remember his/her username right now). But in short, as Nicholas Breyfogle wrote back in June, "The underlying environmental dimensions of industrialized warfare have not yet been systematically studied."

That said, there's a lot of exciting work happening right now in regard to this exact question. It's as if historians have struck gold ─ this is a topic with a potentially huge impact and a wealth of information that has never been explored. Forex, in my field, I don't believe anyone's ever examined the effects of WWII on the Alaska salmon industry. Looking at that in the right way, you could gather critical information on what might happen to fish stocks if the salmon industry were to all but shut down for a year or two ─ and that's something that couldn't otherwise happen in the real world.

This year, the University of Georgia Press published The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War, and the Journal of Environmental History has a wealth of papers on different aspects of WWII, but I'm not aware of a single comprehensive volume to address the subject.

You might try Oregon State University Press' Nature Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War, or Natives and Exotics: World War II and Environment in the Southern Pacific by University of Hawaii Press. There's also a conference planned in February at Ohio State to specifically address the environmental history of WWII in the United States.