Andrew C. Isenberg, Beth Bailey, and Paul Landsberg, eds. The US Military and the Pacific Environment: The Making of An American Lake. University Press of Kansas, 2025.
In the fall of 1945, Eleanor Lattimore saw the United States’ military campaigns and imperialistic discussions of territorial acquisition as signs of a continued presence in the Pacific region after the close of World War II. The coming of the Cold War and a national security agenda would turn the Pacific Ocean into “an American lake,” she wrote, manifesting in the occupation of Japan, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and continued tensions with China.[1] The United States treated the Pacific region as within its sphere of influence throughout the twentieth century, and this trend continues today. The second Trump administration embraces American claims to the Pacific and polices the ocean like a terrestrial border instead of an international space: recently with deadly consequences. However, the decades-long US military presence in the Pacific was not inevitable, and the challenges posed by the natural environment introduce important contingencies to the historical record.
The US Military and the Pacific Environment: The Making of an American Lake is a collection of twelve essays that explore the intersection of environmental and military history. They grapple with the relationship between the US military and the nonhuman natural environment of the Pacific. This volume asks how environmental forces and the US military shaped each other through management, exploitation, resilience, and adaptation. The essays chronologically cover US military actions in the Pacific from World War II through to the Vietnam War with particular focus on Alaska and Vietnam. Editors Andrew C. Isenberg, Beth Bailey, and Paul Landsberg combine their expertise to demonstrate how an environmental lens highlights the complexities of American military involvement in the Pacific region. Pushing back against notions of complete hegemony, the editors argue the phrase “American Lake” obscures “the vast expanse and diversity—the inherent ungovernableness—of Pacific environments.”[2] By framing the US military and the Pacific environment as equal actors, these histories acknowledge the quests (and sometimes failures) of military technology to dominate nature.
The essays tackle a wide range of topics to capture the diversity of the Pacific environment, but the editors unite them around three main themes: power, knowledge, and reciprocity. The first is the exercise of the US military’s imperial power in the Pacific environment. Repeatedly throughout military campaigns and operations, the objectives of the military mission trumped environmental concerns with the ends justifying the means. The wars in the Pacific are no exception. Untethered military action results in both spectacular and slow violence; sudden acts of destruction also bring long-term health and livelihood issues for Pacific communities.[3] This is seen in Chapter 4 with Michael Hill’s “A Fire Came Down from Heaven,” which details the US military’s use of napalm during World War II against Japan. Napalm was employed first to eliminate foliage on Pacific islands used by Japanese soldiers for cover and concealment and then against civilian communities on the home islands.
While the first theme showcases the costs of unleashed power, the second theme explores how military leaders conceived of the Pacific environment through the US military’s role in producing knowledge about it. The Pacific region created a paradox for American policymakers and military leaders: its location made it remote to the continental United States, and yet it was central to the Cold War. The military needed to prepare for these unknown environments and relied on science and technology while ignoring local, Indigenous knowledge: often to the detriment of the natural world. Paul Landsberg (Chapter 8) examines the US Army’s development of air mobility units during the Vietnam War as a case study to demonstrate how the military operated within “environmental imaginaries” that were disconnected from conditions on the ground. By simplifying environmental factors across the entire Pacific region, like assuming a forest in Appalachia is essentially the same as a forest in South Vietnam, the Army created such an imaginary, which led to challenges in deploying its tactics in local environments.
The final theme is the reciprocity between the military and the environment. These two forces represent an entanglement in which both environmental and military histories become richer when examined at these points of contact. This theme is central to the work because it returns agency to the Pacific region and disrupts common narratives of unimpeded environmental destruction by US militarism. Instead of framing Pacific environments as solely the receiver of actions, all essays in this collection explain how nonhuman nature influenced – and sometimes disrupted – US military operations. Examples of this resistance include unforgiving tropical elements that created disorder for troops (Chapter 1); tree density and difficult terrain that offered tactical cover to opposing forces (Chapter 4); and the threat of environmental degradation by the US military being the motivation for local communities’ political mobilization (Chapter 6). In response, the US military either adapted its strategies or sought to overpower its obstacles. Both approaches changed landscapes that were militarized through base construction, chemical warfare, nuclear testing, and habitat destruction. Martin G. Clemis showcases this reciprocal interaction in Chapter 12 “Militarized Harvests,” where he examines how rice became a tool of war. The US chemically destroyed North Vietnamese crops while boosting rice production in South Vietnam. Clemis emphasizes how the US strategies failed because the insurgency employed local rice subsistence despite efforts of resource denial. Together, these themes highlight the struggles of Pacific communities amid a half-century of militarization and the role of the environment in shaping these processes.
The biggest strength of this volume is the diversity of perspectives found throughout the twelve essays. The editors embraced the range of environmental history with essays touching on subdisciplines such as animal history, the built environment, agriculture, and Indigenous history. This reinforces the overarching theme of reciprocity, as it showcases the multiple ways in which the environment can shape the military and vice versa. Each essay balances the multiple and often conflicting perspectives of different military actors, the environment, and members of Pacific communities. This creates a sense of unity amongst different topics and peoples and helps craft a sense of a specific Pacific sensitivity to environmental affairs.[4] Together, the diversity of approaches and perspectives underscores the contingency of the Pacific region, showcasing the military’s challenges in claiming and maintaining this “American lake”. One weakness, however, is the lack of service diversity within the chapters. This stems in part, as Pamela McElwee discusses (Chapter 11), from a terrestrial bias. Each branch of the military has its own focus and strengths, which, in turn, affect how it interacts with the environment from a tactical perspective. By largely treating the US military as a single institution, the nuances between branches become lost.
The US Military and the Pacific Environment is useful for environmental and military historians because it blends the strengths of both disciplines while exposing each to new ways of thinking. Military historians learn from a diverse sample of environmental perspectives and understand how the environment can impact military campaigns beyond the traditional roles of disease, resources, and terrain. This collection can provide environmental historians with insight into the military as an institution and how its priorities affect the social, economic, and environmental realms of Pacific communities. Overall, this collection is a strong addition to the joint study of environmental military history and is essential reading for anyone interested in US military actions in the Pacific.
[1] Eleanor Lattimore, “Pacific Ocean or American Lake?” Far Eastern Survey 14, no. 22 (1945): 313.
[2] Isenberg, Bailey, and Landsberg, The US Military and the Pacific Environment, 5.
[3] Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2013).
[4] I refer to Pacific sensitivity as a shared perspective by different peoples living within the Pacific region. Despite the vast distance and diversity of the region, there is a sense of community and mutuality, especially concerning the natural environment. For more, see: Arif Dirlik, “The Asia-Pacific Idea: Reality and Representation in the Invention of a Regional Structure,” Journal of World History 3, no. 1 (1992): 55–79; Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, “The Dead, the Living, and the Sacred: Patsy Mink, Anti-militarism, and Reimagining the Pacific World,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 18, no. 2 (2019): 304–31.
*Cover Image: Front cover of the book.
[Cover Image Description: The cover features a photograph of a mushroom cloud from a nuclear test rising over a Pacific lagoon, with palm trees and a small boat in the foreground.]
Edited by Katie Kung, reviewed by Matthew Wilson.
