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Nuclear Colonialism and the Social Construction of Landscape in Alaska
Abstract
How does the social construction of landscape justify nuclear testing? Characterizations of the landscape such as remote, empty, and sparsely populated serve to erase the mostly non-white people who live in these places. However, when given the opportunity to speak, people affected by nuclearism reject these characterizations. Here I describe the selection of two nuclear test sites in Alaska in order to link them to nuclear test sites in the Pacific and in the American Southwest. I bring in testimony given by indigenous people in Point Hope, Alaska to show how people in this nuclear test site respond to colonial characterizations. It is important to identify these constructions as they have resonance and are now being used to justify nuclear waste disposal on indigenous lands.
... As such, they are presented as the 'natural' geographies for those infrastructures (Ashwood et al., 2019). This discourse on the rural is similar to how the 'desert' and 'wild' lands of the Global South are often imagined and fantasized of, based upon a colonialist collective psyche (Batel & Devine-Wright, 2017;Edwards, 2011), which projects the Other as 'terra nullius', empty land, there to be exploited and used for the 'development' and 'growth' of Western (read: neoliberal and capitalist) ways of living, and in a way that appears legitimate. This violenceat once infrastructural, discursive and epistemic (see also Davies, 2019) is enacted through the material and symbolic 'emptying out' and 'rhetorical replenishments' (Nixon, 2011, p. 165) of rural areas. ...
The extent to which infrastructures being deployed for a postcarbon transition can be considered sustainable has been increasingly scrutinized within the critical turn in energy justice research. However, the focus therein tends to be on how new megaprojects still reveal Global North–Global South colonial relations and energy-related injustices. In this paper, we aim to contribute to widening critical energy justice research by illustrating how it needs to also consider the spatio-temporalities of renewable energy colonialism in the Global North. To that end, we undertake a psychosocial historiography of selected large-scale hydroelectric power plants in Portugal, from the twentieth century to the present day. This historiography is undertaken via archival data and interviews. Our analysis illustrates how hydrocolonialism has been enacted – discursively, infrastructurally, and psychosocially – in rural areas in Portugal, across different socio-political regimes; and also how it can be contested, by identifying some examples of resistance.
... Research on nuclear colonialism (Endres, 2009;Edwards, 2011) has widely illustrated how governments often rhetorically portray specific places as other, as 'far away', 'empty' or 'sparsely populated' to legitimate both nuclear test sites and sites for nuclear waste disposal. As illustrated in some of the examples given in the previous section, this type of rhetoric has also shaped the deployment of renewable energy and associated technologies and associated sustainability agendas. ...
Governments, namely in the global North, are fostering the deployment of large-scale low carbon and associated energy infrastructures to mitigate climate change. However, deployment often raises opposition from local communities. Social sciences’ research aiming to understand opposition has been steadily increasing over recent decades, but has largely overlooked how opposition to renewable energy infrastructures often stems from, reveals, and may also promote colonialist practices. This paper will discuss the importance of uncovering and examining renewable energy colonialism in its psycho-social, cultural, institutional, geographical, and political dimensions, for creating energy democracies. To this end, it will first define renewable energy colonialism in its relation with neo- and carbon colonialism, environmental and energy justice, and other related concepts and approaches. Second, based on several examples, it will reflect upon state-of-the-art research that reveals how renewable energy colonialism occurs at different levels or scales: transnationally, inter-nationally, and intra-nationally. In so doing, the chapter will also illustrate how renewable energy colonialism is enacted through different voices, namely, through governmental and corporate practices; the media; and everyday discourses. Finally, reflections on the critical and analytical potential of the concept of renewable energy colonialism and on how to take it further will be presented.
