In Anssi Paasi, John Harrison, and Martin Jones (eds.). Handbook on the Geographies of Regions and Territories (forthcoming, Edward Elgar Publishing). and.
B UFFALO Legal Studies Research Paper Series Paper No. 2017 - 007
Military-to-Wildlife Geographies: Bureaucracies of Cleanup and Conservation in Vieques
Irus Braverman
Irus Braverman. 2017. “Military-to-Wildlife Geographies: Bureaucracies of Cleanup and Conservation in Vieques” [DRAFT]. In Anssi Paasi, John Harrison, and Martin Jones (eds.). Handbook on the Geographies of Regions and Territories (forthcoming, Edward Elgar Publishing).
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This paper can be downloaded without charge from the Social Science Research Network Electronic Paper Collection at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=3054165
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Military-to-Wildlife Geographies Bureaucracies of Cleanup and Conservation in Vieques Irus Braverman This chapter examines the interplay between territory, law and legal geographies through an exploration of intricate relationship between militarism and conservation as it has played out in Vieques: a municipality island in the unincorporated U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, located about seven miles southeast of the mainland. The chapter is strongly situated in the legal geography literature—namely, it seeks to expose the reciprocal relationship between law and spatiality, discovering the ways in which law is “worlded” and the world is “lawed.” The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography (2014) identifies three modes of legal geography research: the first mode includes disciplinary work in law or geography and an import and export between the two disciplines; the second consists of an interdisciplinary bridge between law and geography, whereby a common project emerges; and the third mode represents a shift from inter-, to trans-, and even to post- disciplinary scholarship (Braverman et al., 2014, pp. 2-10). This latter mode is characterized by an engagement with third disciplines such as cultural anthropology, and with an integration of broader social and humanities concerns into the traditionally bi-disciplinary focus of law and geography (ibid., p. 10). It is precisely at the third mode of postdisciplinary legal geography that this chapter is situated. It engages in traditional geographical inquiries about the relationship between territory and power, military and nationhood, periphery and center, privatization and globalization and, perhaps most importantly, landscape and contamination. At the same time, the chapter is also concerned with legal questions about the role of law, bureaucratization, and shifting regulatory regimes and about how these both constitute and perpetuate the contaminated geographies in Vieques. In this sense, the chapter promotes a pluralistic understanding of law that not only
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moves away from the assumption that law is an exclusive project of the state (Benda-Beckmann et al., 2009), but also shows the fragmentation of this state and its inner contradictions. Finally, the chapter ties in broader humanities issues such as the relationship between nature and imperialism and the interconnections among the contaminated body of the human, nonhuman plants and animals, and the physical landscape. In this way, territory becomes a dynamic project that weaves together complex conceptions of law and an understanding of the interrelatedness of human and nonhuman ecosystems. During the 1940s, the U.S. Navy acquired about 25,000 acres on the eastern and western ends of Vieques. These lands were used for naval gunfire support and air-to-ground training from the 1940s until 2003, when as a result of insistent protests the Navy ceased all military operations on the island and transferred its property on the eastern side (and to a smaller extent, also on the western side) to the Department of the Interior’s (DOI) US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). The land was designated as a wildlife refuge upon transfer. In 2005, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) added portions of Vieques to the Superfund National Priorities List: a list of the most heavily contaminated sites in the U.S. (EPA, 2013). Many military relics, including tanks, are still scattered around the island’s landscape. Vieques is but one of numerous ‘Military-to-Wildlife’ (M2W), or ‘bombs to birds’ (Krupar, 2016, p. 122), sites in the U.S. Specifically, since the late 1980s, ‘nearly two-dozen major military sites have been closed and [subsequently] reclassified [as wildlife refuges], adding more than one million acres to the U.S. National Wildlife Refuge System’ (Havlick, 2011, p. 183). ‘Paradoxically, military installations include the most contaminated as well as the most biodiverse lands managed by the federal government’ (Ibid., pp. 183-4; see also Sanders, 2009; Wilcox, 2007). Such contaminated yet wild sites challenge the ideal of pristine wilderness.
