Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Consider warfare and engines, whose dynamics derived from politics and
economics rather than wet-dry cycles and the pyric chemistry of living bio-
mass.Their ecological impact was sometimes overt, as when battles set fires
that roamed across fields and woods. More often their ecological clout was
disguised, an iron fist hidden in a velvet glove of economics. Fire weapons
and fire engines restructured the flow of goods and peoples, they influenced
how people used the land, they quickened the tempo of technological
change.They rearranged fuels, they invented new fire devices.They plunged
whole landscapes into a forge of human fury and ambition.
WAR AS FIRE ECOLOGY
War has been associated with fire for so long that the image of one often
equates with the other.“Fire and sword” very nearly says it all: open fire, as
a tactic of battle, as the scorched earth of retreating armies, as the laying
waste by victors; closed fire, as the means of forging weapons, of casting
cannon, of powering ordnance. “Firepower” remains yet today the code
word for military strength.
Few battlefields have lacked fire. Fires have burned on prairies and in
woods, amid ships and cities, flung over ramparts and scattered with artillery
shells. Fire weapons have traveled on land, sea, ice, and air. Yet open fire
could be problematic, and nowhere more than amid the havoc of battle.
Clausewitz's “fog of battle” was most often a cloud of smoke. A broadcast
burn could, with a change of wind, turn on those who set it; smoke screens
obscured the field for both sides. Even in naval battles, the ideal was to hurl
enough controlled fire to disable a wooden ship, not enough to destroy it
as a prize. Sieges sought to burn out defenders, while soldiers on the bat-
tlements poured down flame on assault troops. In the ancient world, Greek
fire (a sulfurous liquid) was a weapon to dread. For gardened societies, espe-
cially, the chaos of war invited the chaos of wildfire, since the breakdown
in social order exposes niches for fire and strews the landscape with fuel.
In the second millennium, two revolutions in firepower shook the con-
duct of war. One was gunpowder (which gave new meaning to the expres-
sion “to fire”); the other was industrialization, which mechanized war and
expanded its range. While each fabricated a host of new fire weapons, it is
often easy to miss the flames for the roar. The worst casualties of World
War II resulted from blasting cities with a mix of “conventional” block-
buster bombs and incendiaries; even the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
