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9 Rev. BDI 1 (1973)
Environmental Welfare and Ecocide Facts, Appraisal and Proposals

handle is hein.journals/belgeint9 and id is 21 raw text is: ENVIRONMENTAL WARFARE AND ECOCIDE FACTS, APPRAISAL AND PROPOSALS by Richard A. FALK Princeton University I In Indochina during the past decade we have the first modern instance in which the environment has been selected as a < military > target appropriate for comprehensive and systematic destruction. Such an occurrence does not merely reflect the depravity of the high-technology sensibilities of the war- planners. It carries out the demonic logic of counterinsurgency warfare, especially when the insurgent threat is both formidable and set in a tropical locale. Recourse to deliberate forms of environmental warfare is part of the wider military conviction that the only way to defeat the insurgent is to deny him the cover, the food, and the life-support of the countryside. Under such conditions bombers and artillery seek to disrupt all activity, and insurgent forces find it more difficult to mass for effective attack. Such policies have led in Indochina to the destruction of vast tracts of forest land and to so-called << crop-denial programs >>. The U.S. Government has altered tactics in recent years, shifting from chemical herbicides to Rome Plows as the principal means to strip away the protective cover of the natural landscape, but the basic rationale of separating the people from their land and its life-support characteristics persists. Such policies must be coupled with the more familiar tenets of counterinsurgency doctrine which seek to dry up the sea of civilians in which the insurgent fish attempt to swim. This drying up process is translated militarily into making the countryside unfit for civilian habitation. To turn Indochina into a sea of fire and compel peasants to flee their ancestral homes was consciously embodied in a series of war policies including < free-fire zones >>, < search and destroy > operations, and the various efforts to move villagers forcibly into secure areas. Therefore, it is important to understand the extent to which environmental warfare is linked to the overall tactics of high-technology counter-insurgency warfare, and extends the indiscriminateness of warfare carried on against people

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