2 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3054165
Coates et al. suggest along these lines that, ‘What makes the relationship between sites of biodiversity and toxicity on military lands particularly intriguing is that, far than being distant from one another, they are often adjacent and sometimes interdependent’ (2011, p. 468). The hybrid nature of M2W lands has also presented new challenges to conservation managers, as the lands are often riddled with explosives or chemical contaminants (Havlick, 2011). Furthermore, conversion into wildlife lands often conceals military impacts as these sites emerge with new names, new managers and new management goals without necessarily requiring a full military cleanup (Ibid.). These sites are therefore subject to a form of ‘double erasure,’ in Sasha Davis’s phrasing. What is erased, he argues, is both the ‘social life that existed in the place prior to its takeover by the military’ and ‘the history of the military’s use’ (Davis, 2007, p. 131). Havlick asks along these lines: ‘Will these places provide scientists and federal managers with new opportunities to critically examine the relationship between technology, militarism, and the environment . . . or will long-standing policies of exclusion and secrecy remain in place despite the change in land managers?’ (2011, p. 191). Finally, in her work on postnuclear landscapes, Shiloh Krupar highlights how the waste’s repositioning into the realm of external wilderness makes for a ‘refuge fix,’ calling for an ethics attentive to the radioactive legacies of the Cold War era (2011, p. 269). Since the presence of endangered species indicates ‘a healthy rather than terminally polluted landscape . . . [m]ilitary-to-wildlife conversions supposedly demonstrate that military activities have not just destroyed nature but actively conserved it’ (Ibid., p. 122). This chapter will study the relationship between militarism and the environment through the perspective of Commonwealth and federal officials involved with the cleanup in Vieques, and in particular of USFWS officials who manage the majority of the contaminated land on the
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island. I am especially interested in the formal and informal regulatory mechanisms that connect (post)military and conservation landscapes. Such regulatory mechanisms expose both the centrality of the state for contaminating and purifying the colonial landscapes (Peluso, 1993) as well as its simultaneous decline through privatization (Woodward, 2014). The chapter is situated at the nexus of the scholarships on critical military geography, legal geography and green imperialism. The last few decades have witnessed a sharp increase in scholarship on critical military geography and post-military landscapes (Davis, 2007, 2011; Havlick, 2011; Krupar, 2011, 2016; Woodward, 2005, 2014). A prominent voice in this scholarship, Rachel Woodward highlights that: ‘Post-military landscapes arguably demand different interpretative frames which take as their starting point the continuity of military imprint despite the removal of military power and control, and require us to look to their present and future particularly when re-use is orientated towards tourism and heritage’ (2014, p. 46). My chapter draws on this literature to understand the presence-absence of military bureaucracy in Vieques, namely how ‘the global apparatus touches the ground’ (Ibid., p. 51). My methodology for this chapter is predominantly ethnographic and, as such, draws on in-depth and recurring interviews and participatory observations with nine conservation officials who have been involved in the cleanup of Vieques. These interviews and observations were carried out from late 2014 until early 2015, especially during my visit to Vieques in January 2015. I have concealed the identity of some of my interviewees by using pseudonyms and by obscuring their affiliation. The Navy has not responded to my interview requests so I was unable to include their perspective here.
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Sasha Davis’ grounded work, too, has taken him to Vieques, mostly to document the local community’s perspective (Davis et al., 2007). Unlike Davis’ work, however, my chapter will study the perspective of conservation officials. My chapter thus adds another layer to the existing grounded scholarship on critical military geography: it offers a legal geography of military landscapes. Specifically, this project explores the administration of ordnance cleanup in Vieques: the laws, regulations, guidelines and (in)formal practices exercised by various agencies in their efforts of removing contamination, or lessening it, and the complex interactions between these agencies. VIEQUES: COLONIAL CONTAMINATION Puerto Rico’s ambiguous political status as an unincorporated territory of the U.S.