This book is one of those rare works that truly should transform how historians understand the past, with genuine implications for how they, and everyone else, ought to perceive the present. Kreike argues that the rigid distinction made by environmental historians and other scholars between nature and culture has blinded them to the centrality of “environmental infrastructure” as a “target, objective, and means in war” (400). Owing to that blindness, historians have misjudged the fundamental importance of war in shaping the history of the last five centuries, and failed to discern continuities across time and space in the practice and aims of war. The same blindness afflicts present-day legal frameworks that ignore direct links between environmental and social infrastructure and thus wrongly distinguish between crimes against humanity and crimes against the environment.
Kreike defines environmental infrastructure as the “homes and stables, fields, fences, soils, crops and weeds, granaries and food...