Podcast Summary:

In this special episode of the IEAM podcast, we speak with authors from the special series “Consequences of Modern Warfare on Ecology and the Environment.” The series presents a collection of views from global experts on the broad environmental consequences raised by ecocide as a result of war. We hear from experts on a range of topics including legacy chemicals in Ukraine, the concept of warfare ecology, using remote sensing to track environmental damage when it’s too dangerous to be on the ground, and applying a natural resource damage assessment in Ukraine.

All of our authors acknowledge the importance and priority of addressing the human suffering that occurs during armed conflict. But these experts take a longer, broader view beyond the acute suffering to ask what is needed to sustain the survivors during and especially after the conflict. What will these people need as they rebuild their lives and communities? Access the series in the March 2023 issue of IEAM.

Listen on iTunes.

About the Guests

Jacob Berkowitz is a Senior Research Soil Scientist and the Team Leader for wetlands research at the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center. He also holds faculty appointments at Louisiana State University and several other universities. He is a Certified Professional Soil Scientist, a Professional Wetland Scientist, and a member of the National Technical Committee for Hydric Soils. He also serves on the Executive Board of the Society of Wetland Scientist South Central Chapter and the editorial board for the journal Wetlands. Dr. Berkowitz has conducted wetland studies in 40 states resulting in more than 100 peer-reviewed publications. His research focuses on ecological assessment and restoration, wetland biogeochemistry, and improving approaches to natural resource management through teaching and public outreach.

Eoghan Darbyshire is a senior researcher at the Conflict and Environment Observatory, a UK-based charity which works to reduce the harm to people and ecosystems from armed conflicts and military activity. Eoghan uses the ecosystem of open-source information, from earth observation data to special media reports, to robustly research, monitor, characterize and communicated the environmental dimensions of conflict. He has an academic background in air pollution research based on in-situ and remote sensing measurements in rapidly changing environments including the Amazon, the Arctic, Delhi, and the Arabian peninsula.

Lauren Koban is an Academy Professor of Environmental Science in the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering at the United States Military Academy (USMA). She earned her bachelor’s from USMA, her master’s from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her PhD in environmental science from George Mason University.

Paulo Murillo-Sandoval is currently an Assistant Professor at Universidad del Tolima in Colombia. He holds a PhD in Geography from Oregon State, where he studied the complex interplay between land cover-land use change during conflict and post-peace agreements in Colombia (Murillo-Sandoval et al., 2023). Paulo developed an integration between time series of satellite imagery to map changes in the landscape and estimate the causal effect of armed conflict on land transformation. He has been working on disentangling the role of coca farming and cattle lands in Colombia, combining Socializing the pixel and Pixelazing the social approaches. Approaches that try to merge social science and hypothesis over the observed patterns detected using satellite imagery.  Now, he wants to understand if there is evidence of new spatial patterns that indicate specific types of land grabbing due to the rapid landscape transformation during Colombian post-conflict. Mentioned in this bio: Murillo-Sandoval, P.J., Kilbride, J., Tellman, E. et al. (2023) The post-conflict expansion of coca farming and illicit cattle ranching in Colombia. Sci Rep 13, 1965. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-28918-0

Ted Tomasi is Managing Principal and leads the natural resource and environmental practice at Integral Consulting. He has more than 40 years of experience valuing natural resources and the ecological services they provide and evaluating environmental policy and natural resource management decisions.  He has particular expertise in natural resource damage assessment (NRDA),  having worked on approximately 70 NRDAs, on behalf of both natural resource trustees and responsible parties.  He has been involved in several complex multi-billion dollar cases, including leading the NRDA data collection on behalf of BP for the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, expert testimony on groundwater damages at the South Valley Superfund site in Albuquerque, evaluation of NRDs at 15 mega-mining sites related to the ASARCO bankruptcy, and claims for damages against Chevron for injuries from oil operations in Ecuador. He has published numerous papers related to economic methods applied in NRDA. He holds a BA in Environment and Public Policy and an MA in Economics from the University of Colorado, and a PhD in Natural Resource Economics from the University of Michigan. Prior to his consulting career he held tenured faculty positions at the University of Minnesota and at Michigan State University.     

Richard Wenning is an ecotoxicologist, specializing in environmental impact and risk assessment. He has guided environmental investigations and assessments and participated in recovery planning after major pollution incidents and natural disasters in several regions around the world. He lives and works in coastal Maine.

Articles Referenced in this Podcast

Access all articles from the Special Collections page for the “Consequences of Modern Warfare on Ecology and the Environment”: https://setac.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1002/(ISSN)1551-3793.mod-war-eco-cons

Credit

This podcast includes sound clips from Free SFX and Freesound.

Permission to use “Intentions” as the opening track kindly granted by The Whitest Boy Alive.