The Pacific Proving Grounds and the Proliferation of Settler Environmentalism

External vulnerability, local resilience, and urban-rural heterogeneity in the Marshall Islands

“…Like abandonment in other contexts ( Gilmore, 2008 ; Pulido, 2016 ), the US has approached the nuclear legacy as a Marshallese problem, ignoring ongoing risks and embodied legacies. For example, the US has constructed its own legal frameworks to avoid accountability, disregarded increasing risks of leakage from the Runit Dome, which houses 3.1 million cubic feet of radioactive material, and, until December 2020, denied Marshallese in the US access to Medicaid while benefitting from Marshallese labor through the Compact of Free Association ( Bahng, 2020 ; Marcoux, 2022 ; Mitchell-Eaton, 2021 ).…”

Sustaining empire: Conservation by ruination at Kalama Atoll

“…(Oldenziel, 2011: 14)The ways colonized tropical islands functioned as laboratories and spaces of biological and industrial experimentation informed Euro-American modernity and the conservation movement (Grove, 1996). Because of their imagined smallness and isolation, islands have been used as testing grounds and laboratories for a harrowing array of destructive and toxic experiments; what Wesley-Smith (1995) in the context of Pacific Islands has called the “laboratory rationale.” As a “settler colonial ideation” (Bahng, 2020) the laboratory suppresses island histories and Indigenous presences (DeLoughrey, 2013). Through a longstanding colonial understanding of the island as a hermetically sealed and ultimately disposable laboratory tied to a promise of remoteness and relative enclosure (Bahng, 2020: 52), the oceanic colonialism of the U.S. “enacted a state of exception to appropriate an enormous portion of the Pacific to detonate hundreds of deadly weapons, rationalized by the misconception of island isolation” (DeLoughrey, 2013: 169).…”