Ecologies of War and Fields of Conflict: Re-imagining the Environment of the Battle of Waterloo. (Publication due 2025)

This article explores the ecological impact of war on the site of conflict known as The Field of Waterloo. It considers literary and visual accounts of farmland at Waterloo immediately prior to, and after, the conflict that ended twenty-five years of war in Europe. The article analyses how the violence of the battle and immediate postwar activity, including battlefield tourism, impacted the nonhuman world, affecting soil, biodiversity and regrowth, and the capacity of the land to bear witness to the events that took place. Environmental destruction is compared with instances of natural resilience and recovery. The Battle of Waterloo took place more than two hundred years ago, but the value of reading historical conflicts to understand twenty-first century violence against the environment, namely in the [current] war in Ukraine, provides a frame for the study. The methodology used here is environmental, ecocritical, archival, and interdisciplinary where paintings and drawings are studied alongside literature. Romantic period poetry, prose, travelogues, letters, and periodicals are discussed, as are current battlefield archaeological and restoration projects.