Abstract
Abstract
Military bases are extremely polluted places, often contaminated with industrial wastes along with the various chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons of war. Today many former bases are converted to civilian use, a process requiring extensive remediation. The reuse of military bases involves extracting toxic sediments as well as the sedimented histories of war and military violence. This article examines questions of environmental injustice at two base conversion projects in San Francisco—at Naval Station Treasure Island and at the Hunters Point Naval Station—using Rob Nixon's (2011) concept of “slow violence.” Slow violence emphasizes the dispersed and slow moving forms of environmental disaster and toxic suffering, expanding the spatialities and temporalities by which we might understand environmental injustice. In relation to Hunters Point and Treasure Island, the concept of slow violence suggests that these base conversion projects are not simply “cleanups,” or breaks with the military's violent past, but are productive of new geographies and temporalities of toxic risk.
Introduction
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Why are these military bases suddenly available for urban reuse, and why do they represent such attractive real estate for Lennar? In 1988, the Department of Defense (DOD) passed the Base Realignment and Closure Act (BRAC), to manage the process of “shutting down the Cold War.” 2 Between 1988 and 2005, the DOD closed 97 major military installations across the country, and 24 of those bases were in California. 3 According to the California's Department of Toxic Substances Control, the state also has 1,200 formerly used defense sites, or FUDS, which are properties that were once used either by the military or its contractors. 4 Both BRAC sites and FUDS are often extremely contaminated places, making their transfer to over to cities and, in particular, any efforts to rebuild on them, long and complicated projects, involving extensive remediation. Yet it is not simply the military's polluted grounds that are surveyed, assessed, and excavated during this process, but also the sedimented histories of war and military violence. How are the violence of war and its toxic wastes to be remembered after these landscape conversions? Is Lennar's development project at the Hunters Point Shipyard a story of environmental and economic progress, or does it produce, or reproduce, more and different forms violence?
In this article I examine two military base conversion projects in San Francisco—the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard and Naval Station Treasure Island—through Rob Nixon's concept of “slow violence.” 5 Slow violence builds on the idea of “structural violence,” but with an important twist: the concept emphasizes change and movement over time as well as space, broadening the common conception of violence as a discrete and immediate event. As Nixon puts it, slow violence is “a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” Nixon develops this concept as a response to contemporary environmental problems, which often occur at speeds and scales that evade popular attention or understanding, and are disproportionately suffered by the world's vulnerable populations. Two examples Nixon works through in his monograph are Union Carbide's explosion in Bhopal and subsequent cancers in the exposed population, and the ongoing presence of Agent Orange—a chemical weapon used by the U.S. during the Vietnam War—in Vietnamese bodies and environments. The concept of slow violence is analytically useful in thinking through the U.S. military's degraded environments as not simply a consequence of war, but also as a continuing form of violence. In relation to the redevelopment of Hunters Point and Treasure Island, the concept of slow violence suggests that even as these bases are officially closed and remade as urban landscapes, militarism is an ongoing condition, remaining in the form of slow moving and dispersed effects of pollution.
In what follows I explore the military histories of Hunters Point and Treasure Island, including the militarization of their environments. I then address the question of why these toxic spaces have recently acquired so much economic value, through a discussion of the evolution of toxic waste policies and practices in the United States over the past few decades. I conclude by returning to the concept of slow violence and suggest it offers an important rethinking of notions of environmental justice, through the analytical register of time and temporality.
Discussion
Naval Station, San Francisco
The 500-acre Hunters Point Naval Shipyard juts out from the southeast corner of San Francisco, and is surrounded by the city's industrial neighborhood of Bayview-Hunters Point. Naval Station Treasure Island is a 400-acre man-made landmass in the San Francisco Bay, built for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exhibition. 6 Treasure Island is connected to the natural Yerba Buena Island, which the Bay Bridge passes through. Although both sites officially became naval stations on the eve of World War II (in 1939 and 1940, respectively), they have much longer connections with the U.S. military. Hunters Point was built as a commercial shipyard in 1868, but acquired by Charles Schwab's Bethlehem Steel Corporation in 1905, which was, at the time, building warships for the Navy at a factory north of Hunters Point. 7 Schwab's business at Hunters Point was subsidized by the Navy, which had identified the strategic importance of San Francisco for its own interests in expanding U.S. military presence across the Pacific Ocean. The military's connection to Yerba Buena Island goes back even farther. First used by the U.S. Army in 1856, it became a naval training station in 1898, just after the Spanish-American War, with the United States preparing to invade the Philippines. 8 Yerba Buena remained a military base throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and the Navy acquired Yerba Buena and Treasure Island together in 1940.
