Scarred Lands & Wounded Lives: The Environmental Footprint of War

The euphemism “collateral damage” takes on new meaning in Scarred Lands & Wounded Lives, a powerful documentary on the ecological consequences of warfare from filmmakers Alice and Lincoln Day, which traces how military forces have intentionally destroyed ecosystems as a means to win battles. Whether the campaigns caused deforestation in countries fighting a civil war or the wreckage of the desert when Saddam Hussein's troops set fire to the Kuwaiti oil fields in 1991, the catastrophic violence enacted upon the flora and fauna during wartime has been incalculable. Not only have military planners seldom taken the preservation of ecosystems into consideration when planning attacks, they have often adopted precisely the opposite approach: removing a foe's tree cover and destroying their food and water supplies are seen as paths to victory. The filmmakers point a finger at the U.S. campaign in the Vietnam War as being the most cruelly deliberate act of destruction, spraying toxic deforestation chemicals across vast stretches of enemy territories. (U.S. fighter jets dropped an estimated 19 million tons of herbicide, poisoning Vietnamese land and water supplies; an even greater tragedy unfolded later when a wave of horribly deformed babies were born to those in the chemically-ravaged regions.) Combining expert interviews with archival footage, Scarred Lands & Wounded Lives also surveys the environmental damage of more recent conflicts in Bosnia, Sudan, and Iraq. Although it features very disturbing images of slain animals and severely injured people, this thought-provoking film is highly recommended. [Note: Scarred Lands & Wounded Lives is also being sold for $19.95 to individuals at www.scarredlandsfilm.org.] Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)