The University of Helsinki has published the first international study on the environmental impact of World War II.
The study says that World War II had a profound impact on nature not only directly in the combat zone and on the internal fronts of the belligerent states, but also on the nature of those territories where the military industry was located. World War II created a global dump that formed from abandoned front lines, half-sunken ships, devastated military bases and bombed-out cities in Europe and Asia.
“This global landfill has not yet been properly cleared. Work continues in Finnish Lapland, on both sides of the eastern border, and on the transferred islands of the Gulf of Finland,”writes one of the authors, Associate Professor of Economic and Social History Simo Laakkonen.
The war was fought not only with cannons, but also with shovels, hoes and earth-moving machines. Soldiers, prisoners of war and prisoners built roads, railways, ports and airfields all over the world, with the help of which the harmful substances inherent in the industrial society spread to completely new, untouched territories.
The scale of World War II was enormous. It was a humanitarian tragedy that claimed 50-70 million lives.
Nuclear weapons are the biggest threat to the environment
The world war gave rise to such global environmental problems as the chemicalization of industrial production, the use of toxic substances that harm the environment, and radioactive fallout.
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“The most dangerous and enduring environmental threat that war has generated is, of course, the development of nuclear weapons,” says Laakkonen.
Prior to World War II, pest control was carried out primarily by natural means. During the war, they began to fight the spread of typhus (with lice) and malaria (with mosquitoes), and then with pests in agriculture with the help of DDT and other toxic chemicals.
Doomsday worries - start of environmental policy
The war made people think about a man-made end of the world, which in turn led to an intensification of environmental policies around the world.
“The World War has had a serious impact on culture. She created a completely new concept of an ecological disaster, anxiety about the possibility of the end of the world, which could happen through human fault. Then it turned into a wide discussion about environmental issues,”says Laakkonen.
According to researchers, the world war has seriously influenced the study of modern environmental problems and ways to solve them in the conditions of the Cold War and after its end.
The recently published book, The Long Shadows: A Global Environmental History of the Second World War, examines the impact of military infrastructure on the environment in the Arctic, India and the Pacific.
The book also discusses the impact of mining on Canada, Japan, Mexico and the Caribbean, as well as war-triggered food crises in Africa, the Soviet Union and China.
The new book by Timo Vuorisalo, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science Simo Laakkonen and Associate Professor of Ecology at the University of Turku, is a sequel to the previously written book Ecology of War: An Environmental History of Modern Warfare (Sodan ekologia: nykyaikaisen sodan ympäristöhistoriaa).
Ilkka Ahtokivi