Unlearned Lessons? The Galician Front of World War I through the Lens of Environmental History

The article is devoted to new trends in the study of the First World War, reflected in the collective monograph by Y.A. Golubinov, Y.A. Zherdeva, A.S. Likhacheva, and O.S. Nagornaya «Mankind against the Environment: Landscapes of the Great War in Eastern Europe» (St. Petersburg, 2024). As the first and therefore groundbreaking study of the ecological dimension of World War I on the Eastern Front, or more precisely in its section in Galicia, the book offers a new, different perspective on the Great War as a space of confrontation between mankind and nature. The rivers and mountains of Galicia in the conditions of industrial warfare, forests and their ruthless exploitation, horses at the front and in the rear, the medicalization of military discourse and the sanitation of conquered territories, the use of oil sources and the scorched earth policy directly provoked by their presence, the reflection of contact with nature in Russian combatants’ verbal and non-verbal narratives, the problems of army demobilization and the demilitarization of militarized landscapes — these and other storylines in the book capture the multifaceted nature of retrospective research. Successfully combining military, environmental, social and cultural history, it does not simply substantiate the idea of the totalization of war. It introduces a new meaning, shaped by the pervasive interference of war in natural processes and, as a consequence, catastrophic, irreversible changes in the state of the environment. The article also highlights the authors’ achievements, such as articulating the differences between human and nature contacts on the Western and Eastern fronts of the Great War, as well as their contribution to the international discussion on the lower time boundary of the so-called Anthropocene.