India, turkey, across europe and kansas city. He most recently finished the coeditor of the coeditor of First World War. And doctor t keller is a National Certified instructor. When you ask those questions, make sure they have a question mark at the end of them. Now, please help me welcome him. [applause] good evening. I am thrilled to be here and happy you could join me. I will talk about my current research, a Global Environmental history of the First World War. I am interested in Energy Geopolitics that link the battle lines on the home fronts with agricultural and industry in ways that fundamentally shaped the 20th century. So i will talk about the main battlefield many of us are familiar with, then hop, skip, and jump around the globe to point out areas that had an incredibly profound Environmental Impact. Now, few human endeavors have altered the Natural World as much as agriculture industry and warfare. In 1914, these came together in ways that were incredibly destructive. When someone mentions war, they think battlefields, and soldiers did change environment on every battlefront. Military planners took the environment into account, considering climate and terrain. Soldiers often talk about battling it concealments. On the western front, we see western soldiers dealing with the mud. If you have ever read all quiet on the western front, you know the battle against rats, disease. Here is a group of soldiers dealing with that mesopotamian sun. That furnacelike setting made for diseases, you name it, tuberculosis, the plague. There was something call the baghdad boyles. It sounds awful. Here again, we see english soldiers. They are in africa. Mostly confronting disease, the jungle setting, but also contending with wild animal attacks, lions and elephants mainly. There was fighting happening in the alps, frostbite, avalanches, hypothermia, isolation, and not surprising, depression, something most soldiers had to contend with. Armies altered ecosystems on every front. I found in many ways that warfare accelerated environmental changes that had begun in the previous century. Let me give you a few examples. The most pressing problem for soldiers fighting in mesopotamia was water. Given the environment, that probably seems obvious. Troops complained about an over abundance of water. The marshlands and ponds would flood during the spring snow melt, water from the highlands and asia minor with swell the rivers and lakes which would turn mesopotamia into a morass. Local civilians had traditionally piled loose dirt along the banks, but in a bad flood, those were not effective, so soldiers alter the land with trenches, protective dams, change water flows, and redirected the course of rivers. The mobilization of armies in the alps intensified industrialization, with a massive expansion of roads, railways, and a electricity, like here. Guerrilla warfare in africa expanded infrastructure with roads and railways, but nowhere was the concentration of forces so great as on the western front, where the stalemate brought ecological of people. Here are french soldiers struggling across no mans land. Scenes like this letter devastation ruined landscapes pitted and cracked with craters and trenches and quickly became a metaphor for the great wars waist. Opposing forces fired over one billion shells, and now it formed a substratum of soil, slowly making their way back to surface. It is typical for farmers to unearth these relics, many of which are still dangerous, still explosive. They will collect them, set them by the side of the road, and then Government Agencies back him up. I had a chance to meet with some over the summer who took me to the collection depot. Here is some of the stuff they recover over the course of a year. It is incredible. They first have to identify what sort of shell, chemical, gas. Is it still alive . We will come back to that. Dont look. These hard minutes haunt the land, may and murder. Occasionally bombs caught in tractor plows will explode, claiming more victims of the war. They saturate the ground in some regions and authorities have designated these lands red zones, too dangerous for cultivation, tourism, or human habitation. We can see traces of this war when we examined the aerial photographs and the way in which crops grow. The different soil is as they are recovered, left to these growing patterns you can trace out where trenches were. Here are a few inches of this, taking from the flanders field museum. That is pretty incredible. Destruction has shaped our view of the ecological impact. Beyond the front lines, major damage to nature on the battlefield was shortlived. Here is a picture of a famous path from france into belgium. It was memorialized with this painting. Today, this is what we would see. Greater environmental change occurred behind the lines. The lands that suffer the most stood pretty far from the fighting. We can think of armies as biological entities which depended on a military ecology of energy. To maintain the biological welfare of soldiers, states commandeered resources, expanding the footprint. Coal was a principal source of Industrial Energy in 1914. The fear was there would be call shortages. To offset potential shortages, they rationed it. This is a british pamphlet instructing citizens. Many places dont burn coal, burn wood instead. There is a massive expansion of timber extraction, and deforestation accelerated in an uneven fashion. Great britain cut down nearly half of its forests. The opening of the