Proving Grounds: Ecological Fieldwork in the Pacific and the Materialization of Ecosystems

Abstract

This article investigates the emergence of ecosystems as objects of study and concern. It contends that the history of ecosystem science cannot be separated from the history of nuclear colonialism and environmental devastation in the Pacific Proving Grounds. From the close of World War II until 1970, the US Atomic Energy Commission was the main sponsor of ecological research in the United States and its territories. During this period, the United States detonated 105 nuclear weapons in the Pacific Proving Grounds. The Cold War science that destroyed nature simultaneously made it available for study. Building on recent work at the intersection of environmental history and history of science, this article emphasizes the role of nonhumans, including nuclear weapons and marine organisms, in the creation of scientific knowledge.

Locating the Boundaries of the Nuclear North: Arctic Biology, Contaminated Caribou, and the Problem of the Threshold

“…The detection of radionuclides in the bodies of caribou in northern Canada both demonstrated the global reach of nuclear fallout and revealed the unevenness of toxic relations and radioactive exposures (Masco 2015;Martin 2018;Bocking 2017;Liboiron et al 2018). Although global monitoring programs indicated that the Arctic environments were subject to lower levels of nuclear fallout, migratory caribou herds throughout northern Canada exhibited significantly higher radioactive contamination levels than grazing animals in more southerly regions.…”

The Nuclear Sensorium: Cold War Nuclear Imperialism and Sensory Violence

“…The legal framework of nuclear weapons testing may be conceptualized as an instance of what Andrew Rotter (2011, 5) calls “sensory civilization” and, in particular, the colonial belief that “a vital part of the civilizing process was to put the senses in the right order of priority and to ensure them against offence or affront … It was the duty of more sensorily advanced Westerners to put the senses right before withdrawing the most obvious manifestations of their power.” In the past decade, historical work on the relation between empire and environment has pointed out that a common strategy of nuclear imperialism is the representation of environments targeted for destruction or development as “empty” (DeLoughrey 2012; Martin 2018). This representational strategy and its destructive effects may be particularly acute in the nuclear context but extends into other contexts as well.…”

“…One of the key factors driving scientific efforts to sense radiation and trace its pathways was the anticipation of nuclear warfare. Another factor was the belief held by most scientists and military officials working in this field during the 1950s and 1960s that existing levels of nuclear testing could be carried out indefinitely since they were no different from natural disasters (Martin 2018, 581). What enabled ecologists to regard nuclear detonations along the same lines as forest fires or storms was the notion of “natural reservoirs” or containers for nuclear fallout and waste in the oceans, in the atmosphere, and underground; these seemingly limitless containers for nuclear contaminants were assumed to “reduce greatly the probability that such materials [would] get incorporated in the bio-chemistry of living organisms, including man” (Bruno 2003, 245).…”

“…The nuclear tests conducted by the United States at the PPG during the 1950s produced a new sensory framework which extended and integrated embodied and machinic sensing but also established an order and hierarchy of ways of sensing that supported nuclear imperialism. As Laura Martin (2008) demonstrates in her analysis of these early nuclear tests, nuclear imperialism demanded new forms of scientific knowledge about the web of relations between bodies, machines, and environments that would transmit the force of the bomb and shape the flow of radiation. Building on Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s (2012) work on the discursive legitimation of nuclear violence in the PPG through its construction as isolated and uninhabited, Martin suggests that the idea of the environment-as-ecosystem has its origins in interests of the military in predicting, manipulating, and maximizing the effects of “nuclear violence,” including radiation, on human and nonhuman bodies and their environments in the PPG.…”

Utopian Conservation: Scientific Humanism, Evolution, and Island Imaginaries on the Galápagos Islands

“…Work in environmental history, science and technology studies (STS), anthropology, and literature has demonstrated how a colonial and imperialistic logic has represented and produced “islands” as sites for civic, natural, and military experimentation (DeLoughrey 2010; Grove 1996; Hecht 2011). This representation of islands as remote, which conferred little if no legal and political importance to the local residents and their environments, has been shown to have largely absolved the state of responsibility for the human and ecological consequences of its interventions (Oldenziel 2011; DeLoughrey 2013; Martin 2018). Yet the Galápagos have seemingly eluded these critiques.…”