—with no voting rights but a non-voting delegate in Congress and a limited application of the Constitution—and Vieques’s even more ambiguous status as a ‘colony within a colony,’ as the locals often refer to it, makes this place into a productive site for documenting the relationship between colonialism, militarism and conservation. So while in many ways this island is no different than many other M2W and Superfund sites across the U.S., its colonial status creates a unique situation. It is from this particular status of the island, for example, that the complex role of the USFWS as both a colonizer and a benefactor emerges. Inheriting the contaminated military landscape of Vieques, the USFWS is assigned to monitor the Navy’s cleanup while also shielding the existing natural resources from human development. This situation readily evokes the concept of ecological imperialism: the strategic imposition of Western environmental ideals on developing countries (Dreissen, 2005; see also Braverman, 2013; Martinez-Alier, 2003). The traditional form of ecological imperialism, whereby Western forms of conservation are imposed on non-Western countries, is more extreme in Vieques in light of the ongoing marginalization of
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Puerto Rico. The controversial redesignation of federal lands in Vieques from M2W makes for one of the largest national wildlife refuges in the Caribbean. In his book Green Imperialism, Richard Grove argues that ‘modern environmentalism, rather than being exclusively a product of European or North American predicaments and philosophies, emerged as a direct response to the destructive social and ecological conditions of colonial rule’ (Grove, 1995, p. 489). Grove sees tropical islands as critically important geographies in modern environmentalism’s coming of age, highlighting the complex interrelations between center and periphery and the radical form of conservation that has emerged by specialists and scientists in the periphery. In his words: ‘it is perfectly clear that the motivations of those specialists who proposed controls (and who were critical of the ecological degradation which they saw happening) were by no means always identical to those of the state. On the contrary, they were sometimes actively anti-colonial’ (Ibid., p. 479). The bombing of Vieques was an essential aspect of its colonization and became even more intense when the Navy withdrew from Culebra, Vieques’s smaller sister-island, in the 1970s. ‘The Navy dropped a trillion pounds of explosives on Vieques, including napalm and everything in the US arsenal from the Second World War to 2003,’ recounts Roberto Rabin, an outspoken leader in the fight against the Navy. Surveys of environments subjected to such weapons suggest, accordingly, that ‘[c]ontaminants of the land and water resulting from these activities may include mercury, lead, copper, magnesium, lithium, perchlorate, TNT, napalm, depleted uranium, PCBs, solvents, and pesticides’ (Porter et al., 2011, p. 74). Moreover, certain studies indicate that Vieques has 27 percent higher cancer rates than the rest of Puerto Rico (Navarro, interview) and many locals believe this to be the direct result of the military toxins in the environment). From the perspective of the locals, then, the contamination of the land has
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translated into the contamination of their bodies, for whom a cleanup would entail an entirely different process than the one being instigated in the landscape. The devastating effects of the bombings formed the basis for a powerful resistance to the Navy, which reached its peak in the 1990s. Rabin describes: ‘I remember grandmothers and grandfathers and little kids participating in protests and being arrested—priests, pastors, ministers, bishops—being arrested with us, in totally nonviolent actions. There was this immense power; the community was empowered.’ The accidental death of Davíd Sanes, a local employed in the Live Impact Area, by a Navy bomb in 1999 became the catalytic event that catapulted the struggle and finally led to the Navy’s pulling out of Vieques in 2003. From this point, the material impact of nearly 70 years of routine bombing had to be dealt with. This process is referred to as the ‘cleanup.’ THE CLEANUP AND USFWS ‘Even the cleanup is controversial,’ Gary Machlis tells me. Machlis is Science Advisor to the Director of the National Park Service and an expert on military landscapes. ‘From a Viequense point of view,’ he explains, ‘if you really wanted the island cleaned up, you would put a hospital every 5 to 10 kilometers. But a wildlife refuge requires much less. . . . The cleanup continues at about 2 per cent a year, so it will be 50 years before it’s done.’ For this reason, community leader Roberto Rabin tells me, the USFWS ‘has been used as a trashcan for military damaged lands in the U.S.’ As a result of the partiality and the slow pace of the cleanup, some of the locals have felt that ‘they were taken in twice: once when the land was expropriated and they were bombed for close to 70 years, and the second [time] when they finally got the Navy base out, and none of it was given back to them’ (Machlis, interview).
