Care for the environment? The armed forces’ evolving understanding of the environment and their own influence on it
This article contributes to research on the armed forces’ understanding of and adaptation to environmental issues. Drawing upon new materialist scholarship (Latour 2004; Tønder 2020), it develops a ”constructive” critical analysis of gatherings of heterogeneous elements across human and non-human divisions that shape armed forces to integrate environmental considerations and reduce their environmental impact. The analysis thus contributes action-oriented knowledge to address the armed forces’ environmental impact. The article is based on Swedish, British, and American environmental policies for defense and four informant interviews with personnel from air bases in Sweden. The article shows that despite resistance to environmental regulations by armed forces, gatherings of knowledge, standards, civil society pressure, laws, pollution, rising temperatures, and more have made armed forces gradually care for the environment and understand operational demands as increasingly enabled by such care. The approach and findings have implications for researching how environmentally impacting organizations can be adjusted to reduce their environmental impact and for critical scholarship on how to address the challenges of the Anthropocene.