panama canal lowered the cost of imports in British Columbia and the u. S. Became leading timber exporters. This is from British Columbia. French and german timber fared well. Both countries had long institutionalized for street practices, and most of the manpower had been diverted to the army. The german sibley took trees from other countries. We see how similar it looks to these wartorn regions all kinds of propaganda encouraging extraction since manpower had been diverted, and archetypal male profession, the lumberjack, now had a gender identity switch. This is an image from the Womans Land Army in Great Britain, where women were sent out to chop down trees. The u. S. Established the forced record for Street Forest ry corps. Timber was crucial. You needed it for everything. This is accelerating the deforestation. Generals when they return from the western front to the southeastern United States or the northwest and saw these clearcut patches, it reminded him of the western front. There was a the discussion for the need for for Street Forestry policy to create Sustainable Forestry practices in the name of national security. The progression of the war accentuated the importance of it. It was the u. S. And mexico that supplied more than 80 of the worlds petroleum, most out of california, but a fair amount along the veracruz coast in mexico. That is where i will focus. To drill there, companies had to move mangroves, draining swamps along the coast. They would dig these deep pits to hold the petroleum once it was pumped out, and it disturb the soil in the way we saw with schelling on the western front. The petroleum was contained at high levels with Hydrogen Sulfide at high to matures. It was common for these blazes and explosions to happen that would devastate land, some of which have not recovered. In Great Britain, there is concern on foreign oil, u. S. Oil , and it was driving british ambitions in mesopotamia. One of the reasons we saw british troops in the deserts, in provinces of the ottoman empire, and sound familiar today, were because the prudish wanted to control the newly discovered oil fields in that region. Coal, oil, but the Crucial Energy resource was food, food scarcity was a defining feature of the war. Countries blockaded by the british and french navies, germany, austria, hungary, faced alarming energy deficits that required authoritarian regulations. It is not at all surprising that germany lost, what is shocking it sustained 1. 7 million soldiers on multiple fronts for over four years as long as it did. Germanys defeat reveals the ecological constraints of waging war. Germans imported 25 of food, dairy, meat, much of the fodder came from russia, argentina, the u. S. And high agriculture yields relied on chilean nitrates for fertilizer. With the british blockade and the poor domestic harvest is, german Agricultural Production plummeted. There is this massive attempt to mobilize food. This is a german placard. It says hold out. It is a potato with a strangely human face. Desperate to increase Agricultural Production, germans plowed church yards, school grounds, forest blades, even the soccer fields, which was telling. German soccer clubs went crazy. Oh no, not the soccer fields. Think of the children. It didnt work. Food shortages exacerbated class tensions in cities where Workers Councils complain the parks and socalled Luxury Gardens in the more affluent neighborhoods were not being used for cultivation. The response was those were two shady to grow anything. The German Government attempted to arbitrate inequalities with ration cards and price controls. Didnt work. Just created a vibrant black market. It did control every phase of Agricultural Production, but often bureaucratic clumsiness or shortsighted policies resulted in food shortages. Here is an example. State officials determined gluttonous pigs were competing with humans for grain. The government decreed the great pig massacre, claiming over 9 million victims. What they did is produce a momentary glut of pork. Sausage every night, but did nothing to alleviate the grain shortage. More detrimental is what the death of those pigs did to the ecology. Takes were not only consumers of fodder, the great producers of fertilizer. Their departure had dire longterm consequences. Regulations proved ineffective in the face of disaster. In 1915, a locust plague of biblical proportions exacerbated a famine in greater syria. All those dots are locusts. They stripped the vineyards, croplands, and orchards. Food markets were bare. We know how dire the situation was. Here is a before and after picture. A nice solid tree, and the next day. People resorted to eating roasted locusts, then burning the husks to heat their home on vince ovens. Rather than enforce food rationing, the u. S. Food administrator, herbert hoover, encouraged citizens to eat less, with the slogan, food will win the war. This is one of many propaganda posters catering towards recent immigrants. Waste nothing. It actually worked. There was a 15 reduction in domestic food consumption. The government would issue all kinds of pamphlets encouraging people to say food. One encourage them to dry food. They would send pamphlets to homeowners, here is how you can drive vegetables, recipes for turning something delightful, like dried carrots, into something delicious. The brochures conceded that some flavor might be lost, but so much remains. The constant bombardment of literature suggests most people were not being fooled