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Rabin explains the local community’s point of view: ‘We had hoped that the decontamination process would involve a lot of community participation, that our scientists’ [who are in] solidarity with Vieques from the universities here and [in] other places, would be able to take a part, and that it would be an important element to the economic development of Vieques as well.’ Instead, Rabin tells me, the military brought in a multimillion dollar company: the CH2M Hill. According to Rabin, the decontamination phase merely perpetuates the occupation and reifies Vieques’ marginalization. ‘These are the processes that I believe are again continuing to violate the basic needs and rights of the people of Vieques to have a real, genuine cleanup done,’ he tells me. ‘If left to the Navy,’ Rabin continues, ‘they would blow all that stuff up right in place, destroying whatever—they don’t care. And the company would like to do that too so that they can make all their money quickly.’ Indeed, the open detonation of unexploded ordnances has been going on for a decade or so. Rabin says: ‘I would hope that there’s some good influence from some nice people in the Fish and Wildlife, but they don’t have the power, the control is really in the hands of the Navy.’ Rabin’s portrayal of the USFWS as an agency with good intentions but little power to counter the colonial legacy of the Navy is the more positive perspective in this context. Many others, local Viequenses in particular, see the USFWS as part and parcel of the same military regime that reigned earlier, only concealed in green. ‘There are very bad relations between Viequenses and USFWS,’ Machlis tells me. Nonetheless, he emphasizes, ‘this was not something that the USFWS sought. Vieques was forced upon them.’
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Figure 1: Map of Vieques’ Natural Wildlife Refuge. Mario (pseudonym) is a USFWS employee in Vieques’ refuge. He tells me: ‘I was involved in clearing the protesters [out of the Live Impact Area] once this [became] Fish and Wildlife [land].’ It was the same set of protesters who previously protested against the Navy, he explains. ‘Same people, different cause. This time: kick the Fish and Wildlife out.’ The USFWS is thus in a paradoxical position in Vieques. On the one hand, it performs policing missions typically assigned to the state, such as that of clearing out protestors; on the other hand, it finds itself on the other side of the fence from the Navy on many issues, in which cases it is politically aligned with the local community. SUPERFUND BUREAUCRACY
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Although the Navy is formally long gone from Vieques, military names and acronyms are still alive in the landscape: they are marked as such ostensibly in order to identify and document the cleanup process. The center of Vieques is designated as the ‘civilian zone,’ while the two opposite sides are defined as ‘impact zones.’ Mario of the USFWS explains that ‘the very tip where the [Navy] did most of their bombing is the Live Impact Area, the LIA. The next section is the SIA, the Secondary Impact Area. And the rest is the EMA [Eastern Maneuver Area]. The LIA is where they concentrated all their heavy power—that’s the area with the most contaminations. Whatever they missed went into the SIA’ (interview). For the most part, the three military areas are still closed to the public. However, some of the beaches—named Red, Blue, Green et cetera by the Navy—have been cleaned, made accessible and renamed according to their local, pre-military name. For instance, the famous beach of La Chiva—the goat—has replaced the Blue Beach, and Caracas replaced the Red Beach. Such renaming practices again speak to the ways in which the landscape is reimagined and reinvented, highlighting the double erasure of military history discussed in Davis’s work. But the erasure of military presence in Vieques is far from complete: signs scattered along the beaches that warn visitors from picking up suspicious objects (Figure 2) serve as constant reminders of the not so distant military occupation of the island. These signs contribute to the making of a hybrid tourist-military landscape.
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Figure 2: Numerous signs warn tourists from picking up any suspicious objects, La Chiva (Blue) Beach. Photo by author, January 2015. Alongside the visible military traces, the landscape of Vieques is also highly determined by much less visible legalities. In 1980, the U.S. Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), commonly referred to as the Superfund Act. Sites eligible for cleanup through Superfund are additionally listed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the National Priorities List (NPL) (NAVFAC, n.d.). At the request of the Governor of Puerto Rico, in 2005 the EPA designated large areas of Vieques and nearby waters, officially known as the Atlantic Fleet Weapons Testing Facility (AFWTF), as a Superfund Site (Porter et al., 2011). ‘Because of its assignment to the NPL, most observers expected that cleanup of both terrestrial and marine environments [in Vieques] would start immediately,’ James Porter writes (Ibid., p. 110). ‘This did not happen. Although the 11
