An Environmental History of the UK Defence Estate, 1945 to the Present

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This book brings to attention the history of places that have traditionally remained under-the-radar in discussions of war and the environment, through site-based studies of five training areas in southwest England and Wales: Salisbury Plain, Lulworth, Dartmoor, Sennybridge and Castlemartin. At these sites, the big events of the twentieth century are written into landscapes that absorb their impact and reflect change in intriguing ways. Here, however, environment is more than a canvas on which historical forces play out; it has an agency of its own, as the depiction of the surprising nature and robust habitats of the training areas recognises. An Environmental History of the UK Defence Estate, 1945 to the Present critically examines the gradual greening of the MoD as it developed policies of military environmentalism. It includes the histories of the ghost-villages created by forced evictions, and charts the rise and fall of anti-military protest movements. It depicts heated confrontations, mass trespasses, and demands for public access alongside conservation work and training activities, situating the human histories of these sites within their environmental history, and taking the reader behind the barbed wire in the first study of its kind.

Reviews

Dudley weaves a narrative through the individual stories of the largest training areas and spaces in southern England and Wales to provide an informed and highly readable account of military environmental history behind the frontline. This valuable contribution will be of direct interest to environmental historians, but will also appeal to geographers, planners and historians of the military as they seek to understand how military activities shape and affect wider activities, environments and landscapes. -- Professor Rachel Woodward, Newcastle University, UK
Marianna Dudley's study uncovers the history of a landscape that has been largely neglected by historians: Britain's military sites. Taking into account broader social and environmental transformations, this book makes the surprising discovery that military activities are about conservation as well as destruction... Dudley's study is environmental history at its very best. -- Christof Mauch, Director, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich, Germany
Marianna Dudley has presented us with her seminal history of British military training areas from 1945 onwards In its essence, Dudleys interdisciplinarily conceived monograph is the finest kind of field study Dudleys comprehensive collection of data and materials pertaining to the state of the natural world in the militarized areas have put the flora and fauna of these hermetically sealed spaces into an entirely new light Dudleys wonderfully written study has lifted environmental history, patronized by historians as an awkward stepchild, to new methodically holistic and interdisciplinary heights, with particularly fruitful results. -- Michael Peters, translated from German by Katie Ritson * Militrgeschichtliche Zeitschrift *

Author Bio

Marianna Dudley is an environmental historian who has held research fellowships at the Library of Congress, Washington, US and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich, Germany. She is based at the University of Bristol, UK.