ABSTRACT
Scholars have offered at least four distinct but interrelated conceptual frameworks for examining the relationship between militaries and the natural world. Environmental historians, including those who study war and militaries, press us to see humans as part of—rather than apart from—the natural world. Works from environmental historians illustrate how an environmental lens can deepen or revise our understanding of battle, war, nation building, and the rise and fall of states and empires. Megan Kate Nelson, for example, has shown how the desert environment of the American Southwest led to poor Union command decisions that military historians had previously attributed to cowardice. Historians of Austria and Germany during the Great War, meanwhile, have pointed to the Alps and the Eastern Front as landscapes that fundamentally influenced the ways soldiers interpreted their experience and the ways these postwar societies understood their service.
