How conflict results in ecological destruction.
The costs of war are numerous. As war rages around the world in places like Israel-Palestine, Ukraine, and Myanmar, it is important for us as humans to consider one of the most devastating costs of warfare: ecocide.
What is ecocide?
First, let us examine and define the term ‘ecocide’. The word is composed of the prefix ‘eco-‘ and the suffix ‘-cide’. ‘Eco-‘ has its origins in the Greek oikos meaning ‘home’ or ‘environment’, meanwhile ‘-cide’ has Latin origins in the word caedere meaning ‘to kill’ or ‘cut down’, thus we can determine that ‘ecocide’ refers to the killing or cutting down of the environment. The charity Stop Ecocide International defines ecocide to be ‘unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.’ It is deliberate or negligent ecological damage.
Ecocide is not what comes to mind for most when the topic of warfare and its consequences is concerned, yet it has potentially the most devastating impacts for humanity and the planet. Warfare, and particularly modern warfare, has seen calamitous damage to the natural environment all over the world. This article will examine only a handful of them and explore the immediate and lasting damage warfare has had on wildlife and biodiversity across the globe.
Agent Orange and the Vietnam War
The Vietnam War is generally considered to have begun in 1955 and lasted until 1975. This 20 year conflict had huge, collateral impacts on the environment in the Indochinese Peninsula and brought the topic of ecocide to academic and public attention.
Operation Ranch Hand was a program of chemical warfare commenced by the United States during their involvement in the Vietnam War. It involved the large-scale spraying of herbicides across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, to destroy the foliage and biodiversity which hid North Vietnamese soldiers from the American troops. The US also sought to eliminate crops which supplied the local people and North Vietnamese troops with food.
Agent Orange, one of the herbicides used during Operation Ranch Hand – so called due to the orange coloured 55-gallon barrels it was stored in – was the most widely used during the war. Of the 20 million gallons of herbicide used by the US Army between 1961 and 1972, more than 65% of which was Agent Orange, around 13 million gallons. The herbicide contained large quantities of TCDD, a type of dioxin, which caused contaminated plants to defoliate and lose their leaves. It infected rainforests, waterways, and local agriculture, and has been linked to a large number of health issues for contaminated humans, such as cancers and profound physical and mental disabilities. The Red Cross has estimated that Agent Orange has caused around 1 million people to suffer from disabilities in the region.
The TCDD found in Agent Orange has been persistent and long-lasting in its harmful effects on the local environment and biodiversity. It has persisted particularly in rivers, lakes, and soil, as well as in the fatty tissue of birds, fish, and other native animals. One of the main ways the government of Vietnam has dealt with Agent Orange contamination has been through landfill sites, which offer a quick and cheap but temporary solution to this persistent problem, although researchers have suggested the incineration of contaminated sediments.
Agent Orange offers one of the first large-scale examples of the specific and targeted extermination of vegetation and biodiversity during warfare. While it was responsible for bringing ecocide into the discussion on the costs of war, it has left devastating, dangerous, and ongoing ecological issues in the region which affect both the wildlife and the local population in serious and tragic ways.
Desert Ecology and the Gulf War
The Gulf War was a relatively short war when compared side-by-side with the Vietnam War, considered to have lasted from August 1990 to February 1991. In August 1990, Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein, invaded the neighbouring country of Kuwait, annexing it and calling it the 19th province of Iraq. In January 1991, a US-led coalition began a largely airborne campaign called Operation Desert Storm, and the subsequent ground campaign, Operation Desert Sabre, bringing the war to a close on 28 February 1991.
Despite the war’s brevity, the Gulf War saw considerable ecological damage to the local and fragile desert ecosystems. As Linden, Jernelov, and Egerup (2004) note, the consequences of the Gulf War impacted the air, marine, and terrestrial environment in Kuwait and southern Iraq. They discuss that the intentional destruction of over 800 Kuwaiti oil wells by Iraqi troops during the invasion in 1990 led to significant environmental damage, including air pollution and large lakes of oil on the desert surface. The oil wells were not capped until October 1991, prior to which the sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions from the burning oil and gas are estimated to have been around 24,000 tons per day, and between 130-140 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) is estimated to have been released into the atmosphere. Linden, Jernelov, and Egerup note that this had significant effects on local vegetation and climate.
Oil lakes formed on the surface of the desert, with an estimated 200 square kilometres of ground covered with up to 250 oil lakes, destroying large swathes of Kuwait’s fragile desert ecosystems. Further, sabotaged oil tankers led to large-scale oil spills in the Persian Gulf, contaminating coastal waters and marine life on a scale many times worse than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.
