Abstract
In Bombs Away, David Havlick unpicks the curious relationship between defence and environmental protection. Specifically, he guides us through the complex and sometimes difficult phenomenon of the ecological restoration of former military sites. Havlick is a recognized authority on this issue, and Bombs Away offers an extended and deepened analysis of the practice, readily nameable as military to wildlife conversions and problematized as hybrid places where nature and culture come together in transformative ways. These blended places, Havlick argues, give us new ways of understanding society-nature relationships, and Havlick is an expert guide to the manifestations of hybridity brought into being by the practices of converting and ecologically restoring former military sites.
Drawing on extensive fieldwork (primarily in the United States), but also including the traces of the Cold War written through the zones bordering the former Iron Curtain in continental Europe, Bombs Away takes us through the evolution of a set of practices through which former military sites have become wildlife refuges. Havlick insists that we see not just the ecological benefits for flora and fauna (ourselves included) of the increased biodiversity and enhanced protection of that diversity that these sites afford, but that we should also understand the politics of this process. It is not simply a matter of militarized spaces – for example, former munitions production and testing sites, arsenals and training areas– being turned over to nature. Rather, that conversion is a complex and difficult process around paradoxical spaces which are redolent with the idea of new environmentally beneficial possibilities while still emphatically imprinted with the idea of armed conflict and all the activities which make it possible.
Furthermore, and as Havlick shows us, ecological militarization is not just about greenwashing former military spaces, but also about the erasure of other, older, pre-existing practices. Former modes of agricultural land-use, former ways of living in a landscape, former cultural ideas which guided interpretation and experience, and the age-old practices through which people find meaning in the spaces and places they inhabit, become obscured by the greenery that moves in when military forces and uses move out. So, as Bombs Away makes very clear, to celebrate military to wildlife conversions as merely the triumph of ‘nature’ over humanity’s grubby, polluting schemes to produce and practice the execution of violence, is to miss the point that these blended spaces force us to consider the transformative effects of ecological process, scientific practices and political discourses working in hybrid form.
Bombs Away is an engaging read, not least because it includes both explicit and implicit reminders that geography is essentially a field-based practice. Havlick develops his arguments about these hybrid spaces while telling us about his own encounters with the huge variety of military-to-wildlife conversion sites that he has visited. He reminds us that fieldwork is not just an exercise in looking, but also an exercise in visualization so as to understand what we see. I finished reading Bombs Away and then went up to one of my favourite sections of Hadrian’s Wall, the Roman Empire’s northern boundary zone, which came into being in the 2nd century and is still clearly visible as earthworks and exposed (and restored) masonry in a line across the north of England. Bombs Away made me think differently about a place I thought I understood because, as Havlick shows us with the more contemporary former military sites which he guides us through, romantic notions of natural reclamation in military landscapes can provide quite insidious cover for processes that are violent, expropriating and deadly.
