Having taught graduate seminars on the environmental history of East Asia and entertained the idea of writing a book on the topic, I can say that the paucity of English-language scholarship on the environmental history of Korea (along with my inability to read Korean beyond a kindergarten level) made the former a pedagogical challenge and the latter a scholarly impossibility. For those reasons alone, this outstanding set of articles on woods and warfare on the Korea peninsula by John Lee, David Fedman, and Lisa Brady could not be more welcome. The present commentary focuses on the main contributions that, in my view at least, each of the articles makes to the global environmental historiography of war and the environment, while also highlighting some questions that might be fruitfully pursued in future research. Given the primary focus of my own research, these comments have an unabashedly China-centric bias, for which I apologize in advance.
Lee insightfully notes that in Korea and the rest of Eurasia, the rise of the early-modern state went hand in hand with mounting demand for timber and an expansion of state management of forest resources. To a considerable extent, this “linkage of war, bureaucratic expansion, and forests” grew out of the Military Revolution (ca. 1450–1750), which featured larger and increasingly centralized militaries, more powerful gunpowder weapons, heavier fortifications, and more ships. Lee shows that these developments put the same pressures on forests in the Korean peninsula that they placed on woodlands elsewhere. As alarming scarcities of wood loomed in the wake of the costly and destructive Imjin War, the Chosŏn government followed a pattern similar that of early-modern European maritime powers, seeking to ensure access to timber for construction of naval vessels in the early- to mid-seventeenth century by expanding state forestry systems centered on the pines of western and southern Korea.Footnote 1
In most other Eurasian states affected by the Military Revolution, simultaneous need for timber and horses endowed forests and grasslands alike with growing importance (McNeill Reference McNeill2004, 394). In contrast, Lee suggests that while the military significance of Korea's woodlands increased over the course of the seventeenth century, the importance of grasslands for horse pasture declined. Ranches that supplied horses for Korean cavalry divisions during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries gave way to the post-Imjin Chosŏn state's “privileged landscape, the pine forest,” as the military came to emphasize warships and gunpowder weapons over cavalry. What explains this rather unexpected decline in the Chosŏn military's “equine element” during the Military Revolution? It could have had something to do with the mid-seventeenth-century rise of the Qing Empire and, following Manchu invasions of Korea in 1627 and 1636, the Chosŏn dynasty's incorporation as one of its tributaries. Qing hegemony in Northeast Asia may have minimized threats posed to Korea by horse-riding peoples to the northeast and rendered cavalry less vital to the Chosŏn state's security interests. This hypothesis is purely speculative, and I claim no real expertise on the topic, but the possibility deserves consideration. The Qing's ability to acquire horses from ranches in Manchuria and Mongolia would at least account for the diminished role of horses, noted by Lee, in Korea's tribute obligations (Bello Reference Bello2016, chap. 3).
Lee's coverage of “post-Imjin Korea” and Fedman's focus on the colonial era leave the big question of what happened to Korea's forests during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries unanswered.Footnote 2 How did Korea go from the verdant, pine-covered peninsula described by Lee to the “land of bald mountains and red earth” that, as Fedman shows, aroused the anxieties of Japanese colonial foresters in the early twentieth century? One wonders especially about the impact of swidden cultivation, a topic that Lee, Fedman, and Brady all mention in passing but do not consider in depth.
Even if, as Fedman shows, Japanese forestry officials initially strove to regenerate Korea's woodlands through scientific management, by the 1930s these conservation efforts gave way to unrestrained exploitation in the name of mobilization for total war. On a global scale, the period between the First and Second World Wars witnessed an acceleration of military industry that enabled states to mobilize greater resources and perpetrate unprecedented levels of destruction. During World War II, militarized economies pursued energy and materials to fuel conflict with sometimes reckless abandon, and the world's woodlands felt the effects. Laborers who were not drafted into military service cut down trees as rapidly as possible. Energy-intensive, fossil-fueled harvesting machinery and transport networks made it possible for combatants to loot timber from every continent (McNeill Reference McNeill2004, 399; Tucker Reference Tucker, Tucker and Russell2004). In East Asia, Japan's military expansion required extending control over its empire's forests. During the 1930s and 1940s, exploitation of timber resources at home and abroad accelerated as Japan prepared for and embarked upon the path of total war (Tsutsui Reference Tsutsui2003). From the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 until Japan's unconditional surrender in 1945, the Japanese empire exploited and sacrificed resources in what Ian J. Miller (Reference Miller2013, 95) calls an “escalating frenzy of consumption” that encompassed all economic sectors.
