We are all accustomed to environmental rhetoric of the form, "we must save the earth from..." However, we are less familiar with the origins of the idea that human actions could have effects at a planetary scale. The historian Jacob Hamblin argues that it derives largely from the activities of the US military after the Second World War. With the advent of massive bombing of civilian populations and then of nuclear weapons, it seemed likely that the next war would be a total war that directed weapons of mass destruction against enemy populations. The next question was, what new weapons of total war might be developed? One answer was weapons that damaged the environment upon which the population depends.
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