The environment has been leveraged as a tool of control in conflict settings throughout human history. Capturing or enclosing and controlling the resources needed for everyday needs and livelihoods has been a feature of most conflicts. Understanding how this happens and what the implications are for the environment in conflict is critical to addressing environmental and conflict issues. This chapter lays out how this has unfolded in many contexts and highlights critical nuances for different environmental mediums and across space and time.

Theatre depicts the way the socio-climate of so it reads Theatre depicts the way the socio-climate of drought intenstified in Australia as settler farmers drought intensified in Australia as settler farmers cleared land to plant imported food crops and, in particular, rain-dependent wheat. Local ecologies were drastically changed by colonial occupation. Dryness and dust increased where there had previously been the biodiverse sources of food depicted in Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander First Nations (First Nations) performance and drama. Different meanings for meanings for home and homeland exemplify the genocidal conflict between First Nations Country and settler farmsteads. Plays by, for example, Noongar writer Jack Davis and the pre-eminent Dorothy Hewett feature ecologies drastically altered by wheat farming in conjunction with oppressive race and gender relations. Drama about mining similarly shows a combination of ecological damage and social inequity. As Jill Orr performs in a vast monocrop of wheat and amidst gypsum mine waste, her bird-like action evokes in a vast monocrop field of wheat grief over an ecocidal loss of multispecies habitats.

This chapter illustrates a challenging clinical ethics case involving a twenty-something trauma patient experiencing dysphagia who declined recommendations for artificial nutrition and wanted to be allowed to take food and fluid by mouth. Capacity assessment was complicated by disagreements over clinical facts. The Ethics consultation process was impacted by limited consultant bandwidth and lack of institutional support. Moral distress was experienced by many team members including clinical ethicists who found themselves wondering how this consult went wrong, and whether withholding food from a decisionally capable patient was in fact within the rights of the healthcare team.

Chapter 6 looks at how money acts both as an element in the moral concretion of the revolution’s moral project – one that here takes the form also of a ‘moral economy’ – but also a prime catalyst for its deterioration in the face of the pervasive condition of moral-cum-material decline Cubans call necesidad, intimating a sense of destitution that is felt to exert itself as an uncontrollable force. The relation between the revolution and what lies beyond it, then, is seen here through the prism of the duality of money as both a qualitative token of value and quantitative scale for commensuration. The former is central to the way pesos (Cuba’s national currency, issued by the revolutionary state) operate as moral concretions of the revolution, marking out the scope of its moral economy. The latter, however, comes into its own with the use of US dollars and locally issued currencies pegged to it, which have become increasingly pervasive in everyday consumption since the 1990s. In its capacity to commensurate all values quantitatively, the dollar rubs out the distinction between the state’s moral economy and the variously licit and informal realms of transaction that have grown alongside it in Cuba. Crucially, in this way, it tends to trump the revolution’s effort to position itself as transcendental condition of possibility for life, encompassing it with its own transcendental scope.

Food shortages impacted some countries more severely than others. They also did not affect everyone equally within societies. Access to food determined new social hierarchies in wartime. Rising costs of living everywhere meant that a higher part of household income had to be devoted to food. Worsened material conditions sharpened old social divisions and created new ones. In many cases, it was easier for the rich to still obtain food despite rationing, which fed resentment against the comparatively better-off. The term ‘profiteer’ and its equivalent in other languages came to define the perceived enemy, which lived in opulence during times of scarcity and took advantage of the reduced circumstances of others. Employees on fixed incomes were particularly hit by the changing economic conditions. For middle-class people whose identity was linked to their class status, the struggles they experienced to obtain basic consumption goods were experienced as déclassement. Hunger both weakened and strengthened the spirit of community: outsiders, including a growing number of war refugees, were increasingly perceived as additional mouths to feed in a context of dwindling food supplies. Hunger thus transformed the self-perceptions of many Europeans and their positions within established social hierarchies.

Chapter 5 focuses on the state system of food provision, which continues to supply Cuban families with essential food and other household goods in heavily subsidised prices. State goods operate as concretions of the revolution’s moral project, embodying its frugal ethos metonymically, and taking it deep into people’s homes and ultimately, through ingestion, their bodies. Here too, however, the duplex personhood elaborated earlier comes into play, this time due to the fact that people gain access to these goods only by virtue of their bureaucratic designation as ‘citizens’ of the revolution. While this appears to be a version of the role/person model developed in Chapter 3, it also turns the model on its head since here the role of citizen is associated with what is deemed as the deepest level of people’s existence, namely their ‘basic needs’ as biological organisms. This puts a paradox into the heart of the state rationing system, which can be parsed out morphologically as the constitutive mismatch between a state system that purports to cater to people as whole, flesh-and-blood people, but only actually meets a small part of the needs they feel they have. The chapter builds a model of this part/whole paradox with reference to the ethnography of the system’s operation at neighbourhood level.

Food insecurity during the First World War made hungry civilians around the continent search for alternative modes and means to fight hunger in war and post-war Europe. A transnational comparison of survival strategies, employed by individuals throughout Europe, demonstrates how ordinary civilians responded to the shortcomings of official food provisioning. The chapter explores how civilians turned to home-based agricultural production, made trips to the countryside or participated in black market. As regular circuits for obtaining food were very restricted, individuals circumvented official distribution means by relying on the alternative economies of grey and black markets. Bartering, especially, became an important means to cope with the economy of shortages. Relying on informal channels, as this chapter demonstrates, the hungry population traded jewellery for potatoes or furniture for meat. Civilians sometimes even resorted to illegal and criminal activities such as fraud and theft to meet their basic needs. In Eastern and Western Europe, individuals of course took actions in different forms, depending on the severity of the food scarcity, but, as this chapter argues, the strategies they used also shared many similar features and delineated new modes of social interactions, and new relationships to the licit and the illicit in wartime.