Waste Frontiers/War Enclosures: Decolonial Geosocial Analysis of Contaminated Military Land Conversions

Abstract

Military-industrial practices have left widespread contamination affecting land, water, air, and human and nonhuman bodies. This article uses decolonial analysis to examine the racial-colonial foundations that underlie contemporary efforts to reuse former U.S. military land for development projects. Interrelating scholarship on security and development with that of militarization and political ecology, I use “geosocial spectacle” to probe the material and pedagogical governance, frontier logics, and colonial aesthetics that emerge through land remediation and redevelopment. Featuring two military sites within U.S. base closure and realignment—the U.S. Front Range area of Colorado and former U.S. unincorporated territory of the Panama Canal Zone—the article delineates and expounds on two types of U.S. military land conversions: brownfields and biodiversity recreation. The article interrelates the conversion of contaminated land in both cases as waste frontier that facilitates ongoing cycles of land repossession as a form of dispossession and containment or denial of war. The article concludes by advocating for decolonial studies of the global color line entrenched by the U.S. Pentagon’s ongoing climate colonialism, to subvert the compartmentalized harms of war and capitalist extraction, and to galvanize explicitly anticolonial, antiracist land reuse and governance.

军工行为造成了广泛的污染, 影响了土地、水、空气、人类和非人类。本文采用去殖民化分析, 探讨了重新开发前美国军事用地的种族殖民基础。结合安全与发展、军事化、政治生态学等研究, 采用“地理社会奇观”来探讨土地修复和再开发的物质和教育治理、前沿逻辑和殖民美学。重点关注了被关闭和调整的两个美国军事基地(科罗拉多州的美国前线山区和巴拿马运河区的前美国非建制领土), 描绘并阐述了美国军事用地的两种转变——工业污染废弃用地和生物多样性娱乐用地。在这两个案例中, 本文将转变受污染土地与废弃物前沿相互联系起来。废弃物前沿有助于将土地再拥有作为一种剥夺、遏制或否认战争。本文主张, 针对美国五角大楼气候殖民主义牢固确立的全球种族分界线, 应当开展去殖民化研究, 颠覆战争和资本主义榨取的危害, 明确鼓励反殖民、反种族主义的土地再利用和治理。

Las prácticas militares–industriales han generado una contaminación generalizada que afecta tierra, agua, aire y a los cuerpos humanos y no humanos. Este artículo usa el análisis decolonial para examinar la fundamentación racial-colonial que subraya los esfuerzos contemporáneos para reutilizar antiguos terrenos militares de Estados Unidos para proyectos de desarrollo. Interrelacionando la erudición sobre seguridad y desarrollo con la de la militarización y la ecología política, utilizo el “espectáculo geosocial” para catear la gobernanza material y pedagógica, la lógica fronteriza y la estética colonial que surgen con la recuperación y el redesarrollo de la tierra. Con dos sitios militares dentro del marco del cierre y reajuste de bases americanas –el área americana de Front Range, en Colorado, y el antiguo territorio no incorporado a la soberanía americana de la Zona del Canal de Panamá– el artículo delinea y se extiende en dos tipos de conversiones de terrenos militares de los EE.UU.: los terrenos desocupados y la recreación de biodiversidad. El artículo interrelaciona la conversión de tierras contaminadas en ambos casos como frontera de residuos, lo que facilita los ciclos continuos de recuperación de la tierra como una forma de desposesión y contención o denegación de la guerra. Se concluye en el artículo abogando por los estudios decoloniales de la línea global de color atrincherada por el vigente colonialismo climático del Pentágono, para subvertir los daños compartimentados de la guerra y la extracción capitalista, y para impulsar la reutilización y gobernanza de la tierra explícitamente anticolonial y antirracista.

关键词:

• 工业污染废弃用地
• 生态
• 前沿
• 军事
• 跨殖民
• 废弃物

Palabras clave:

• ecología
• frontera
• militar
• residuos
• terrenos desocupados
• transcolonial

Key Words:

• brownfield
• ecology
• frontier
• military
• transcolonial
• waste

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 These waves took place in 1988, 1991, 1993, and 1995.

2 U.S. military presence is poised to return to the Philippines (Ziezulewicz 2023).

3 The overwhelming majority of brownfield sites are not Superfund sites, which are fewer in number and involve more severe contamination than brownfields. The lowest estimate of brownfield sites ranged between 130,000 and 425,000 and at nearly 100 times the number of Superfund sites (U.S. General Accounting Office 1995).

4 Oakwood Homes took over as master developer in 2017 from the Shea Homes and Lennar collaboration.

5 This is due to the Latin American debt crisis, the U.S. blockade and invasion, and a series of structural adjustment measures.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shiloh Krupar

SHILOH KRUPAR is Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor in the Culture and Politics Program of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research addresses the spatial administration of inequality, vulnerability, toxicity, and uneven life conditions, which she considers to be geographical political and embodied relationships.