Nuclear strategy has long been formulated through analogies. We focus on one in particular: guns. Early nuclear strategists in the United States used multiple analogical comparisons to make sense of the new, apparently unprecedented technology that confronted them. They compared nuclear deterrence to gun dueling and the nuclear revolution itself to the rise of gunpowder on European battlefields. Both analogies invoked empire, in the form of American settler frontier gunfights and the impact of firearms on European expansion. This article offers a critical reading of them. We show both analogies were historically flawed, relying on outdated accounts of how firearms shaped military-political change. Our argument proceeds in three stages. First, we document the role of gun analogies in early US nuclear strategic writing. Second, we critically evaluate the analogy, showing its historical and analytical limits. Drawing on firearms literatures in history, sociology, criminology, and economics, we show that much of what we now know about firearms diverges from nuclear theory and history. Third, we develop an alternative interpretation, contrasting these analytical fictions with the actual history of nuclear colonialism.
Dans la continuité de travaux qui invitent à prendre en compte la dimension politique des paysages industriels, nous proposons d’analyser la construction d’une centrale nucléaire comme une politique de production du paysage. Pour cela, nous prenons le cas de la centrale de Wylfa, au Pays de Galles. Au début des années 1960, sa construction est présentée comme une promesse de modernisation pour une région rurale souffrant de déclin industriel. En parallèle, les débats sur la préservation des paysages se structurent au Royaume-Uni, s’institutionnalisant dans l’Electricity Act de 1957, qui est le premier texte législatif majeur à comporter une clause sur l’aménité du paysage et sa préservation. Mobilisant le renouveau matérialiste de la géographie des énergies, nous proposons de considérer les paysages comme la résultante de relations entre des éléments matériels, des acteurs et des idées. En nous reposant sur une enquête de terrain menée en 2021, alliant observation, travail d’archives et entretiens, nous identifions une série de variables (techniques, juridiques et politiques) qui conditionnent la forme d’un paysage nucléaire.
»Geographien der Kernenergie. Eine Einführung«. Nuclear energy has long attracted the attention of scholars in the humanities and social sci-ences. With this HSR Special Issue, we would like to push the scholarly fron-tier by highlighting the geographies of nuclear energy in the past and present. Nuclear energy is inherently interwoven with geography. We argue that to fully appreciate and grasp nuclear energy’s geographical and spatial dimen-sions, approaches from a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields are needed. This special issue thus includes contributions from history, geogra-phy, political science, technology assessment, science and technology stud-ies (STS), and other fields. This article introduces this topic by outlining the state of the art of the geographies of nuclear energy and discusses different conceptual frameworks of how to understand nuclear-space interactions. In addition, the individual articles in this issue are briefly presented here and discussed within the research context. The articles themselves cover the ge-ography of nuclear energy from beginning to end: from the mining of ura-nium, the planning and construction of nuclear power plants, the formation of public resistance, and the cooling of nuclear energy sites as well as the evo-lution of research centres and, last but not least, the political control and stor-age of nuclear waste. The collection of articles published here were part of the double session “Geographies of Nuclear Energy,” presented at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2021, and of the session “Atomic Riv-ers,” presented at the ESEH Conference 2023.
Bien que connaissant un renouveau épistémologique, la géographie du nucléaire peine à identifier les processus menant certains espaces à être catégorisés socialement comme nucléaires. Cet article propose d’étudier ces mécanismes d’assignations spatiales en croisant les concepts de « nucléarité » et de « stigmatisation territoriale ». Le but est de singulariser la nucléarisation de l’espace, que nous définissons comme les opérations qui, par des pratiques et des discours, tendent à catégoriser socialement un espace comme faisant partie du domaine nucléaire, séparé de celui conventionnel, lui appliquant ainsi un ensemble de normes d’exception. Nous l’appliquons au cas de l’atoll de Hao, en Polynésie française, base arrière des essais nucléaires menés par la France de 1966 à 1996. Nous comparons deux évènements, la vente des gravats et des déchets métalliques issus de la destruction des infrastructures militaires. Les résultats montrent que la nucléarité spatiale est relationnelle, processuelle et multidimensionnelle, émergeant des actions des acteurs, de leurs intérêts et discours. Différents régimes de nucléarité spatiale coexistent dans le temps et l’espace, faisant fluctuer la nucléarité des lieux. