Background

A Blind Spot in Environmental Sociology

Sociologists have examined violence in many different forms across macro and micro levels of analysis. Yet in its early years, environmental sociology all but ignored conflict and war. A growing line of research has begun to fill this gap over the last quarter-century — but much important work remains. This chapter considers how prominent environmental sociology theories investigate environmental degradation and inequality in relation to warmaking and large-scale organized violence.

As Gould observed, "militarization is the single most ecologically destructive human endeavor." Ecosystems are destroyed by militarization "numerous times and at numerous levels including extraction, production, distribution, testing, transportation, disposal, implementation, and reconstruction." Despite this, the scholarly literature has heavily emphasized economic institutions and processes as contributors to environmental harm while largely ignoring the military.

Nuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll, 1946
Nuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll, 1946. The U.S. nuclear arsenal grew from roughly one thousand warheads in 1953 to approximately eighteen thousand by 1960. Each new generation consumed more energy, produced more radioactive waste, and had a greater environmental impact. Plutonium — a byproduct of weapons production — has a half-life of 500,000 years. Source: U.S. Navy / Public Domain

Historical Context

The Industrialization of War and Environmental Destruction

The links between environmental degradation and warmaking grew precipitously as nation-states became the dominant political and military organization in the modern world, and with the fusion of industrialism and militarism. This fusion produced qualitatively new forms of ecological harm:

  • Mass troop mobilization required industrial provisioning and energy-intensive transportation at a scale that dwarfed civilian activities
  • Deliberate ecocide — destroying the natural environment to destroy an enemy's morale or deprive them of natural resources — became a calculated military strategy, from chemical weapons in WWI to herbicides in Vietnam
  • Nuclear weapons development created radioactive and toxic contamination that will persist for geological timescales — plutonium's half-life exceeds 500,000 years
  • Risk-transfer militarism — the shift to high-tech, long-distance warfare — directs casualties and environmental harms away from the homeland onto peripheral nations and populations
U.S. military aircraft spraying Agent Orange over Vietnam
U.S. military aircraft spraying Agent Orange over Vietnam. The deliberate use of herbicides as a weapon of war — destroying forest cover to deprive enemy forces of concealment — caused catastrophic ecological damage across Southeast Asia and exposed millions to toxic contamination. Source: U.S. Air Force / Public Domain
Aerial view of the Hanford nuclear site, Washington State
Hanford nuclear site, Washington State. The most contaminated nuclear site in the U.S. — a product of Cold War weapons production. National sacrifice zones like Hanford are disproportionately located on or adjacent to Indigenous lands, producing cascading environmental injustices. Source: U.S. DOE / Public Domain

The U.S. Case: Ecological Imperialism

The United States waged formal and informal wars against Indigenous peoples across North America, deliberately destroying "the flora and fauna that American Indians used for food and other purposes." The near-extinction of the American bison in the late nineteenth century — driven by industrialization, settler expansion, and deliberate extermination — is one vivid example. The United States did not simply conquer and settle the continent: it pursued a policy of ecological imperialism from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Theory

The Treadmill of Destruction

Building on the treadmill of production, the treadmill of destruction theory argues that environmental destruction can be generated by the inertial growth dynamics of national militaries. This military-driven growth dynamic is not a derivative of capitalism — it has a qualitatively distinct institutional logic rooted in geopolitical competition and arms races.

Driving Force

Geopolitical Competition & Arms Races

Technical sophistication in weaponry provides decisive military advantage. This advantage compels continuous investment in weapons technology, which has steadily increased in environmental lethality. States pursuing geopolitical goals are not subject to the profit motive — they will "spare no expense, human, more-than-human, or otherwise," to maintain military parity.

Key Finding

Capital Intensity & Environmental Inequality

In an analysis of 126 nations from 2000–2010, military expenditures per soldier significantly drove carbon emissions in both developed and lesser developed countries — positive in developed nations, negative in lesser developed ones. This bifurcated pattern reflects ecologically unequal exchange: powerful nations externalize environmental costs to the global periphery.

