Description
The idea that ‘ecocide’ (a term first coined in the 1970s to describe the massive destruction of the environment during the Vietnam war) is a war crime is rightfully gaining traction. However, I would like to argue that it would be even more important (intellectually, legally, politically) to qualify the destruction of landscape during war. I here understand “landscape” in its substantive meaning: a physical environment imbued with social, political and cultural meaning. As such, the landscape, co-constituted by people, polity and environment, may be described as the very possibility of inhabitability of the Earth.
The deliberate destruction of the landscape during war may probably be dated to the emergence of “total war” in the early 20th century. Clearly, making the land un-inhabitable has now become relatively commonplace in warfare: not simply killing civilians and destroying infrastructure, but, more broadly, ensuring that the land becomes uninhabitable and unlivable for decades to come, or becomes alien to its population through the deliberate creation of solastalgia. As a matter of fact, warfare seems to be increasingly about destroying the possibility of a meaningful relationship between the human being and the Earth.
I would like to argue 1/ that the landscape has become one of the central objects of warfare and 2/ that war against the landscape should be made a war crime.
