Description
Through the rubric of “conservation by ruination,” this paper examines the case of Kalama Atoll (named Johnston Atoll by the U.S.), an unincorporated U.S. territory 800 miles southwest of the Hawaiian Islands, to explain how contamination and conservation work together to enlist an ecology into a continuous geopolitical claim. Over a period of 165 years, in furtherance of the U.S. imperial project, guano entrepreneurs, conservation scientists, and military researchers alternately ruined, conserved, and engineered Kalama into a conservation frontier and a laboratory for nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons testing, storage, and disposal. Within the uneven, variable, and continuous process of U.S. imperial formation, ecological ruination at Kalama produced spaces of exception where new ecologies called for protection, and the military enjoyed greater freedom of action. Toxicity and conservation are not just two sides of the same imperial coin; they are often congruent and work in tandem. The destruction itself is part of the conservation, where what is ultimately conserved is empire itself. Going beyond the growing body of literature on military environmentalism (or green militarism), this paper considers the important role of multispecies and technoscientific assemblages in the production and conservation of imperial power.