by this. They were not keen on dried dishes, but did practice other forms of selfrestraint. Uber cold on patriotic americans to participate in meatless mondays or wheatless wednesdays, and it worked. All kinds of pamphlets like this, a way to save, so this is patriots fruit trees with reserves. There is wasted fruit, rotted fruit, not patriotic. A lot of this is directed towards housewives, towards producers, saving that food. Or how to prepare your meals. There was the creation of a number of agencies during this war to regulate or somehow direct these resources. One was the National War Garden commission. We see these sorts of commissions in most belligerent countries, the cultivation of home gardens anywhere you can come backyards, vacant lots, school grounds. By 1917, the cultivation of nearly 3 million gardens, these numbers may be inflated, but was still telling, nearly 25 of american households had what were popularly cold war gardens. We see schoolchildren during recess put those kids to work planting peas. You can grow food. We see them plowing up the fields. You know the war has come home. The propaganda is fantastic. Pumpkins, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, carrots charging over the top. The farmer has become a soldier. Not a rifle, but a tool. Will you have a part in victory . I point this out because even as the war massively expanded patterns of exploitation, it also set standards for conservation. Incentives for mass production were large. You had to feed these massive industrialized armies. To do that, the government guaranteed prices of over two dollars a bushel for wheat for the duration of the war. That is high. Adequate rainfall, soaring prices, created bonanza farms on the american and canadian prairies. Optimistic farmers borrowed heavily, taking out second mortgages on their farm to break sod on marginal lands to reap profits. Most of this is done across prairies, suited for gasdriven tractors, plows, and combines. Wheat farming was so lucrative that financial profits outweighed the environmental costs, but what we find is the environmental and economic consequences that distorted Agricultural Production were severe. Those fields we sell devastated on the western front, predominantly farming lands, we know they recovered productivity quickly, within a few years after the armistice those yields liquidityrewar levels. Problems for those indebted farmers. It left hundreds of thousands destitute and what we find is foreclosure rates hit record numbers, the like of which we have not seen since. Ok, i will take you somewhere else now. The situation was even worse in africa. What we find is that energy deficits and massive population displacement created famine conditions. Most of the fighting in africa took place in germany. Predominantly tanzania, kenya, down in portuguese east africa, same in mozambique. There was fighting elsewhere, but those were pretty much done by 1915. Here it lasted the entire time and was mostly guerrilla fighting. Now, since pack animals in that region fell prey by the thousands from the tc fly, it produces the parasite that causes sleeping sickness. It meant European Forces relied on Energy Bodies as energy reserves. Both sides carried out their campaigns on the backs of africans. Millions were mobilized for this. The british recruited one million porters from populations across subsaharan africa. Pursuing the germans required two or three african carriers for british soldiers. They often view their african recruits or conscripts as a tactical advantage. What we find is there was a high death rate among african recruits, much higher than for british or german soldiers. Food shortages is one explanation for this disparity. By 1917, most laborers received less than 1000 calories per day. Food shortages plagued most of the african continent during the war. Thousands of hungry soldiers outstripped local supply. Soaring prices compounded struggles to obtain limited provisions. Guerrilla warfare created negative feedback loops, troops that would take cattle, and that allowed for tsetse fly expansion, pushing the flies into the bush, lowered the incidences of sleeping sickness, with the cattle gone, then the bush expanded and it had the opposite effect. The reduction of livestock correlated to an increase in animal attacks on humans. Cows were easy prey for old, lazy lions. We find that the lions were looking for people instead. People would desert villages for safer places, allowing the bush to recover and those tsetse numbers to swell. Poor weather and blight in 1916 and 1917. To make matters worse, there were laws that restricted the sale of firearms and ammunition, meaning if were around to prevent animals from ravishing plantations with impunity. That population displacement in africa meant ecological dislocation. Here we find another image, further into the belgian congo with african porters. I will skip across the atlantic to latin america. Hardly anyone thinks about latin america during this war, but it played a pivotal role. South american neutrals, often neglected and First World War scholarship nourished and fueled european armies throughout the war, like mexico or argentina or chile. For chile, that role was in Sodium Nitrate in chile. They had a near monopoly over trade. Over soda trade. Nitrate was essential for fertilizer and a major constituent of explosives, thus served two vital needs of any belligerent country. What we found with the war, however is it accelerated