Khaki conservation: an examination of military environmentalist discourses in the British Army

The paper examines discourses of military environmentalism. It opens with an assessment of the significance of military environmentalist discourses and outlines reasons for their study. In three successive sections, the paper then looks in detail at the form and function of three of these discourses. The paper draws on a range of primary and secondary sources including Ministry of Defence and Army publicity information, policy documentation, parliamentary debates and data from the Otterburn Public Inquiry. It examines the construction of military training as environmentally compatible through a discourse of ‘crater-as-habitat’. It goes on to look the paternalism within discourses of military land management. It then examines a discourse of administrative rationalism in conservation, which is foundational in that it defines what environmental protection and conservation are about. The paper concludes with a comment on the wider significance of military environmental discourses.