Over the course of the Gulf War’s short duration huge degrees of ecological damage were inflicted, principally by Iraqi forces invading Kuwait from August 1990. Immense quantities of pollutants like sulphur and carbon dioxide were released into the air, and vast tonnages of crude oil were allowed to spill across swathes of desert surface and vegetation and significant portions of the marine environment in the Persian Gulf. A short war with long-lasting impacts of ecocide.
Ecocide and Conflicts in Israel-PalestineÂ
Conflict in the territory of Israel-Palestine between local Jewish and Arab populations has a long history, rooted particularly in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948. While the prospect of peace appeared on the horizon after the 1993 Oslo accords, signed in Washington D.C by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, conflict in the region has escalated. Cracks appeared after the accords, exemplified by criticism from opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, and the assassination of Rabin by a Jewish extremist in 1995. Following a Hamas-led surprise attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has been at war with Hamas-controlled Palestine. As part of this conflict, environmental warfare and ecocide have played significant roles.
Israel has been responsible for a number of incidents of ecocide during its conflict in the region. According to the Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network (PENGON), in 2014 the Israeli Operation Protective Edge damaged 250,000 fruit bearing trees along the border with Palestine. Following the operation, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) admitted to spraying pesticides along the border with Palestine to shrink the already-scarce availability of farmland in the area.
The Goldsmiths-based research group Forensic Architecture (FA) have found that a major ecocide has been occurring in Gaza. They have found that since October 2023, many Palestinian orchards have been uprooted and crops have been bulldozed by Israeli forces. They examine the Abu Suffiyeh farm in eastern Gaza which, through satellite imagery, can be seen to have been almost totally destroyed by January 2024 due to the conflict. FA has found that prior to 2023, Gaza contained around 170 square kilometres of agricultural land. By March 2024, as much as 40% of that had been destroyed by the Israeli invasion. Further, the soil and waterways in Gaza have been contaminated by toxins, munitions, sewage, and waste, and the air has been polluted by smoke and particulate matter.
Ecocide has played a significant role in military strategy of Israel since the 2010s and will continue to have ruinous effects on the native vegetation, agricultural capacities, and local people in the region for years to come.
Russo-Ukrainian War
While the Russo-Ukrainian War is considered to have begun in 2014 when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, the full-scale Russian invasion of the country commenced in February 2022. Since it began, the invasion has incurred serious and widespread ecological damage across Ukraine.
While Ukraine makes up only 6% of the territory in Europe, it contains around 35% of the continent’s biodiversity. Since the invasion, the non-profit organisation Razom have found that there have been over 1,500 reported cases of ecosystem destruction, including at national parks and biosphere reserves. This may prove to be irreparable damage and a fundamental, radical transformation to terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems in Ukraine, such as the Irpin wetlands.
It is likely that significant portions of land will remain contaminated from conflict long after the Russo-Ukrainian War comes to a close. More than 200,000 hectares of Ukrainian land is thought to be contaminated with debris, mines, and shells. Furthermore, Razom identify that many divisions of the Russian army utilise outdated Soviet equipment and vehicles which use harmful chemical propellants and severely contaminate the soil. These chemicals are absorbed by the soil and go on to contaminate irrigation systems and waterways, polluting the Ukrainian water supply. 25% of Ukraine relies on groundwater for its water supply, which is easily contaminated by chemicals like the ones leaked in the Russian invasion.
The war in Ukraine has been plagued with large-scale ecocide. Ecological damage has been rife as a consequence of the Russian invasion in 2022, and will continue to have adverse environmental and human impacts in the region, many of which will prove to be long-lasting and, in some cases, potentially irreparable.
Conclusion
War is devastating. Conflict has ruined human lives, countries, economies, cultures, and environments. Huge and diverse landscapes have been catastrophically damaged during and as a consequence of war, be it intentional or negligent. It is important that we consider the ecological impacts of war and how these adversely affect all ecosystems, and can have terrible and persistent impacts.
At a time when climate change events are becoming more prolific and extreme globally, it is vital that, as a species, ecocide can be prevented, mitigated, and punished in the instances that it occurs. Through ecocide, war, irrespective of its location, is contributing to climate change.
It is positive that in September 2024 ecocide was raised to the forefront of the global discussion when it was proposed to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for consideration of its recognition as a punishable criminal offence and contrary to international law.
While it is unlikely that war will cease altogether, and that ecological destruction will stop completely, it may become increasingly possible for those who engage in ecocide to be held to account and punished, and for the communities affected to access mechanisms and projects of remedy.