Department of Defense had been held accountable under the EPA laws pertaining to CERCLA/Superfund Sites since 1985, in 2002, the Pentagon successfully sought exemption from almost all environmental laws and regulations, citing preparedness needs in a time of heightened national security concerns’ (Ibid.). The official superfund law was thus stripped off of much of its power. Notwithstanding, at least five Commonwealth and federal agencies have been involved in the Vieques cleanup: the Navy, the EPA, the USFWS, Puerto Rico’s Environmental Quality Board (the equivalent of the EPA on the state level) and Puerto Rico’s Department of Natural Environmental Resources (DNER). Craig Lilyestrom is director of marine resources at the DNER and the Natural Resources Trustee of both land and water in Puerto Rico. Lilyestrom explains that: ‘CERCLA is the legal framework under which we have to work to perform the cleanup. That’s why we have all these meetings with all these agencies: we go over there and approve the [cleanup plans] and make comments in the process.’ Because of the prohibition of federal agencies from suing each other, ‘we are the only agency that has the power to sue the Navy for noncompliance with the Superfund requirements,’ he adds. Under the legal geographies of CERCLA, the cleanup is configured first and foremost as a bureaucratic process. How much needs to be cleaned and to what degree, who will do the cleaning and how, who monitors the process and under what timeline—these questions and others are continually negotiated between multiple agencies, producing a massive amount of documents, reports, reviews, court cases, and more reports. The complex technicalities of the Superfund process were highlighted by all my interviewees. Daniel Rodríguez, EPA’s Remedial Project Manager in Vieques, tells me:
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This is a very slow process. The thing is [that] to do your work you need to develop a work plan, we need to review the work plan, and from the work plan you create a report, we need to review a report and then we need to make sure you’re complying with all the regulations that apply so that [we determine] that you are using sound science. And it has to be documented: every single decision that we make on this site it’s backed up with data. It’s not make-believe science. . . . I keep the exact original copy of the final draft here [points to library shelf]. The EPA website contains the following updated cleanup numbers for January 2016: Surface Clearance: Over 2,531 acres cleared of munitions; over 38,000 munitions items removed and destroyed; Sub-surface Clearance: A total of 9.5 miles of roads cleared (includes a 25-foot buffer on either side) and 10.7 miles of beaches cleared (includes sandy beach areas and a turtle nesting habitat); Scrap metal: Over 16.9 million pounds processed and over 13.2 million pounds recycled (EPA, 2016). The intensified bureaucratization of the cleanup process serves to highlight both the control and the containment that government agencies exercise over hazardous military matter. Indeed, the manageability of the site becomes front and center of the cleanup project (Krupar, 2011, p. 269). During a tour of the beaches of Vieques, Mario and his colleague Anna tell me that ‘they’re supposed to be done on land by 2023, which is another 8 years, but then they’ve got the underwater zone. The underwater is supposed to be done by 2028.’ The cleanup process is also not consistent across the landscape. Lilyestrom explains that rather than removing every bomb from the island, the military looks for ‘high density anomaly areas.’ This search technique is good for finding where ordnance is common, ‘but not as good at finding out where they’re less common.’ ‘You’re never going to be able to clean it completely,’
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Lilyestrom continues. ‘So there’s no way you’re ever going to be able to tell someone that it’s absolutely safe. . . . That’s why they turn it over to Fish and Wildlife… They hope that the wildlife isn’t going to blow itself up, . . . [but] if they do it’s less of a problem than if a person on a bulldozer gets blown up.’ Such biopolitics of contamination spell out the differential treatment of bodies and the particular usefulness of nature and wilderness in the cleanup process. In Krupar’s words: ‘Essentially, that which has been liquidated is repackaged as ecological improvement and “peace dividends.” . . . However, such military-to-wildlife conversions are also utopian projects of the nation-state, which propagate the idea that such lands are now demilitarized and safe for public recreation and observation of nature’ (2016, p. 122). In Vieques, the superfluous and meticulous planning and paperwork, as well as the redundancies, contradictions, and delays inherent to the documentation and planning of the cleanup, reiterate that the Navy is far from leaving the island. In fact, its practices may well be impacting the landscape as much as during the bombing phase. Hence, not only the naturalization of the