It does not come as much of a surprise that the Japanese colonial regime in Korea defined woodlands as “national defense resources” during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45 and targeted them for industrial-scale utilization. Where Fedman breaks genuinely new ground is by showing what this wartime exploitation of forest resources meant for the Korean people. Focusing on the “lived experiences and corporeal consequences” of state-led efforts to rationalize consumption, he reveals how wartime reforms necessitated by the colonial government's command economy for forest products impinged upon the fuel energy needs of Korean households. By the early twentieth century, Fedman notes, Korea suffered from shortages of firewood and charcoal that led rural residents to burn grass, thatch, pine needles, and other forest biomass as fuel.
An even greater fuel crisis existed in the long-deforested areas in North China's Henan Province covered in my most recent book (as well as the parts of Northwest China that are the focus of my current research), where rural residents burned brush, grass, chaff, roots, and whatever else they could get their hands on. Wartime demands only deepened preexisting fuel scarcities. In China, as in Korea and many other parts of the world, fuel gathering was primarily the work of women and children. For this reason, as I argued in my environmental history of World War II in Henan, extreme shortages of wood and other types of fuel made the experience of war especially difficult for the female members of rural households (Muscolino Reference Muscolino2015). Fedman makes a similar point about the gendered nature of energy consumption in wartime Korea when he asserts that women were “disproportionately affected” by the stringent regulations that the colonial government imposed on heating practices in Korean homes to promote fuel conservation.
Among the three articles in this forum, Fedman's discussion of the Japanese colonial regime's wartime campaign to get Koreans to practice a “low temperature lifestyle” during the frigid winter months exemplifies Rob Nixon's (Reference Nixon2013) celebrated concept of “slow violence.” During the war, as Fedman ably demonstrates, loss of access to wood fuel deprived Korean households of materials that were essential to their livelihoods. Fedman notes that fuel regulations limited Koreans’ ability to eat their staple diet of hot soups and stews, not to mention rice and other grains. The colonial rhetoric of improving Korean habits and valorizing imperial service masked what Fedman refers to as a “human desire”—but what I would characterize as a human need—to stay warm in a bitterly cold environment.
Fedman's article left me wanting to know more about how Korea's populace coped with these wartime restrictions on resource use and the deprivations that they caused. He writes of Korean women removing state-mandated stove lids and “improperly” using fuels, as well as a crime wave with “origins in the ondol,” but does not elaborate on these incidents. Fedman displays a mastery of the colonial-era documents in Japanese and Korean that make up his primary source base. Supplementing these materials with oral histories or memoir literature (genres which have proven indispensable for research on wartime China) might provide even more insight into the ecological dimensions of daily life and survival strategies under total war.
If mobilization in support of Japan's military endeavors during World War II took a heavy toll on Korea's woodlands, the Korean War caused even heavier damage. Forestry management thus represented an integral part of the reconstruction and development efforts undertaken in the early 1950s by the United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency (UNKRA) to “reorganize and rationalize” Korea's environment through a wide range of agricultural programs. Resource development, as Brady shows, mattered as much as battlefield success in the UN's effort to achieve military victory and ensure the Republic of Korea's future success as a non-communist bulwark in the Cold War.
UNKRA's developmental agenda, in Brady's interpretation, heightened and reinforced goals that prevailed in Korea from the Kabo Reforms of the 1890s through the colonial period, as it pursued modernization and progress through the rational exploitation of resources and scientific management of agroecological systems. Yet her argument for the “remarkable continuity” between UNKRA's initiatives and previous Korean rationalization schemes runs the risk of neglecting the extent to which UNKRA's initiatives in Korea extended and built upon earlier UN-sponsored postwar reconstruction and development programs.
Immediately following World War II, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) administered assistance to countries beset by postwar dislocations and sought to lay the groundwork for economic recovery and growth by providing material resources and technical expertise to rebuild communications, agriculture, and industry. In 1946–47, reconstructing war-damaged areas in China emerged as the largest single-country component of UNRRA's global project, bringing two thousand foreign experts to China along with $17 million worth of supplies (Mitter Reference Mitter2013). UNRRA's largest and highest-profile endeavor in China, which I have examined in some detail, centered on reconstruction and redevelopment of the flooded areas created after Chinese Nationalist armies diverted the Yellow River in 1938 to impede Japan's military advance. In addition to supervising the tens of thousands of laborers who worked to divert the Yellow River back to its pre-1938 course, UNRRA offered material support to displaced people who returned to their homes in the flooded area and assisted them in bringing abandoned land under cultivation, making it possible to turn war-torn environments back into productive agricultural landscapes (Muscolino Reference Muscolino2015).
