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I found that Brady’s War Upon the Land brought up some interesting concepts for us to consider both with respect to works we have read in weeks passed as well as the history of war and the environment in the United States. One concept that I enjoyed and found particularly effective for Brady was her development of nature as an actor. I thought Brady depicted this especially clearly when she presented the quotes of Captain Thaddeus Minshall stating that “nature and man are at war” (2). While we have previously discussed nature’s potential role in determining the course of American culture and society, this quote from Minshall gives nature both agency an orientation, and one directly opposed to the conquest of humans. With this in mind, I think Brady’s focus on the Civil War becomes a great point at which to start the conversation about war emerging between man and the environment.
As Brady mentions, although the wars of colonial America and the American Revolution housed conflict within North America, the Civil War was the first prolonged and large-scale series of battles to occur on American soil. This compounded with the technology that made the Civil War the first “modern” war in American history places this monograph at the beginning of an age where we see a shift in the way Americans interact within the environment – particularly as industrialization spread rampantly across the United States (4). Additionally by discussing environmental history in conjunction with military history, Brady is able to write a narrative that emphasizes the idea of nature and man as independent, but inherently linked agents. I think this is brought up effectively in Emily’s post where she juxtaposes Brady’s discussion of nature’s “power to shape human decisions” and how Union generals used their own northern ideas about improving, civilizing, and conquering nature in establishing a battle strategy against the Confederacy (emkrall).
Another piece of War Upon the Land that I appreciated was Brady’s use of the concept of “agroecosystems” or “domesticated ecosystems” (9). I think the most effective deployment of these agroecosystems was the ability to use them to highlight the differences between northern and southern farmers leading up to the Civil War. While southern lifestyle was dominated by plantation farms, most northern yeoman looked at their much smaller farmland with industrialist perspectives because the environment did not direct the culture of the North (18). I also think you see the clash between these two divergent environmental cultures in examples like the Union’s efforts to redirect the Mississippi River in the early years of the Civil War. Before finally being able to “embrace the hybrid nature of the river’s landscape,” General Grant’s Union soldiers unsuccessfully tried to turn the river twice, and as a result they suffered at the hands of diseases that plagued the mosquito-ridden region (48). It was not until northerners sought to understand the southern agroecosystem and “ally” with “their erstwhile nemesis, water” that the Union was able to use the southern environment for their own directives (41). Through this work, I think Brady was successful at establishing a framework for future historians to assess the ongoing cause and effect relationship between war and the environment as well as developing an effective frame in which to view nature as an actor in American history.