The treadmill of destruction theory's most important contribution is identifying the unique institutional logic of military-driven environmental harm. Whereas corporations might damage the environment as a side effect of profit-seeking, military competition can and does set in motion the deliberate degradation of the environment to achieve strategic objectives. The nuclear weapons complex is the clearest illustration: no profit motive drives the production of warheads; the driving force is geopolitical existential competition.

"The nuclear weapons-systems possessed by modern militaries are technologically sophisticated, resource-intensive, and generate unprecedented forms and volumes of waste."

Theoretical Debate

Environmental Security vs. Political Ecology

Since the end of the Cold War, the study of violence and the environment has developed around a productive and contentious debate between two perspectives. The environmental security tradition — most influentially associated with Homer-Dixon and Kaplan — argues that resource scarcity and population growth are the central forces generating conflict. Political ecologists challenged this neo-Malthusian framing, pointing instead to poverty, structural inequality, and the diverse forms of state-sanctioned violence that damage environments in pursuit of geopolitical or economic objectives.

The chapter's central lesson from this debate: the focus on resource-driven conflict obscures attention from the myriad forms of state-sanctioned violence in developed societies that degrade the environment and pose threats to global ecological security. Violence against environmental justice activists has reached unprecedented levels in the twenty-first century — spanning the developed and underdeveloped world — even as military and intelligence agencies have embraced environmental security rhetoric.

Deforestation in Colombia linked to conflict and coca eradication. By Matt Zimmerman - Slash and burn agriculture in the Amazon, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33978259
Deforestation in Colombia linked to armed conflict. The confluence of treadmills of production and destruction — narcotraffickers, paramilitaries, state forces, and coca eradication programs — has generated severe human and environmental health consequences in some of the most ecologically sensitive areas of the world. Source: Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Contemporary Dynamics

Nuclear Weapons, Asymmetric War & the Anthropocene

Nuclear Weapons as a Treadmill Case Study

Nuclear weapons punctuate the treadmill of destruction metaphor. Nuclear arsenals are planned decades in advance of their production and amassed through extensive cycles of research, development, and testing. Profit has never been a primary incentive. The trajectory of nuclear warmaking is not subject to the will of corporate managers or shareholders — it is driven by geopolitical competition and existential security calculations that have their own expansionary inertia.

Research consistently shows that nuclear weapons possession is powerfully associated with higher carbon emissions — and that civilian nuclear energy fails to provide enough efficiency to offset other sources of carbon emissions. The current costs of American nuclear warmaking have dramatically expanded since the Cold War, leading to what the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability calls the "Trillion Dollar Trainwreck."

Risk-Transfer Militarism

Modern warmaking is characterized by resource-intensive, high-tech weapons that direct the attendant risks of war — casualties and environmental and human health harms — away from the homeland and its troops toward the periphery. This "asymmetric war" and "risk-transfer militarism" concentrates the benefits of military power among dominant nations while externalizing the environmental costs onto lesser-developed countries and internal peripheries — including Native American reservations within the United States.

Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, Colorado
Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, Colorado. Site of plutonium pit production for U.S. nuclear warheads. The facility produced contamination that persists in surrounding soil and groundwater. Rocky Flats is one of many "national sacrifice zones" disproportionately located near communities with limited political power. Source: U.S. DOE / Public Domain

The Path Forward

Ontological Asymmetry, the Meso-Scale & Path Dependency

The chapter proposes a productive theoretical path forward for environmental sociology's engagement with war: a focus on ontological asymmetry and the meso-scale of analysis. This approach acknowledges that reality is stratified, has emergent causal tendencies, and that these tendencies are multidimensional — operating at multiple scales simultaneously.

War and warmaking are not nominal events that occur at a fixed point in time and space. They are processes that can develop their own expansionary logic — as the treadmill of destruction argues. A focus on ontological asymmetry reveals the interplay of history, social structure, and the natural world that drives the environmental impacts of warmaking across different historical periods and geopolitical contexts.

The path dependency method offers the most promising analytical framework. A critical juncture — the time and place in which a powerful organization enacts a schema that amasses power through the appropriation of nature — can initiate reactive sequences that "lock in" to a causal pattern of accelerating environmental degradation. Once a treadmill achieves structural persistence, alternative developmental paths become increasingly difficult to access. Understanding when and how treadmills emerge, intensify, and might be dissolved is one of the central theoretical tasks that lies ahead.