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Subject After the 2014 and 2016 editions of our summer school, which focused respectively on initiations in contemporary wartime experiences (http://1418.hypotheses.org/547) and on the "Face of Battle" and battlefields http://1418.hypotheses.org/1059), we have chosen a new topic for 2018: the environmental history of the First World War.
We understand the environmental history of the Great War in a broad sense. We will of course reflect on the environmental consequences of the war: the destruction of cities, villages, soils, various forms of pollution and their counterparts: reconstruction and reconstitution (at the level of public policies but also at the level of territories), de-mining of battlefields, exhumation and re-inhumation of the dead, policies for maintaining their memory and handling war ruins (and in particular battlefields). This obviously implies taking into account the long duration of the Great War, since the environmental footprint of the Great War is often present to this day. Moreover, the environmental consequences of the war are not confined to the front lines. The economic exploitation of the hinterlands, even if they are far away from the epicentres of warfare, has their rightful place in this context, as it results in sometimes profound and long-lasting changes to ecosystems. For example, what does the totalization process mean in terms of exploitation of oil, mineral resources, forestry, agriculture, etc.? Thus the stigmata of the famine of 1915-1916 in Mount Lebanon are visible until today in the landscapes. The history of cities will also be an important focus, since the war also had a great influence on urban development, as it did in Thessaloniki, for example, due to the massive presence of Allied troops, but also to a great fire in 1917. However, this conception of environmental history based on the consequences of war does not in itself sum up the relationship between individuals and their environment. The environmental conditions and constraints that the environment imposes on warfare are at the heart of many current research projects that examine the relationship of individuals and groups to the space around them and their larger environment. This means that varied scales of analysis must be used. The relationship between combatants and their combat environment, for example, can then be evoked on the basis of both meteorological and geographical criteria. Newspapers and correspondences are full of references to geographical features, to places lived in, to the weather. The drawings and photographs represent "war landscapes" in large numbers.
This will make it possible to address in return not only the effects of war on various environments, but also the effects of the environment on warfare and those that take part in it on the different theatres of operations (mountains, seas, hot and cold deserts...). This may then also allow us to investigate a new global history of the world war in terms of latitudes, longitudes, altitudes, in short to consider the possibility of a geohistory of the Great War that is as concerned with the environmental conditions as with the environmental consequences. |
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