Brady does not tell us much about the backgrounds of the UNKRA personnel at the center of her story or the roots of their thinking about the intersection of warfare, development, and nature. One wonders if any of these individuals had previous experience working for UNRRA and if the schemes that they advocated during the Korean War drew inspiration from initiatives undertaken in China or the other countries in which UNRRA was active. Pursuing these questions could add a valuable dimension to the recent scholarship that has considered the UN's pivotal role in the global project of development that attempted to modernize nations all over the world by rationalizing their environments (Amrith and Sluga Reference Amrith and Sluga2008). Certainly, the belief that an “industrialized, capitalist economy based on extensive and scientific use of well-managed resources would help to establish democracy,” thereby “enhancing economic and political stability regionally and globally” had a resonance in the global Cold War that extended far beyond the activities of UN personnel in Korea.
Finally, UNKRA's promotion of coal-burning power plants, large-scale irrigation and hydroelectric infrastructure, and factories for producing synthetic nitrogenous fertilizer hint at the role that its developmental programs might have played in helping usher Korea into the Anthropocene—a recent slice of the Earth's history in which humans have transformed the environment to such an extent that it has signaled a new geological epoch (Thomas et al. Reference Thomas, Parthasarathi, Linrothe, Fan, Pomeranz and Ghosh2016).
It bears mentioning that human alteration of the Earth's forest cover, the environmental issue at the heart of this forum, is a defining feature of the Anthropocene. Half of the world's forests disappeared after 1950, primarily due to clearance for agriculture. But the bulk of this destruction fell on the world's tropical forests, while the forest area in temperate regions stabilized or even expanded (Williams Reference Williams2003). In South Korea, for its part, forest area increased from about 3 million hectares in 1955 to 6.43 million hectares in 2014 due to aggressive state-sponsored forest restoration (de Jong, Liu, and Youn 2017). Exactly how this shift took place, and how it fit into the larger-scale global pattern of deforestation, merits more in-depth research.
By directing attention to Korea's place in the transformations that have fundamentally altered humanity's relationship with the Earth, Brady, Fedman, and Lee have not only added tremendously to our understanding of East Asian environmental history, but also helped to illuminate the most pressing issue of our time.
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Having taught graduate seminars on the environmental history of East Asia and entertained the idea of writing a book on the topic, I can say that the paucity of English-language scholarship on the environmental history of Korea (along with my inability to read Korean beyond a kindergarten level) made the former a pedagogical challenge and the latter a scholarly impossibility. For those reasons alone, this outstanding set of articles on woods and warfare on the Korea peninsula by John Lee, David Fedman, and Lisa Brady could not be more welcome. The present commentary focuses on the main contributions that, in my view at least, each of the articles makes to the global environmental historiography of war and the environment, while also highlighting some questions that might be fruitfully pursued in future research. Given the primary focus of my own research, these comments have an unabashedly China-centric bias, for which I apologize in advance.
Lee insightfully notes that in Korea and the rest of Eurasia, the rise of the early-modern state went hand in hand with mounting demand for timber and an expansion of state management of forest resources. To a considerable extent, this “linkage of war, bureaucratic expansion, and forests” grew out of the Military Revolution (ca. 1450–1750), which featured larger and increasingly centralized militaries, more powerful gunpowder weapons, heavier fortifications, and more ships. Lee shows that these developments put the same pressures on forests in the Korean peninsula that they placed on woodlands elsewhere. As alarming scarcities of wood loomed in the wake of the costly and destructive Imjin War, the Chosŏn government followed a pattern similar that of early-modern European maritime powers, seeking to ensure access to timber for construction of naval vessels in the early- to mid-seventeenth century by expanding state forestry systems centered on the pines of western and southern Korea.Footnote 1
In most other Eurasian states affected by the Military Revolution, simultaneous need for timber and horses endowed forests and grasslands alike with growing importance (McNeill Reference McNeill2004, 394). In contrast, Lee suggests that while the military significance of Korea's woodlands increased over the course of the seventeenth century, the importance of grasslands for horse pasture declined. Ranches that supplied horses for Korean cavalry divisions during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries gave way to the post-Imjin Chosŏn state's “privileged landscape, the pine forest,” as the military came to emphasize warships and gunpowder weapons over cavalry. What explains this rather unexpected decline in the Chosŏn military's “equine element” during the Military Revolution? It could have had something to do with the mid-seventeenth-century rise of the Qing Empire and, following Manchu invasions of Korea in 1627 and 1636, the Chosŏn dynasty's incorporation as one of its tributaries. Qing hegemony in Northeast Asia may have minimized threats posed to Korea by horse-riding peoples to the northeast and rendered cavalry less vital to the Chosŏn state's security interests. This hypothesis is purely speculative, and I claim no real expertise on the topic, but the possibility deserves consideration. The Qing's ability to acquire horses from ranches in Manchuria and Mongolia would at least account for the diminished role of horses, noted by Lee, in Korea's tribute obligations (Bello Reference Bello2016, chap. 3).