the processes that would exhaust their nitrate deposits. It also revealed the systemic weaknesses in relations between labor and capital. Chiles main trading partner was germany, so it plummeted chile into severe depression. The nitrate districts were the hardest hit. There was little other than mining nitrate in the desert. Unemployed nitrate workers were sent south to the agricultural lands, but their arrival exacerbated already dire conditions. Only with economic recovery in 1915 and the continued reliance on nitrates prevented total mayhem. At the same time, scientists in germany had developed a process of nitrogen fixation which doomed chiles nitrate industry. There we go. Some nitrate mining. In this area, it was one of the 10 wealthiest countries. It reinforces changes happening on that land. Great britain, for example, fly imports supplied 40 of Meat Consumption and 80 of that is coming out of argentina. South americas relationship with Great Britain was viewed in a negative light, labeled as part of Great Britains socalled informal empire. The south american economies were entirely dependent on european whims. We switch that a little bit in view argentina in this larger Transatlantic Energy exchange. It is a different view. It gave argentina a strategic advantage. Even though Great Britain had to rely on argentina during the war, argentina decided to get coal from the u. S. Instead of Great Britain. Perspective,gy Great Britain was as dependent on argentina for food as argentina was reliant on Great Britain for coal, so these exchanges created mutually dependent networks the war directed or reinforced or at times balance. The last place is cuba today. The last place i will take you today is cuba. Even though it was a really fertile island, it grew cap group cash crops instead. War effort, the cuban government sought to employ the owners of those sugar plantations, called sugar centrals, who could use some of their land to allow their tenant farmers to plant food crops. Is, thething of it following sugar beet production during the war raised sugar prices, which drove plantation expansion often at the expense of food crops. The cuban government is issuing all these proclamations to people, tried to eat beans and bananas, not so much wheat, but sugarcane plantations meant well. Meant wealth. For many cubans, they also signified foreign control over sugar production. So we see here, one of the big sugar production was hersheys. Of the 130 sugar plantations, owned well over half of those. Impoverished peasants in 1917 began to express their resentments of the rich by attacking these large sugar centrals. In response, the United States deployed the marines to calm the cuban countryside. It was on the face of it to say these cuban peasants, maybe its german infiltrators and spies. But really they were sent there to protect sugar plantations in what is now known as the sugar intervention. All this looking at different places, latin america, the north american plains, africa, made me think all these close comparisons, what was happening on the western front. The question is, what exactly then is a war landscape . I will introduce you to kurt laban. He was a german psychologist, an artillery officer during the war. While he was recuperating from combat, he wrote this pamphlet called war landscapes. He talked about the perception of battlefield. After talking with a number of soldiers he came to the conclusion that there are war landscapes and peace landscapes. Peace landscapes are boundless. War landscapes, on the other hand, were directed, contained, ordered by violence and destruction. Of from what we know today shellshocked, now known as ptsd, the psychological analysis makes sense. Environmental perspective, we find the border between a war landscape and peace landscapes overlaps or vanishes entirely. Here is our war landscape a german soldier looking out over the western front. How different is it from a young boy looking out over these eroded lands on the american prairies . How different is it from these lumberjacks you are seeing. Soldiersind french under fire on the western front. Mexican oil workers there along the veracruz coast. Thating these landscapes, cross between a war landscape and peace landscape created unease and some less obvious ways. The war simultaneously opened and closed frontiers. Some of these efforts were related to empire building agendas. Others were part of capitalistic schemes. All of them extended state or corporate control over the Natural World in some way. On dominionsdent for energy, europe met its increasing war demands only through the settler societies, only through these colonial landscapes. Societies used Imperial Energy needs to further extend systems of colonial control over frontierland and indigenous populations. What the war is doing is reinforcing state building projects that began in the 19 centuries their dispossession, subjugation and segregation. Flows,mperial energy intensified by the war, brought their own violence that turned suppose it piece lands, places far from the front lines, into war lands. The legacy of that violence continued long after the fighting ended. The First World War is still contemporary. We live with the environmental consequences of the conflict even now. Thank you all very much. [applause] i ended with plenty of time to take questions that you might have. As a reminder, there are microphones on either side of the stage. If you are unable, i can come to you. It is