This edited volume, marking the 110th anniversary of the First World War, is the first collection of environmental histories of the eastern front during the Great War. It boasts a stellar group of international scholars who hail from Polish, Austrian, Italian, Russian, and British universities and work in a dozen research languages. The result of a 2023 symposium at the University of Vienna, this collection is much more substantive than the typical conference volume. Featuring color photographs, fifty figures, thirty-three pages of bibliography, and footnotes, it is an incredible resource for scholars well-versed in environmental history as well as newcomers. The Great War and the Anthropocene contains thirteen empirical case studies and one theoretical essay, which nuance conceptualizations of landscape, terrain, nature, and environment.
The detailed introduction by editors Kerstin S. Jobst, Oksana Nagornaia, and Kerstin von Lingen goes beyond presenting the volume’s topic and contributors to synthesizing three literatures: environmental history, spatial studies, and the environmental history of war. It stops short of taking a strong evaluative stance on those literatures or mobilizing them to advance a specific argument. Instead, the editors present the volume’s contribution as addressing “lacuna[e]” (2) and “gaps” (10) in the environmental study of WWI by extending the geographical scope eastward and chronological scope forward (8). Fighting in the east was bound up with other wars that continued until the early 1920s. The editors rightly insist that scholars must push against the “universalization of experiences on the Western Front” (6), but I think this volume achieves much more than that.
This fresh evidence from the east compels us to revise conceptual frameworks of WWI, which are largely based on evidence from the west. One case in point is that the volume’s first essay, an insightful piece on the concept of “warscape” by Christoph Nübel, bases its conceptual apparatus on evidence from the western front (36). The case studies that follow, however, highlight the particularities of the eastern front. In charting that “war of movement,” where large swaths of territory changed hands and the frontline often moved rapidly, these essays transform our understanding of human-environmental interactions during WWI by shedding light on understudied regions, ethnic groups, and ecosystems. For instance, Gustavo Corni reconstructs mountain warfare in Alps, while Tomasz Kargol tabulates environmental devastation in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria.
Each essay in the volume explores how a particular landscape—a space defined by geography, geology, culture, and memory—became militarized, both by soldiers in response to the exigencies of war and by civilians struggling to survive. Liubov Zhvanko, for example, shines a spotlight on Ukrainian refugees who reshaped linguistic, cultural, and geographical spaces into refugee towns. All the contributors underscore that militarization entailed not just the destruction but also the reconfiguration of landscapes through the creation of infrastructure, cemeteries, settlements, maps, beliefs—even species. In her essay on animal combatants, Oksana Nagornaia notes how the war not only destroyed millions of horses, it enhanced the species’ biodiversity, as enemy horses were captured and placed into new breeding herds.
In addition to extreme biological and geological change, WWI transformed attitudes towards the environment. For military commanders, Yaroslav Golubinov and David Novotny show, environmental destruction went from being a means to an end to an end in and of itself, leading to the indiscriminate destruction of civilian targets. For medical doctors, Andrea Rendl and Gwendal Piégais demonstrate, the war provided a steep learning curve about the necessities of vaccination and sanitation infrastructure to guard against infectious disease.
The line between militarization and demilitarization was often blurry. As Yulia Zherdeva demonstrates, efforts to detoxify continued to assault habitats and cultures long after the battle ceased. Likewise, efforts to memorialize the war, Kamil Ruszała and Hanna Bazhenova show, were designed to create closure but intensified the reconfiguration of landscape through the excavation of stones and exhumation of bodies. Like cemeteries, war photography, Alexandra Likhacheva illustrates, can provide a therapeutic outlet as well as reorder the material world in accordance with idealized memories of the photographer.
These essays are rigorous, persuasive, and methodologically diverse. There is noticeably little on the Ottoman empire (apart from Nicholas J. Saunders’s essay discussing attacks on the Hejaz railway), and the essays rarely refer to each other even though they contain many points of intersection. Still, The Great War and the Anthropocene is an enormous leap forward in the environmental historiography on the eastern front, one that greatly enriches our understanding of how the Great War unfolded far from Flanders Fields.
