This collection, Ecologies of War, extends ethnographic attention beyond “war itself” to include forms of war that are often unrecognized as such—in everyday experiences, material effects, and affective resonances of violence that have penetrated and contaminated the environments and ecologies of places where perpetual wars of US empire, never-ending wars, and peacelessness of political enmity continue. Although environmental historians have examined battlegrounds and landscapes altered by military activities and technologies, these essays bring an explicitly anthropological approach to essential entanglements of wars and ecologies, characterized by proliferations and archives of violence.

The image accompanying this series, by Teresa Montoya, is part of a multimedia project that visualizes environmental toxicity across the Indigenous Southwest. In this image we see a detail of a uranium tailings pond at White Mesa Mill near the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal community of White Mesa in southeastern Utah. The mill is neither owned nor affiliated with the Ute Nation but has long worried residents and nearby Diné communities about radioactive contamination.