landscape but the bureaucratization of the cleanup process, too, serves as a form of erasure: it redirects attention to the (micro)technicalities and away from the (macro)politics of colonial contamination. BOMBS VS. WILDLIFE: NEOLIBERAL INTERPRETATIONS The USFWS officials I interviewed have suggested that if not for the military zones, the wild areas of Vieques would have already been developed, resulting in a variation on the nearby highly developed island of St. Thomas. But while the USFWS is the formal manager of the land in its new designation as a national wildlife refuge, this agency’s officials in fact have to constantly negotiate their operations with the civil contractors who perform the physical clearing and cleaning in these areas. At this juncture, the carefully laid out plans to protect the habitat of
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the island’s twenty-five endangered species, and its other wildlife, are being reinterpreted and redirected. The everyday practices of ordnance cleanup on the part of the military and USFWS’ wildlife conservation result in numerous conflicts. Lilyestorm recounts: ‘you tell them to leave all the trees of diameter greater than 3 inches, the contractors say: “well, that tree was leaning against another one that we had to take down.” This kind of stuff.’ ‘It’s much more expensive for them to go cherry-picking and trimming rather than just cutting everything down and getting it out of the way,’ Lilyestorm explains. ‘Every now and again they’ll run into a situation where they’ll have to do a detonation. And [with] certain kinds of munitions, when you detonate them they send out incendiary materials, [so] they’ll start a fire and you’ll end up with 400 burned acres. You know, it’s tough; it’s tough to protect things when they’re under that condition.’ ‘“The budget is for cleanup, it’s not for restoration,” the [Navy] keeps telling us,’ Lilyestrom continues. ‘But there seems to be some way of getting around that [to] require [that] if you cut down a tree, you plant a tree. This way, [the Navy] may be made to pay for a restoration of some areas. It gives us a standing, in any case, to demand it.’ Such checks and balances can be introduced precisely because of the complex bureaucratic layering of this project, which paradoxically enables malleable legalities to emerge. In addition to their legal manifestations, the ongoing tensions between military and conservation interests are evident in the physical landscape. When traveling through the southwestern parts of the refuge, for example, Anna and Mario direct my attention to clear-cut areas and, within them, to tall piles of dead branches. ‘They just pile everything together,’ Mario explains. ‘And nobody takes it away. That’s an ongoing controversy that we have with the
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Navy.’ These huge piles of cleared brush are a fire hazard, Mario complains. In the area’s climate, they can set the entire area on fire, with devastating results for wildlife. Another controversy between the USFWS and the Navy pertains to the land crab habitats scattered along Vieques’ beaches. Land crabs are protected species in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and are managed carefully on Vieques, Mario tells me. He drives me to a particular site, where he explains: ‘This is one of the primary land crabbing areas where we did all the studies. So we told the Navy: you treat that area like it was a baby, you go in there with a laser and just do the bare minimum. [But] they destroyed them.’ Mario’s frustration is evident. ‘The Navy still doesn’t know, but we’ll file a report about this,’ he comments. On another day, Mario takes me to visit the closed military zone. After a long drive over rough dirt paths, we finally arrive at the LIA’s Central Processing Center (Figure 3). ‘This is where the Navy does their cleanup,’ he tells me, pointing out the scrap metal, the incinerator that burns off the residues, the drums for storing the scrap metal, and the containers which ‘get shipped off the island to a metal scrap yard, and they get sold. This is how the cleanup goes. They’re very organized, they’re very methodical in their process’ (interview).
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Figure 3: Barrels, Live Impact Area, Vieques. Photo by author. Vieques’ local residents are no longer allowed into the LIA, which used to be accessible to them (except during bombing times) when the Navy owned the land. USFWS personnel, too, are now formally required to coordinate with the Navy before they enter the LIA. Because live ordnance is still scattered in the area, the USFWS are prohibited from conducting a variety of management operations. Despite this official prohibition, USFWS personnel and other volunteers dig nests in the LIA for endangered hawksbill turtles to lay their eggs in, as part of their conservation management. While military regulations and policies continue to override and hinder the everyday conservation work on the island, the relevant agencies and nonprofits perform small acts of resistance through their insistence on practicing conservation even in the face of contrary military orders.
