Commentary by Roger Martin Martin writes about research at KU for Kansas media and in a Web zine. Contact Martin at rmartin@kucr.ukans.edu or (785) 864-7239. Martin also can be heard on KANU 91.5 FM public radio Archives More articles by Roger Martin Subscribe now to receive KU News by email

War's damaging effects range from the subtle to the dramatic

by Roger Martin

War has a look. It is the bloody and anonymous bodies. It is the billowy mushroom cloud, the wall of flame rising from a forest that's been napalmed, the sky of Kuwait blackened by oil fires.

The environmental damage that results from war ranges far beyond the made-for-TV moments, says William Tsutsui, a University of Kansas associate professor of history.

In a forthcoming essay in the journal Environmental History, Tsutsui meticulously documents what World War II did to Japan's environment.

The destruction extended well beyond the bombing of 66 cities from mid-1944 to the end, during which many human lives and a quarter of the housing stock was lost.

The depletion of the Japanese environment began years before, Tsutsui says, when the Japanese, building a war chest, became aggressive exporters.

Deep-sea fishing for tuna and crab increased rapidly, with almost all of the harvest sold to the United States. Japan's portion of the world's whale catch increased twelvefold. Factories hummed, choking the air of major cities.

During the war, about 15 percent of all Japanese forest disappeared, Tsutsui says. The bombings wiped out 178 square miles of cityscape.

By comparison, in 1945 alone, 50 square miles of forest were cut down every week.

Pines fell in droves for a research project that Tsutsui's own father took part in -- an effort to distill fuel from the resinous roots.

To make one gallon of the fuel required 2.5 man-days of labor and tons of pine roots. Eventually, 70,000 barrels of crude per month were produced this way.

But the refining process was imperfect, and very little ever made it into a gas tank.

Nevertheless, the logging created erosion and silting and flood. Domestic and wild animals alike became food. The only farm animal to flourish was the goat. Migratory songbirds disappeared at a rate of 7.5 million a year. Pets vanished. Most of the animals in Tokyo's main zoo were killed.

Alternate fuels appeared. A battleship on a suicide run to Okinawa in 1945 was fueled by edible refined soybean oil. Sweet potatoes were turned into airplane fuel.

The chemical insecticide industry got a boost. Before the war, pyrethrum was a mainstay. It was made from dried chrysanthemum flowers, 90 percent of them grown in Japan.

When pyrethrum disappeared around the world, U.S. chemists perfected a compound called DDT.

And yet the environmental disaster wasn't unmitigated, Tsutsui says. For example, fish thrived, as every seaworthy vessel was deployed for the war.

And recovery of bombed areas came swiftly. Tsutsui writes, "A survey of fauna at the Hiroshima hypocenter in October 1947 found that animal and insect populations had fully recovered."

Then, in 1948 and 1949, with urban renewal, the vegetation that flourished immediately after the war was destroyed.

"Nature, happily, has extraordinary powers of regeneration," Tsutsui writes, "and humankind, regrettably, has an uncanny ability to shatter delicate ecological systems even in times of peace."

As our thoughts turn again to war, everyone will reckon the human costs -- the lives lost, the families torn apart. Some will recall the made-for-TV moments of environmental destruction.

But it is harder to keep in mind subtler distortions of the natural order that occur in the dark beyond the edges of our television screens.