During and after World War II, Treasure Island was used as a sending and receiving station (a stopping point for sailors coming to and from sea), and it also housed several training schools—including, after the war, a training program in Atomic, Biological, and Chemical Defense. 9 As an island in the middle of the bay, Treasure Island's impact on urban life was less profound than Hunters Point, where military industrialization had deep social consequences. During the war, the military's productive needs had created shipyard boomtowns around the San Francisco Bay Area and throughout the West Coast. High demand for labor attracted migrants from across the country, including African Americans leaving the Jim Crow south. Between 1910 and 1970, over six million African Americans left rural southern states for northern and West Coast industrial cities. 10 Before 1940, most black migrants headed to industrial cities like Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit, but the war redirected this migration toward the West Coast: between 1940 and 1945, San Francisco's black population increased by almost 30,000 people, or 665 percent. 11 Because of a racialized real estate market, most black migrants settled in the city's Fillmore District—which was torn down in the 1960s, during the city's infamous period of urban renewal—and in Hunters Point. 12
The closure of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in 1974 13 left roughly 8,000 people unemployed, and compounded a longer process of de-industrialization that was taking place in San Francisco, and particularly in the industrial Bayview-Hunters Point area. 14 De-industrialization produced high rates of unemployment and left a landscape of vacant industrial sites in the area, especially along the waterfront north of the shipyard. During roughly the same time, between 1950 and 1970, as a consequence of white flight and a discriminatory housing market, the black population of Bayview-Hunters Point increased from 21.6 percent to 71.6 percent of the population—an indication of racial segregation in San Francisco. 15 These years were also marked by an increasing sense of racialized neglect of the neighborhood and its population, as well as increasing political activism around anti-poverty and civil rights. Along with Hunters Point, the Bay Area cities of Oakland, Richmond, and Marin City all once housed wartime industrial shipyards that drew in black migrants from the south. Today, the geography of these former military boomtowns reads as a map of poverty, racialized populations, pollution, health inequalities, and environmental justice social movements. 16
Militarized environments
Both Hunters Point and Treasure Island are polluted with a stew of the twentieth century's more toxic industrial byproducts, including asbestos, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), pesticides, and radiation. 17 While radioactive isotopes were commonly used in industrial shipbuilding and repair work in the twentieth century, some of the radioactive wastes at these two military bases today come from U.S. military nuclearism during the Cold War, including nuclear weapons “tests” in the Pacific Ocean. The temporalities of these chemicals and forms of radiation outlasted the Cold War and persist as environmental hazards today.
From 1946 to 1969, the Hunters Point Shipyard housed the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory (NRDL), which grew out of the U.S.'s first set of nuclear tests at the Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, in the summer 1946. 18 Many of the ships that became radioactive at Bikini were brought back to Hunters Point for decontamination, and a small group of scientists was tasked with the project of clearing “hot” ships as well as experimenting with techniques in radioactive decontamination, which was a thoroughly new problem of the age. In its early years, radioactive warships from Bikini, docked at Hunters Point, were used as floating labs, and scientists worked out of small buildings on the shipyard leased out to the fledging lab, for temporary use. 19 By 1950, the NRDL had grown into a 600-person laboratory with a large research agenda that included working with fallout samples from the Pacific Proving Grounds and the Nevada Test site, developing more precise instrumentation to detect and measure radiation, and conducting biological experiments on animals. 20 Much of the lab's radioactive waste was packed into 55-galloon steel drums and dropped in the Pacific Ocean, but some of these wastes were also put in landfills on the base, and released into the shipyard's sewage system. 21
In August 2000, a toxic fire erupted at the shipyard's landfill, sending yellowy-green smoke into the air for several weeks. Public housing residents who live uphill from the shipyard, in former military barracks, could see the smoke, and worried about its effects—emanating from the most contaminated area on the base. 22 An Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry risk assessment later concluded that the wind blowing during those weeks, on average, would have pushed the smoke out over the bay, away from the public housing units, and that people's risk of cancer from the toxic event was low. Still, many Hunters Point residents question the risk assessment and connect this fire with a longer, lived experience of pollution and racism in the city. Bayview-Hunters Point residents who attend the Navy's environmental remediation meetings on the shipyard base conversion project want to know the history of the radiation lab, including the ways its waste products might have contributed to high rates of cancers and other environmentally related health problems suffered by people in the neighborhood today. At these meetings, the Navy shields itself from addressing the social history of pollution by arguing that its remedial task is merely technical, and that the politics of radioactive waste is a separate issue, not one of their concerns. 23
Treasure Island was not an industrial shipyard, rather its polluted nature today is largely a consequence of training programs in nuclear defense. After 1946, as the U.S. began preparing for future atomic bomb tests, the military realized it needed soldiers trained in both radiological warfare and radiological safety, and technicians who could operate and repair instruments that used or measured radiation. 24 The island's Damage Control School ran a number of programs in Atomic, Biological, and Chemical Defense, using real sources of radiation. In 1996, part of Treasure Island was opened for civilian use, including a small neighborhood built in the 1970s for military families on top of the former training area for the Atomic, Biological, and Chemical Defense school. In the past several years, residents have found shards of radium-227 in their yards, while in 2013, California's Center for Investigation Reporting found higher levels of cesium-137 on Treasure Island than the Navy had officially acknowledged—both isotopes used in its atomic defense training program. 25
In anticipation of a future environmental disaster—a nuclear war—the U.S. Navy produced actual environmental disasters at both military bases. Practices of radiological defense, including training programs and scientific experiments, allowed for a systemic application of radiation and other toxic chemicals at Hunters Point, Treasure Island, as well as at other military bases and research labs across the country. These practices provided the illusion that radiation could be safely managed—what can be considered a discourse of controllable disaster. This illusion of control is challenged by the existing threat of radiation at both military bases today.
