Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword by Klaus Toepfer
- Introduction
- Part I General principles
- Part II The legal framework
- Introduction
- 2 The law of war and environmental damage
- 3 War and the environment: fault lines in the prescriptive landscape
- 4 The inadequacy of the existing legal approach to environmental protection in wartime
- 5 United States Navy development of operational-environmental doctrine
- 6 In furtherance of environmental guidelines for armed forces during peace and war
- Introduction
- 7 Peacetime environmental law as a basis of state responsibility for environmental damage caused by war
- 8 Environmental damages under the Law of the Sea Convention
- 9 The place of the environment in international tribunals
- 10 Civil liability for war-caused environmental damage: models from United States law
- Part III Assessing the impacts – scientific methods and issues
- Part IV Valuing the impacts – economic methods and issues
- Part V Prospects for the future
- Index
3 - War and the environment: fault lines in the prescriptive landscape
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword by Klaus Toepfer
- Introduction
- Part I General principles
- Part II The legal framework
- Introduction
- 2 The law of war and environmental damage
- 3 War and the environment: fault lines in the prescriptive landscape
- 4 The inadequacy of the existing legal approach to environmental protection in wartime
- 5 United States Navy development of operational-environmental doctrine
- 6 In furtherance of environmental guidelines for armed forces during peace and war
- Introduction
- 7 Peacetime environmental law as a basis of state responsibility for environmental damage caused by war
- 8 Environmental damages under the Law of the Sea Convention
- 9 The place of the environment in international tribunals
- 10 Civil liability for war-caused environmental damage: models from United States law
- Part III Assessing the impacts – scientific methods and issues
- Part IV Valuing the impacts – economic methods and issues
- Part V Prospects for the future
- Index
Summary
[W]e must face the fact that war and its forms result from the ideas, emotions and conditions prevailing at the time.
Carl von clausewitzThe rise of normative consciousness
Throughout history, man has caused tremendous damage to the environment during armed conflict. In the seventeenth century, for instance, the Dutch flooded their own lands by destroying dikes to arrest the onslaught of foreign invaders. More recently, Allied attacks on Romanian oilfields and facilities during World Wars I and II – in particular those at Ploesti – seriously damaged the surrounding terrain. Despite these and the countless other incidents that could be cited to illustrate war's oft-devastating environmental impact, only with the Vietnam conflict did the international community begin to focus seriously on this reality. Von Clausewitz's classic maxim about the context of war was soon to be validated vis-à-vis the environment and the normative architecture that would emerge to protect it.
It was not the scale of environmental destruction caused during that struggle which attracted attention; indeed, far greater devastation had been wrought in earlier conflicts. Instead, general anti-war fervor, growing environmental awareness, and the vivid images of what was occurring made possible by televised mass media operated synergistically to awaken much of the collective conscience. The normative result was twofold: (1) the conclusion of the Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD), a treaty limiting use of environmental modification as a method of warfare; and (2) inclusion in the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 of two provisions that limit the environmental damage permitted during international armed conflict.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Environmental Consequences of WarLegal, Economic, and Scientific Perspectives, pp. 87 - 136Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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