In their new books, Lisa M. Brady and Megan Kate Nelson bring environmental history to the study of the Civil War and use the war to explore contemporary ideas about the natural environment, its human shaping, and how the war changed attitudes toward the environment. As Brady suggests, the Civil War illustrates “the fundamental importance nature has in shaping human decisions even in cases where other issues seem to take precedence” (4). The environment both influenced the conduct of the war and was altered by the war. The wartime experience also influenced how people thought about the environment after the war. The war later provided a rationale for “nature protection at the national level” (Brady 5).

Of the two books, Brady's is more rooted in traditional military history. It explores how the environment and “ideas of nature” influenced military decisions. Building on the work of Mark Grimsley, whose Hard Hand of War (1995) she references regularly, Brady follows Union operations chronologically, devoting most of her attention to three campaigns: Grant's effort to capture Vicksburg, Sheridan's devastation of the Shenandoah Valley, and Sherman's March to the Sea. Civil War officers, many of them engineers educated at West Point, were naturally inclined toward engineering feats and winning by picks and shovels rather than rifles. This is particularly evident in Grant's efforts to redirect the Mississippi River. Indeed, his campaigns marked the first efforts to control the Mississippi River. Union engineering efforts included a six-mile canal, which forced the Confederate abandonment of Island 10 and led to the capture of Memphis, and ambitious projects to divert the Mississippi River from Vicksburg, which failed due to local swamps, disease, and the difficult environment.

As Brady notes, the environment significantly influenced the conduct of the war. In turn, Union generals sought to make the environment serve the needs of the war effort. This was particularly true of Sheridan and Sherman, who launched campaigns that specifically targeted the environment. Contemporary writers often reported that their depredations turned vast areas into wilderness. The deliberate creation of wilderness, which contemporaries saw as the destruction of the man-made landscape, including farms, buildings, and railroads, became a centerpiece of Union strategy. “Union operations first took advantage of southern improvements, then targeted them as part of a larger military strategy” (Brady 12), which undermined support for the Confederacy.

Megan Kate Nelson takes a broader approach and combines environmental and cultural history in her analysis. In individual chapters she considers the destruction wrought upon cities, homes, the natural environment, and people. How did people make sense of the loss of communities, homes, natural environment, loved ones, or limbs? How did these influence the conduct of the war and the postwar environment?

Like Brady, Nelson describes how devastation became integral to military strategy. Military theorists on both sides came to believe “that violent acts of destruction had an emotional impact in addition to a material reality, and that the emotions of both soldiers and civilians had the power to determine the course of the war” (Nelson 3). Nelson, though, balances the traditional focus on Union devastation and Sherman's March with a discussion of the Confederate destruction of Hampton, Virginia and Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Confederate soldiers burned the former in a failed effort to prevent its use as a refuge for escaped slaves, and the latter in retaliation for Union devastation in the Shenandoah Valley. Northerners and southerners reacted in similar ways to ruins, and contemporary writers on both sides of the conflict used them to exemplify the enemy's savagery. In fact, Brady argues that both armies embraced hard war tactics from the war's outset. The progress of the war, though, meant that this devastation was more often visited on southern cities, and she explores “the tremendous staying power of urban ruins in the southern imagination” (Nelson 60).

Soldiers burned people's homes in retaliation for guerrilla activities and for suspected spying, and eventually as general retaliation for a host of real or perceived slights. Union soldiers looted for both personal and practical reasons and particularly targeted the homes of Confederate military and political leaders. Pianos, seen as symbols of elite privilege, rarely survived looters. Looting and vandalism proved a humiliating process, a violation of private space – particularly women's space. Not uncommonly, people stated they preferred their houses burned outright rather than first looted. After the soldiers departed, locals continued to loot the ruins as they tried to rebuild their lives.

Much of the war's devastation, which Nelson explores as both reality and metaphor, was short-lived. Union armies both destroyed and created. They expanded and improved roads and railroads and built camps, churches, theaters, and other structures. After the war, people built new, often better, homes, and communities quickly recovered and flourished. The missing limbs and other visible wounds of veterans, though, remained a lasting reminder of the war's cost. These continued to invite questions about masculinity, humanity, and life and death.

Nelson and Brady echo several common themes. Powerless and humiliated, civilians struggled to deal with the war's devastation. Often, they lacked vocabulary for the destruction wrought by advancing armies, and so embraced metaphors for unimproved landscapes: desert, wasteland, wilderness. Together, the books demonstrate that there are still new avenues for scholars to explore when examining the Civil War, and their approach is worth pursuing. Both authors focussed most of their attention on major Union operations, particularly Sherman and Sheridan in Virginia and Georgia. Similar examinations of other theaters of war would be worthwhile. How, for example, did guerillas affect the environment? Union forces made extensive use of the nation's waterways, and this topic is worthy of more discussion. How did the natural environment shape Union riverine operations, and how, in turn, did they alter the rivers they traversed?