Book contents
- Nature at War
- Nature at War
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables and Charts
- Maps
- Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I New Weapons, New Spaces
- Part II Military Materials I (metals and energy)
- Part III Military Materials II (foods and plants)
- Part IV New Landscapes
- Part V New Frontiers
- Part VI Conservation
- 12 Total War and the Total Environment
- Index
12 - Total War and the Total Environment
World War II and the Shift from Conservation to Environmentalism
from Part VI - Conservation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2020
- Nature at War
- Nature at War
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables and Charts
- Maps
- Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I New Weapons, New Spaces
- Part II Military Materials I (metals and energy)
- Part III Military Materials II (foods and plants)
- Part IV New Landscapes
- Part V New Frontiers
- Part VI Conservation
- 12 Total War and the Total Environment
- Index
Summary
As the essays in this volume make clear, World War II was a total war similar to World War I but much longer, more widespread, more mobile, and more resource intensive. Its effects reached into every corner of American life, aiming to mobilize every atom and molecule from Florida to Alaska. Most conspicuously, the United States created miraculous new productive capacity to supply its massive military forces the vast supplies they needed – everything from wheat, soybeans, and cigarettes to airplanes and alloys. Vast amounts of oil, electricity, and coal and a range of new wartime technologies and chemicals fueled this productive explosion. A new geography emerged during the war – speed-based and urban, focused on northern industrial, coastal, and Sunbelt areas – as well as a new material culture of plastics and alloys. A new economic-environmental system took hold in the country based on faith that the new Keynesian growth economy could, in the future, provide not only the “guns” that US national security appeared to require but also the “butter” – the food, homes, cars, and refrigerators – that seemed central to a new, affluent standard of living.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nature at WarAmerican Environments and World War II, pp. 325 - 358Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020