a lot to take in. I was interested in the fact that a lot of the trench warfare was in an area in france that was heavily vineyards, the champagne area, and i was wondering how quickly, first of all, how much was destroyed during the battles, and didnt how quickly could that recover. Wind vineyards depend on old vines that have been around for decades to actually make a good mature wine. I was wondering if that was a big industry for france. Even before the fighting ended, the french government came up with plans for recuperation of those lands. There were deliberate efforts to preserve some of those old vines as much as they could, so we find that happening. There was a dip in that production, but it ended up being able to recover. By the late 1920s, most of those vineyards are back up and running. There are complaints by veterans organizations, former soldiers, who go back and visit their old places of combat, and they were inaccessible because they had grown up so much. There were these wonderful letters saying we need to trim to get to where the trenches used to be. There was a dip that takes place, but there was a fairly quick recovery to it. Thank you. I have a question for you. How did you come to this topic . As you opened your conversation you said there are , misconceptions about the Environmental Impact beyond the western front. Expand upon that. My first book was about mountaineering in the alps. One chapter was about the First World War in the alps, of which i had known very little. It was very stark in how the soldiers were seeing the war. The alps, imagine this pristine, pure place where you can find nature intact, then the war comes there and destroys this perceived pristine landscape. I thought this is really interesting. I should look to see what is happening elsewhere. That is when i saw that there is not that much written. A little on the russian front, but not much elsewhere. That is what led me to it. In one of these moments you sometimes get as a researcher, i had no idea how i would do this project, and i first did research in the archives which still have intact military records from the war. I met this wonderful archivist and i wasnt describing it to him. He said it was so exciting. He said, how are you going to do this . The environment could be anything. Where do you draw the line . Are you looking at sheep or that will further the forms, where do you draw the lines . I dont know. And then as we talked about it, we decided to narrow it down a little bit, and that is when looking at agricultural and energy, i thought this will be one way to approach it. That is how i came to it. With all of this new stuff happening in areas that are being torn up, where their different crops and things in that area that were normal for that area . There are ecological changes taking place, so the western front, and soldiers are noting this. There noting that beautiful pasture land and forest is now torn up and being taken over. What is interesting is that if you were a french agricultural economist, you saw what was happening there as a godsend. It was destroying these old property lines, obliterating ownership records, and finally france can get out of its medieval farming and into the modern age, so now that was the hope, but in fact, there was this massive push, of course there was, on the part of local towns, state governments, to return things as fast as they could to how they were before the war, which is another story about french agriculture. What was planted before the war will be planted after the war. Thanks. Hi have a couple of questions that are related. The first is you talked about the british blockade of germany and the problems that caused. On the flipside, you had german submarine warfare in the atlantic. You talked about these different resource sites. I am curious if you researched articulated perception of what that cost was in merchant marine destructions and what losses came of those resources, say food. So that is one question. The other question is you mentioned in the western front, even today, read sounds where are notone, where they cultivated or used for productive purposes. I curious about the scale of those. I will take the red zone first. They are located with 10 miles or so within that strip of the former western front. There has been a great deal of work to clear those lands. I would not call him extensive, but they are noticeable. The irony is, what makes a great nature reserve . You fence off the territory and keep people out of it prevent agriculture, habitation, so these weapons are now protecting it from human intervention. There are these nature reserves in spots that are highly developed places with massive farming and aquacultural inputs, so that is the interesting thing about red zones. They are there and will be there in our lifetime for sure. With the merchant marines, that was great. There were these plans to say if we dont get enough delete, then then maybe wet, need to turn to the seas to increase fishing stock, but most ships had been conscripted, so if you were a merchant marine, you were usually operating at a loss, which allowed some fish stocks to recover. When those navies had taken their ships, they then retrofitted him, improved him, so when the merchant marines got back, they were much better high powered to do their fishing, so prices skyrocketed afterwards we find, so that is an interesting point is well. Thank you. You mentioned just briefly real estate, i suppose no taxes