Sand, Snow, and Stardust:
How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments
By Gretchen Heefner (University of Chicago Press)
Witnessing humans people are operating at the convergence point of wisdom and audacity is fun, and this book celebrates that spirit. This is a book about the U.S. military dealing with extreme environments, specifically the desert, the arctic, and the moon: the eponymous sand, snow, and stardust. This is not only alliteration, but is the major challenge in each environment. The result is the U.S. military’s understanding of its need for ‘environmental intelligence’, a combined idea mixing ecology, logistics, and experience as relates to specific climates
This is a five star read for facts with a three-star organization. It has more of a point rather than a thesis, which is the untold nature of this story. The idea that the Space Race had a military component to it (as opposed to being a pursuit only of national pride or scientific accomplishment) is well-established, but this book explains how space is more of the end of a story, starting in World War II during the North African campaign. This was when strategists realized that the future of war was global (and extra-global) and would require learning how to wage war in new climates.
The clever bit of the book’s arrangement is that the participants understood the continuity of their research. The text balances character study of some of the more interesting individuals involved, directly or indirectly, with the narrative of what happened in each place, and the specific scientific research developed or used. It does not work; it roughs up the chronology in a way that leads to looking back and forth to keep it mentally organized. Each part in itself is good.
The arctic section is the standout one. Paradoxically, it represents the greatest success and the greatest failure of the three. What was built in the arctic is still around, under a different name1 and under the umbrella of the Space Force. However, the ice won. What remains is a fragment of the original plan, and the plan did not reach fruition, or did so in a limited fashion, much greater than occurred with either desert or Moon.
The arctic section is also where the saltiness of the text is allowed to reign. The book is not outright critical of the U.S. military but the author loves to spike the camera. Trash, and trashing, comes up frequently. Despite the narrative here being the development of environmental intelligence that the U.S. needed a deeper and more complex understanding of ecology in order to accomplish its goals, the underlying attitude of all of these environments being fundamentally worthless and destroyable is on display. While the astronauts wantonly blowing up the landscape is choice, the arctic is the fullest expression of this attitude. Outside of of the leftover trash including nuclear reactor runoff and a lost yet fully armed and operational nuclear warhead, in the arctic we have a series of direct displacements for the local Inuhuit.
You know, the people already living there, when the U.S. was throwing blood and treasure into solving the mystery of how to live there.
You know, the people who still live near there, despite the U.S. failing in managing to live there.
It is not imperialism all the way down, though. The U.S. was flexible about acknowledging or ignoring boundaries on the basis of what served its best interests.
The arctic section is also the one most unfortunately relevant to today’s politics, considering it is all in Greenland. Maybe, by the time you read this, the U.S. has invaded the autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, and NATO Article 5 invoked. But, at this moment, most people are going “Greenland? Why Greenland? Is it just the Mercator projection?” This book provides an extensive exploration of why Greenland, with an eye towards history and free of jingoism. Oh, and why it went badly last time, for reasons that have not materially changed, the global war against permafrost not withstanding.
The other reason why I think this book is cruising to end up on the naughty list for Certain Pundits is it gives lie to the rhetoric coming out of the Department of Defense. The United States Military was the greatest military that the world has ever known. It was not that way because of its warrior ethic. It was that way because at an underground ice fortress at a place named for the edge of forever where mere supply represented a logistical triumph, there was a place that sold minis.
Early on, the author invokes the “bridge to Mars” which sounds like the ultimate in congressional pork. And it is risible the first time you see the images. But it has stuck with me. The bridge to Mars is an infographic detailing the methodology for the U.S. exploration of Mars. Say what you will about the virtues of private space exploration, this, as is several of the other moments in this book, remains inspiring. Any modern version would be afraid to be so boring, but this does successfully represent the sort of paradox of environmental intelligence. It is understand the need to understand, but also knowing when not to care. That is cool. That is American execptionalism, not all this LARPing for the rubes
Anyway, good book; sometimes hard to follow; often amusing, and consistently informative.
My thanks to the author, Gretchen Heefner, for writing the book, and to the publisher, University of Chicago Press, for making the ARC available to me.
- There deserves to be a bigger aside on the name. The original one used was Thule, as in Thule, the quasi-mythical northern Atlantic island that probably was a place visited by Ancient Greek writers (but it is not clear as to which one), but also Thule, the geographic equivalent of the swastika in its racist appropriation. Needless to say, that the base has not had its name revered is surely an oversight.No one thinks of Greenland. ↩︎
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