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Keeping in mind that the USFWS is a federal agency, the turtle example, like many others, illuminates the underlying complexity of colonial power. Specifically, such examples demonstrate how the imperial center can lose control over its periphery. The complex and convoluted bureaucracy of M2W conversion in Vieques means that conservation efforts—the initial purpose of the land’s reclassification as a national wildlife refuge—are rendered semiillicit. Richard Grove observes similarly that ‘the sheer tyranny of physical and mental distance from the centre contributed to the growth of peripheral or even sectarian sympathies. Even colonial governments became peripheral in their attitudes’ (Grove, 1995, pp. 482-3). In this case, the center is not only the US Navy and its headquarters in the mainland, but also the central headquarters of the USFWS, which undermine the conservation operations in Vieques by understaffing and underpaying their Vieques constituents. To complicate the picture, the marginalized presence of the USFWS on the island and its prioritizing of endangered species over human needs are perceived by many locals as a form of ecological imperialism. As Rabin’s earlier quote emphasizes, the choice to turn the vast majority of the island into a wildlife refuge was anything but a local choice. Performed in the name of locals and proclaimed as enacted for their benefit, the locals were in fact never consulted about this move. The cleanup operations in Vieques thus provide a backdrop for ongoing clashes between different forms of colonialism. RADIOACTIVE CONTAMINATION While officials struggle to sort out the conflicting policies and regulations regarding the ongoing cleanup, both humans and nonhumans continue to be exposed to contaminants. ‘We are almost wholly ignorant of the effects that high explosives and heavy metals have on ecosystem health and ecosystem function,’ James Porter et al. write (2011, p. 103). James Porter is a marine
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biologist with particular expertise in coral ecosystems. He explains in our interview that this ignorance is especially true for the underwater environment. ‘Out-of-sight, out-of-mind thinking prevails,’ Porter writes, ‘but as most ecologists know, it rarely, if ever, works’ (Ibid., p. 110). The question of radioactive contamination demonstrates the extent of the Navy’s ‘out-ofsight, out-of-mind’ mentality and its secretive and exclusionary operations. In addition to the chemical ordnance, ‘the Navy admitted to strafing the eastern end of the island with 267 rounds of armor-penetrating depleted uranium ammunition,’ Porter et al. write (2011, p. 71). ‘Because the use of radioactive munitions required special permission from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (which had not been obtained), the Navy attempted to recover the material. Although approximately half of the depleted uranium shell casings were located (only from land sites), none of the radioactive material contained in them was found, leading to concern that radioactive materials from this depleted uranium ordnance may also have spread into the marine environment’ (Ibid.; Vera, interview). The risk of radioactive contamination on Vieques is further indicated by the presence of the sunken USN Killen, a Navy ship launched in 1941 and used as a target during the atomic bomb tests in the Marshall Islands. The Navy claims that the Killen underwent a water wash after the atomic blasts to remove as much of the radioactivity as possible (Porter, 2011, p. 70). In 1975, the Killen was towed to Vieques and scuttled just across from the LIA. Seven years later, a survey conducted by both the DNER and the Navy concluded that the ship’s wreckage is ‘an important marine habitat and that no action should be taken to remove the remaining hulk because it would be ecologically damaging to attempt to do so’ (quoted in Ibid., p. 113-4). According to Porter, corroding bombs on Vieques’ coral reefs spill and leach out onto the surrounding reef, contributing to the chemical contamination of the area. The area surrounding
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the Killen in particular was found to be chemically contaminated. However, Porter found no indication of radioactive contamination ‘that would have been associated with [the Killen’s] participation in nuclear testing on the US Marshall Islands in 1958’ (2011, p. 115). CONCLUSION Military interests and procedures still shape ex-military spaces even in the absence of formal control (Woodward, 2005, 2014). Vieques exemplifies this disjuncture between presence and absence: while on paper the Navy is responsible for cleaning the island from military contamination, it has in fact delegated the everyday cleanup operations to private companies. Governmental agencies such as the USFWS, EPA, DNER, as well as nonprofit and community groups, monitor the situation to ensure that the Navy and its contractors perform their job with the least damage to the environment. This chapter has examined the bureaucracies of this cleanup, highlighting the complex interrelations between the different agencies, personalities and interests that operate in this place. The original colonial narrative underlying the historical designation of Vieques as a bombing range and the continued military presence on the island is straightforward, some may even say banal (Davis, 2011). ‘There were developed countries and underdeveloped countries,’ Porter explains. ‘Puerto Rico wasn’t a main concern to the [United] States, and Vieques was even less of a concern than Puerto Rico. So if you want to do some testing, [you say] “Hey, let’s do it in Bikini [atoll], let’s do it in Vieques! . . . Let’s keep our house clean. We can dirty somebody else’s [house] with the stuff we have to do”’ (interview). Davis explains: ‘It should be emphasized that the colonialisms on these islands hosting military facilities are very enduring and consistent. Changes in American political administrations, including to the current Obama
