Since the Spanish-American War, the United States has had a significant military presence in the Pacific World. The environmental consequences of the U.S. military presence in the Pacific, including the outbreak of disease in the Philippines, the dropping of nuclear bombs on two cities in Japan, the testing of even more powerful nuclear weapons in South Pacific islands during the Cold War, and the use of chemical defoliants in Vietnam, have been profound. Those consequences transcended the Pacific World: in the U.S., East Asia, Australasia, and Europe, the use of nuclear weapons and chemical defoliants sparked concerns about the environment. By the time of the Vietnam War, emerging concerns about the global environment resonated with critiques of the war, encouraging some to perceive the war in Vietnam as more destructive to the environment than previous wars, and others to infuse environmentalism with the urgency of the global anti-war movement.

Intersections between the Pacific wars and the environment provide a tremendous opportunity to understand both twentieth-century environmental history and the significance of the long U.S. military presence in the Pacific World. Yet, there has not been a major academic conference on the environment and war in the twentieth-century Pacific World. Current scholarship provides a valuable starting point for new ways to address the environmental context and ramifications of the Pacific wars in a way that transcends any single conflict. We will build off these early studies to analyze the intersection between environmental history and the Pacific wars, with a hope to move beyond environmental consequences, in order to write a new transnational history that draws on environmental history, military history, and scholarship in war and society. By bringing together scholars of environmental history, military history, and the Pacific World we hope to create a lively conversation about the significance of the environment and the Pacific wars and help instill an environmental sensibility to a series of conflicts usually studied through a military framework.

This symposium is convened by Beth Bailey, Drew Isenberg, and Paul Landsberg, and co-sponsored by the University of Kansas Center for Military, War, and Society Studies and Center for American History.