Profiting from the wastes of war
Why are old, polluted military bases of value to companies like Lennar? It matters that these sites are near major cities, as Lennar's development projects are also part of a broader moment in U.S. urban history.
In 1980, in response to toxic disasters like Love Canal, U.S. Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, or CERCLA, generally known as Superfund. The federal-level toxic waste policy imposed a strict form of liability for hazardous waste cleanup, and also required remediation to analytical detection limits. 26 By the 1990s, cities and states argued that these aspects of Superfund had the effect of preventing industrial cleanups by discouraging private investment. Cities at the time had come to grapple with the spatial effects of de-industrialization—an urban landscape of vacant, contaminated properties, and sought to return these sites to economically productive use. 27 In response, in 1993, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) passed the Brownfields Action Agenda, followed by other legislation supporting private investment and redevelopment of toxic sites like the EPA's Brownfields Revolving Loan Fund Grants, Brownfields Job Training Grants, and the Small Business Liability Relief and Brownfields Act. Brownfields are defined as formerly industrial properties in which contamination deters or prevents future development. 28 Taken together, these policies had the effect of making contaminated urban sites a good business opportunity, particularly through providing liability relief and relaxing cleanup standards required before developers could begin rebuilding on them. 29
In short, while in the 1980s industrial cleanups were motivated by concerns for environmental and human health and governed by the federal level Superfund Act, by the late 1990s, these cleanups were motivated by economic factors, and governed by more business-friendly legislation in which cities and states had more regulatory authority. 30 As the EPA administrator, Carol Browner, wrote at the time in an environmental law journal, “brownfields are becoming places of opportunity.” 31 Between 1997 and 1998, the EPA removed 30,000 properties from its list of potential Superfund sites, as an incentive for private companies to invest to those sites, so they would not have to pay the higher costs of clean up. 32 Indeed, by the 2000s, the remediation and redevelopment of contaminated industrial sites had become an industry itself. For example, one of the Navy's main contractors at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard is the “life cycles management” firm Tetra Tech, Inc., which lists “brownfields” on its website as a “market.” According to the EPA in 2013, “The transition from a manufacturing-based economy has created both environmental challenges and socioeconomic development opportunities for communities throughout the United States. EPA estimates that over the next 30 years, more than $200 billion in economic activity will result from the cleanup of approximately 294,000 waste sites.” 33 While Hunters Point Shipyard is a Superfund site (Treasure Island is not), it has benefitted from these shifts in toxic waste policy over the past several decades, including a growing common sense among real estate companies and other financial interests that toxic waste sites can represent profitable opportunities.
Conclusion
In this context, the short-term temporalities of finance and capital accumulation conflict with longer temporalities of hazardous waste. Many truckloads of radioactive earth from both Treasure Island and Hunters Point are taken to privately owned nuclear waste repositories (another aspect of the remediation industry) to other parts of the country, creating new geographies of waste, and new problems for people living today and in the future. 34 The concept of slow violence challenges the notion that these military base conversions represents environmental “cleanups,” or clean breaks with the military's violent past. The remediation projects are also waste displacement projects, both spatially and temporally.
The concept of slow violence also expands notions of environmental justice, which are often restricted in practice by legal or technical standards of evidence. It is often impossible to connect one person's cancer with a particular pollutant, for example, or to prove discriminatory siting of a hazardous facility in a court of law. While the standards of evidence required in legal or scientific domains must be engaged with by environmental justice activists, it is also true that the kind of environmental violence posed by the military's toxic waste, and which many people around the world suffer from as part of their daily lives, is lost within these dominant logics. Drawing on the concept of slow violence, I suggest a more expansive notion of environmental justice, one that considers both the broad geographies and multiple temporalities of pollution and environmental suffering.
Footnotes
Author Disclosure Statement
The author has no conflicts of interest or financial ties to disclose.