Lee's coverage of “post-Imjin Korea” and Fedman's focus on the colonial era leave the big question of what happened to Korea's forests during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries unanswered.Footnote 2 How did Korea go from the verdant, pine-covered peninsula described by Lee to the “land of bald mountains and red earth” that, as Fedman shows, aroused the anxieties of Japanese colonial foresters in the early twentieth century? One wonders especially about the impact of swidden cultivation, a topic that Lee, Fedman, and Brady all mention in passing but do not consider in depth.
Even if, as Fedman shows, Japanese forestry officials initially strove to regenerate Korea's woodlands through scientific management, by the 1930s these conservation efforts gave way to unrestrained exploitation in the name of mobilization for total war. On a global scale, the period between the First and Second World Wars witnessed an acceleration of military industry that enabled states to mobilize greater resources and perpetrate unprecedented levels of destruction. During World War II, militarized economies pursued energy and materials to fuel conflict with sometimes reckless abandon, and the world's woodlands felt the effects. Laborers who were not drafted into military service cut down trees as rapidly as possible. Energy-intensive, fossil-fueled harvesting machinery and transport networks made it possible for combatants to loot timber from every continent (McNeill Reference McNeill2004, 399; Tucker Reference Tucker, Tucker and Russell2004). In East Asia, Japan's military expansion required extending control over its empire's forests. During the 1930s and 1940s, exploitation of timber resources at home and abroad accelerated as Japan prepared for and embarked upon the path of total war (Tsutsui Reference Tsutsui2003). From the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 until Japan's unconditional surrender in 1945, the Japanese empire exploited and sacrificed resources in what Ian J. Miller (Reference Miller2013, 95) calls an “escalating frenzy of consumption” that encompassed all economic sectors.
It does not come as much of a surprise that the Japanese colonial regime in Korea defined woodlands as “national defense resources” during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45 and targeted them for industrial-scale utilization. Where Fedman breaks genuinely new ground is by showing what this wartime exploitation of forest resources meant for the Korean people. Focusing on the “lived experiences and corporeal consequences” of state-led efforts to rationalize consumption, he reveals how wartime reforms necessitated by the colonial government's command economy for forest products impinged upon the fuel energy needs of Korean households. By the early twentieth century, Fedman notes, Korea suffered from shortages of firewood and charcoal that led rural residents to burn grass, thatch, pine needles, and other forest biomass as fuel.
An even greater fuel crisis existed in the long-deforested areas in North China's Henan Province covered in my most recent book (as well as the parts of Northwest China that are the focus of my current research), where rural residents burned brush, grass, chaff, roots, and whatever else they could get their hands on. Wartime demands only deepened preexisting fuel scarcities. In China, as in Korea and many other parts of the world, fuel gathering was primarily the work of women and children. For this reason, as I argued in my environmental history of World War II in Henan, extreme shortages of wood and other types of fuel made the experience of war especially difficult for the female members of rural households (Muscolino Reference Muscolino2015). Fedman makes a similar point about the gendered nature of energy consumption in wartime Korea when he asserts that women were “disproportionately affected” by the stringent regulations that the colonial government imposed on heating practices in Korean homes to promote fuel conservation.
Among the three articles in this forum, Fedman's discussion of the Japanese colonial regime's wartime campaign to get Koreans to practice a “low temperature lifestyle” during the frigid winter months exemplifies Rob Nixon's (Reference Nixon2013) celebrated concept of “slow violence.” During the war, as Fedman ably demonstrates, loss of access to wood fuel deprived Korean households of materials that were essential to their livelihoods. Fedman notes that fuel regulations limited Koreans’ ability to eat their staple diet of hot soups and stews, not to mention rice and other grains. The colonial rhetoric of improving Korean habits and valorizing imperial service masked what Fedman refers to as a “human desire”—but what I would characterize as a human need—to stay warm in a bitterly cold environment.
