Micah Muscolino's most recent book, The Ecology of War in China, frames combat as a struggle to control energy, or the capacity to do work (p. 6). During the Sino-Japanese and the Chinese civil wars, the Japanese, Nationalist, and Communist armies vied for control of the energy that circulated in everything from farm communities and armies to draft animals, mud, and the mighty Yellow River itself. Muscolino convincingly shows that attempts to dominate environmental energy were central to conflicts both between and within the societies at war.
The focus of the book is Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's fateful decision to destroy the Huayuankou dike on the Yellow River during the battle for central China. Using a rich array of archival sources from China, Taiwan, and the United States, Muscolino depicts the evolving relationship between the human parties and the Yellow River. Excellent maps supplement his clear prose, allowing readers to follow the complex movements of populations, armies, and water during and after the Second World War.
In addition to his crisp account of the battles and their political ramifications, Muscolino presents a history that is not exclusively human. In the language of theatre, many historians focus on dialogue and stage directions, at the expense of setting. Flattening out environmental details in this way yields anthropocentric histories that might have happened anywhere. By contrast, Muscolino's attention to nitty-gritty details such as silt, donkeys, and firewood anchors his narrative in the specific setting of the mid-century North China Plain.
More provocatively, he sees in the Yellow River “a distinctive agency, acting unpredictably even as it was being acted upon” (p. 141). Muscolino's bold decision to attribute agency to an inanimate entity will be controversial, but this is a welcome new direction for historical writing. The actions of the river and nearby societies have been interwoven for millennia. He rightly points out that “the Yellow River was no passive object” (p. 22). Water does not move at random, nor does it submit completely to human will. In this energy-centric environmental history, Muscolino demonstrates that while humans might shape or contain a river temporarily, the water never loses its capacity to surprise. Like Huck Finn's Mississippi, the vital waterway at the center of this book is no mere line on a map, but almost a character in its own right. Such attention to the actions of nonhumans is an important contribution to history that addresses societies in their environmental contexts.
Human agency, on the other hand, is underdeveloped in Muscolino's otherwise illuminating discussion of “military metabolism.” This is the term he applies to the ways in which “military systems extract free energy to do work and maintain their internal organization, while at the same time releasing low-level energy via entropy (waste)” (p. 7). This model is well suited to his vivid depiction of armies contending for control of cropland, waterways, and the labor of civilians. This fresh, macroscopic perspective on war allows for many insights on the unintended downstream effects of combat, such as deforestation and soil loss.
But militaries also act on their environments out of fear, vengeance, or the desire to intimidate other parties. Such decisions are only tenuously connected to any contest over energy or material resources. For instance, civilian massacres obliterate bodies that could otherwise be put to work. Likewise, with their immense inputs and long-lasting environmental devastation, nuclear weapons seem a poor bargain if the goal is to gain control of an enemy's energy resources. The main events of this monograph are bookended by the Japanese army's slaughter of civilians in Nanjing, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These military actions seem less like examples of “struggles over incarnations of energy and power” (p. 12) than of the ferocity of humans who feel threatened or aggrieved. Therefore, although much global combat certainly fits Muscolino's helpful framework, he could strengthen his argument by defining the conditions in which military metabolism applies, instead of suggesting the “primacy of nature's energy for all military conflicts” (p. 6). An even more satisfying account of the “choices of commanders [and] the fates of communities” (p. 5) might draw more attention to the ugly, irrational feelings that motivate so much of human endeavor, including war.
Muscolino has done a great service by demonstrating new ways to think about not only the conflicts he covers, but warfare in general. His analysis of the effects of battle on the societies and landscapes of north China alone would justify reading The Ecology of War in China. The book's greatest merit, however, is in showing how violence is inextricable from its environmental context. Muscolino's careful archival research, brisk prose, and innovative use of environmental science have set a standard for future historians to follow.
