Sustaining empire: Conservation by ruination at Kalama Atoll

Abstract

Joined to the Hawaiian Islands by ocean currents and winds, Kalama Atoll (named Johnston by the United States) emerges from the sea 825 miles southwest of Honolulu. Over a period of 165 years, in furtherance of the U.S. imperial project, Kalama has been rendered both conservation frontier and island laboratory for an extraordinary amount of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. This article examines U.S. imperial governance at Kalama, an unincorporated U.S. territory, and how military ruination of Kalama has produced new military natures that call for observation and protection. Introducing a rubric of “conservation by ruination,” we highlight how a coalescing of toxic destruction and conservation efforts functions as a continuous geopolitical claim to the atoll, and how imperial formations at the atoll are weaved through technoscientific and multispecies assemblages. In essence, what is conserved in conservation by ruination is not wildlife, habitats, or nature, but empire itself. Kalama is a post-apocalyptic cyborg assemblage of bleached coral skeletons and radioactive debris, dioxin-laden leachate and crazy ants; a cacophonous ecology of weathered concrete and rusted metal, inhabited by seabirds and steadily dissolving into the sea. But it is also an atoll that remains connected to the islands and peoples of Oceania, and which is neither lost, small, isolated, or ruined. We therefore end the article by speculating on restoration of this atoll whose imperial formations capture not only its spaces, but also its futures.

Indigenous environmental perspectives: Challenging the oceanic security state

“…Rather than solely focus on challenges to state-centric power or resource extraction in terrestrial locales, here we concentrate on the oceanic registers of Indigenous resistance to occupation and militarism in aqueous places as they offer important but distinct forms of place-based opposition. Indeed, environmental threats, sovereignty, and decolonization are central fights for resistance activities in heavily militarized archipelagos, atolls, and islands such as Guåhan, Kaho'olawe, Kalama, Kwajalein, Okinawa, and Puerto Rico (Davis, 2020;De Onís, 2021;Du Plessis et al, 2022;Dvorak, 2020;Ginoza, 2012;Na'puti and Bevacqua, 2015;Natividad and Leon Guerrero, 2010;Torres, 2020). From the Marianas, organizations such as I Hagan Famalåo'an Guåhan (IHFG) employ Indigenous Chamoru values that inform connections with lands, waters, and ancestors to 'promote collective self-determination and the demilitarization of the island's land and environmental resources by colonial powers' (I Hagan Famalåo'an Guåhan, 2021).…”

“…Understanding security of the nation-state has evolved through ‘securitization theory’ (Balzacq et al, 2015), which challenges traditional security approaches and exposes how ‘issues are not essentially threatening in themselves; rather, it is by referring to them as “security” issues that they become security problems’ (Eroukhmanoff, 2018: 1). The nation-state security approach privileges military responses across ocean spaces and archipelagos (Amar, 2013; Du Plessis et al, 2022; Na’puti, 2022). Contemporary security perspectives of ocean space discursively and materially construct Oceania as territory , specifically ‘national’ land for state building and intervention in the Pacific (Davis, 2020).…”

From “footprint” to relationships: Impacts of US military base on Okinawa

“…Engaging with an Indigenous epistemological framework prevents us from confining one's experience as natural because "(l)ike race, indigeneity is a socially constructed category rather than one based on the notion of immutable biological characteristics” (Kauanui, 2016) and Indigenous sovereignty and responsibility that is embedded in the claim to indigeneity are what derives from cultural and political struggles from territorial occupation. Literature paying attention to a connection between Indigenous epistemological framework, environmentalism, and military activities grants us the capability to expose American “settler militarism,” the dynamics through which settler colonialism and militarization simultaneously perpetuate, legitimate, and conceal each other (Nebolon, 2017, p. 25) and exposes various logics of sustaining imperial power through militarizing islands in the Pacific (du Plessis et al., 2022).…”