were paid on that during the war, and after the war, they got all this land they cant do anything with. How did they restore the title to that . Was there a Government Program to help restore the lands . There were a couple of Government Programs to help do that. Part was clearing ordinance, part subsidizing farmers to recover property and purchase product, and in part it was a host of researchers, both on the local level to investigate all property claims, some by wordofmouth in a matter of honor these were the property lines we have had sort of thing. It became the touchy subject. There were a number of lawsuits about whos land is whose and where those property lines are, especially with some of those economists in the mix who thought we should get rid of the lines entirely and consolidate these family farms. That is what we find happening with real estate. It was touch and go, but a lot of it is taking place on the local people, deliberate efforts supported by federal state. We will take our next question from the right. In terms of energy flow, have you seen differences or similarities between world war i and world war ii . Ok. Yep. World war ii is a whole different level of magnitude. Thats why i not going there. I gave a talk one set of british were college and they were like, you could do a whole series. Im like, no, no, massive orders of magnitude greater. The First World War, for some states, it is the first time they are inserting themselves in the market place to control prices, create hybrid organizations that are part government, part private, and they fumbled, bumbled, and stumbled their way through it to get it to work. The First World War was this learning curve for a lot of them. But what it did was it provided him information and knowledge so when the Second World War came around, that ability to extract an exploit was done with greater precision and effort. It is a whole different ballgame. The First World War in some ways was that first performance where you get all your jitters out, then the Second World War, they kind of figured it out. And our last question. I was thinking about the aerial photos with the outlines of the trenches. They appear more green than the rest of the area, assuming the nitrates from explosives, what else would cause those areas to be green . What it is also doing is those explosives, here is the difference between the First World War and the Second World War, world war i explosives exploded on impact, world war ii exploded order. Impact, goes down into the earth, when they explode before, it explodes and takes out the troops you want to take out. These explosives in the first will war are penetrating bedrock, getting into stratum that had not been touched, so upsetting bedrock and changing water levels. Even though the soil is somewhat reconstituted, it has changed bedrock levels into water levels such are able to get to that water source easier, even though they are next to each other. It makes enough of the differences that we can visually see it. Thats largely what it is. Thank you. Thank you everyone for your questions and joining us here this evening. On behalf of the National World war i Museum Memorial we hope , you come back soon and another thank you. Thank you all very much. [applause] 19 60 president ial debates between john f. Kennedy and Richard Nixon will be the focus of a live program next sunday at 9 a. M. Eastern. Our guest is the president ial studies director at the miller center. We will talk about how the debates came to be. The issues, the candidates, and how the debates created public expectations for later president ial campaigns. Ethnic sunday, here on American History tv on cspan3, and cspans washington journal. Every saturday on American History tv, go inside a Different College classroom and hear about topics ranging from the american revolution, civil rights, and u. S. President s to 9 11. Thanks for your patience and logging into class. Campusesost college closed, watch professors transfer teaching to a virtual setting to engage with students. Gorbachev did most of the work to change the soviet union, but reagan met him halfway. Reagan encouraged him, reagan supported him. Freedom of the press, i should mention, madison called it freedom of the use of the press and it is freedom to print things and publish things, not the freedom for what we now refer to institutionally as the press. Onlectures in history cspan3, every saturday at 8 p. M. Its also available as a podcast. Find it where you listen to podcasts. This is American History tv weekend,3, where each we feature 48 hours of programs focused on our nations past. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] the 1918 flu pandemic altered American Life in ways that are familiar to those living through the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. Conflicting information left people wary and fearful. College classes were held outside, sports were canceled, asks or challenged as unamerican, and fines imposed on those who refuse to wear them. Next, Christopher Mcknight countryrecounts how the experienced the events of a century ago and the lessons we might learn. He directs the Oregon University center for humanities. Cracks since the pandemic has begun, for our purposes, since we shut down in march, they thing that has been driving our analysis here as historians is what is the historical precedent . Obviously, 1918 is the one that comes to mind and we have nobody better to tell us about 1918 th m