In War Upon the Land<\/i>, Lisa Brady looks at the way nature played an active role in the Civil War, both in how it drove strategy on both sides and was often a foe in its own ride to both the Union and Confederacy. She does this in tight, thorough analyses of nature\u2019s role in four different theaters of the Civil War, with each getting its own chapter. For example, as Ian <\/a>covers in his post, Brady spends a chapter detailing how a desire to control nature determined much of General William Sherman\u2019s strategy in his famous March to the Sea, as well as the challenges brought on by natural agents such as disease and weather. In another chapter, Brady looks at how Union troops in the Shenandoah Valley, led by Philip Sheridan, ravaged the landscape of what Brady calls the \u201cgranary of the confederacy.\u201d (73) The strategy originated from Ulysses S. Grant, who ordered that resources in the Shenandoah Valley such as crops, farms, and mills be destroyed in order to weaken the Confederacy. (78) Grant\u2019s strategy paid off in 1864 when he gave control of the area\u2019s forces to Philip Sheridan, a young general who agreed with Grant on the importance of destroying enemy resources in the region. Brady quotes Sheridan as saying that the resource rich territory of the Shenandoah Valley was \u201ca factor of great importance,\u201d showing that Sheridan\u2019s strategy was directly influenced by the region\u2019s natural features. (79) Finally, Brady also points out how ruthless Sheridan was in implementing his strategy, quoting him as saying that he wanted the area to remain a \u201cbarren waste\u201d for as long as the war lasted, which of course meant continued hardship for Confederate civilians in the area. (80)<\/p>\n In my Ethics and Warfare class, we have spent some time debating strategies such as Grant and Sherman\u2019s that destroy enemy resources in such a way that the the opposition\u2019s civilians must suffer. We learned that military leaders and ethicists of the Civil War era generally accepted the idea that it was ethically acceptable for civilians of an opposing state to be made to feel the hardships of war, and that therefore such strategies were permissible. I believe that looking at these strategies with a focus toward nature and ecology adds another wrinkle to the moral debates regarding those strategies. In this class, we often look at our subjects of study asking the question of \u201cis this natural\u201d or \u201cwas this a natural occurrence.\u201d Therefore, my question is would we consider strategies like enemy crop destruction natural, given that they are driven by an understanding of the importance that control over nature (in the form of agriculture) plays in military strategy. One could argue that it is therefore inevitable in military conflict that opposing forces will mar the landscape in ways to make it less useful for the enemy. However, does that sense of inevitability mean it is morally acceptable to destroy crops when doing so will clearly harm enemy non-combatants? I enjoyed the chapter on Sheridan, as well as Brady\u2019s book as a whole, because it prompts these kinds of tough questions and provides an interesting look at how nature has affected into military history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In War Upon the Land, Lisa Brady looks at the way nature played an active role in the Civil War, both in how it drove strategy on both sides and was often a foe in its own ride to both the Union and Confederacy. She does this in tight, thorough analyses of nature\u2019s role in … <\/p>\n