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administration, have had very little effect on either military planning or questions of political status’ (2011, p. 2; citations omitted). But while this traditional form of colonialism may not be new, the ongoing geopolitical militarism in Vieques is newly obscured behind heaps of bureaucratic documents and complex legal geographies. This highly bureaucratic militarism is in turn privatized by the state. Alongside the old-fashioned colonialism, then, an extensive bureaucracy and a new form of cleanup have emerged that feed on the prevailing neoliberal order and that result in the outsourcing, privatization and subcontracted management of military functions and actions (Woodward, 2014, p. 45). As this chapter has documented, the privatization of the cleanup has added additional layers of operational conflicts to restoration efforts in Vieques. Colonialism in Vieques thus takes on different shapes, both traditional and transformed. In the military legal geographies of Vieques, environmental cleanup is trapped between conflicting colonial and neoliberal interests, necessitating complex navigations among multiple agencies. The USFWS in particular is in a difficult bind: perceived as an arm of the Navy by the people of Vieques, the USFWS’ office on the island is underfunded and understaffed. The words of Richard Grove are highly pertinent in this context. ‘At some periods,’ Grove writes in Green Imperialism, ‘departments or agents of the colonial state have themselves taken on a sectarian or peripheral role in countering the complacency of a metropolitan centre unable or undisposed to be sensitive to the environmental risks perceived in the peripheral colonial state’ (1995, p. 485). Indeed, the USFWS in Vieques is engaged in multiple forms of peripheral conservation projects, which seem to go against the colonial state. Simultaneously, in imposing certain environmental ideals on the local communities without executing democratic decision-making processes, the USFWS exercises a form of ecological imperialism.
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INTERVIEWS Mario (pseudonym), Vieques Refuge, USFWS. In-person, Vieques, PR. In-person, January 1213 & 16, 2015. Craig Lilyestrom, Director, Marine Resources Division; Natural Resources Trustee, PR’s DNER. Telephone, November 12, 2014. Gary Machlis, Professor of Environmental Sustainability, Clemson University; Science Advisor to the Director, National Park Service. Telephone, September 28, 2014. Cruz Navarro-Delgado, Biostatistics and Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of San Juan. Telephone, September 18, 2014. James W. Porter, Meigs Professor of Ecology, Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia. Telephone, September 24, 2014. Roberto Rabin, Director, Fortin Conde de Mirasol Museum. January 19, 2015. In-person, Esparanza, Vieques, PR. Daniel Rodríguez, Remedial Project Manager (Vieques Field Office), US EPA. In-person, Isabelle Segundo, Vieques, PR. January 16, 2015. Anna (pseudonym), Caribbean National Wildlife Refuge Complex, USFWS. Telephone, August 24, 2014. In-person, January 12-13, Vieques, PR. Juan Vera, State Underwater Archaeologist, Puerto Rico. In-person, Isabelle Segundo, Vieques, PR. January 16, 2015. REFERENCES Benda-Beckmann, F. von, Benda-Beckmann, K. von and A. Griffiths (eds), Spatializing Law: An Anthropological Geography of Law in Society, Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
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Havlick, D. (2011), ‘Disarming nature: converting military lands to wildlife refuges,’ Geographic Review, 101 (2), 183-200. Krupar, S. (2016), ‘The biopolitics of spectacle: salvation and oversight at the post-military refuge,’ in Magnusson B. & Z. Zalloua (eds), Spectacle, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, pp. 116-153. Krupar, S. (2011), ‘Alien still-life: distilling the toxic logics of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29, 268-290. Martinez-Alier, J. (2003), The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of the Ecological Conflicts and Valuation. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. NAVFAC. (n.d.). Comprehensive, Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), accessed 25 February 2015 at http://www.navfac.navy.mil/products_and_services/ev/products_and_services/env_restor ation/installation_map/navfac_atlantic/vieques/site_descriptions/regulatory_overview/cer cla.html. Peluso, N.L. (1993), ‘Coercing conservation? the politics of state resource control,’ Global Environmental Change, 3 (2), 199-217. Porter, J.M., J.V. Barton and C. Torres (2011), ‘Ecological, radiological, and toxicological effects of naval bombardment on the coral reefs of Isla de Vieques, Puerto Rico,’ in Machlis, G. et al. (eds), Warfare Ecology: A New Synthesis for Peace and Security, in 65 NATO Science for Peace and Security Series C: Environmental Security, Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, pp. 65-122. Sanders, B. (2009), Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism, Oakland, California: AK Press.
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