Fedman's article left me wanting to know more about how Korea's populace coped with these wartime restrictions on resource use and the deprivations that they caused. He writes of Korean women removing state-mandated stove lids and “improperly” using fuels, as well as a crime wave with “origins in the ondol,” but does not elaborate on these incidents. Fedman displays a mastery of the colonial-era documents in Japanese and Korean that make up his primary source base. Supplementing these materials with oral histories or memoir literature (genres which have proven indispensable for research on wartime China) might provide even more insight into the ecological dimensions of daily life and survival strategies under total war.
If mobilization in support of Japan's military endeavors during World War II took a heavy toll on Korea's woodlands, the Korean War caused even heavier damage. Forestry management thus represented an integral part of the reconstruction and development efforts undertaken in the early 1950s by the United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency (UNKRA) to “reorganize and rationalize” Korea's environment through a wide range of agricultural programs. Resource development, as Brady shows, mattered as much as battlefield success in the UN's effort to achieve military victory and ensure the Republic of Korea's future success as a non-communist bulwark in the Cold War.
UNKRA's developmental agenda, in Brady's interpretation, heightened and reinforced goals that prevailed in Korea from the Kabo Reforms of the 1890s through the colonial period, as it pursued modernization and progress through the rational exploitation of resources and scientific management of agroecological systems. Yet her argument for the “remarkable continuity” between UNKRA's initiatives and previous Korean rationalization schemes runs the risk of neglecting the extent to which UNKRA's initiatives in Korea extended and built upon earlier UN-sponsored postwar reconstruction and development programs.
Immediately following World War II, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) administered assistance to countries beset by postwar dislocations and sought to lay the groundwork for economic recovery and growth by providing material resources and technical expertise to rebuild communications, agriculture, and industry. In 1946–47, reconstructing war-damaged areas in China emerged as the largest single-country component of UNRRA's global project, bringing two thousand foreign experts to China along with $17 million worth of supplies (Mitter Reference Mitter2013). UNRRA's largest and highest-profile endeavor in China, which I have examined in some detail, centered on reconstruction and redevelopment of the flooded areas created after Chinese Nationalist armies diverted the Yellow River in 1938 to impede Japan's military advance. In addition to supervising the tens of thousands of laborers who worked to divert the Yellow River back to its pre-1938 course, UNRRA offered material support to displaced people who returned to their homes in the flooded area and assisted them in bringing abandoned land under cultivation, making it possible to turn war-torn environments back into productive agricultural landscapes (Muscolino Reference Muscolino2015).
Brady does not tell us much about the backgrounds of the UNKRA personnel at the center of her story or the roots of their thinking about the intersection of warfare, development, and nature. One wonders if any of these individuals had previous experience working for UNRRA and if the schemes that they advocated during the Korean War drew inspiration from initiatives undertaken in China or the other countries in which UNRRA was active. Pursuing these questions could add a valuable dimension to the recent scholarship that has considered the UN's pivotal role in the global project of development that attempted to modernize nations all over the world by rationalizing their environments (Amrith and Sluga Reference Amrith and Sluga2008). Certainly, the belief that an “industrialized, capitalist economy based on extensive and scientific use of well-managed resources would help to establish democracy,” thereby “enhancing economic and political stability regionally and globally” had a resonance in the global Cold War that extended far beyond the activities of UN personnel in Korea.
Finally, UNKRA's promotion of coal-burning power plants, large-scale irrigation and hydroelectric infrastructure, and factories for producing synthetic nitrogenous fertilizer hint at the role that its developmental programs might have played in helping usher Korea into the Anthropocene—a recent slice of the Earth's history in which humans have transformed the environment to such an extent that it has signaled a new geological epoch (Thomas et al. Reference Thomas, Parthasarathi, Linrothe, Fan, Pomeranz and Ghosh2016).
It bears mentioning that human alteration of the Earth's forest cover, the environmental issue at the heart of this forum, is a defining feature of the Anthropocene. Half of the world's forests disappeared after 1950, primarily due to clearance for agriculture. But the bulk of this destruction fell on the world's tropical forests, while the forest area in temperate regions stabilized or even expanded (Williams Reference Williams2003). In South Korea, for its part, forest area increased from about 3 million hectares in 1955 to 6.43 million hectares in 2014 due to aggressive state-sponsored forest restoration (de Jong, Liu, and Youn 2017). Exactly how this shift took place, and how it fit into the larger-scale global pattern of deforestation, merits more in-depth research.
By directing attention to Korea's place in the transformations that have fundamentally altered humanity's relationship with the Earth, Brady, Fedman, and Lee have not only added tremendously to our understanding of East Asian environmental history, but also helped to illuminate the most pressing issue of our time.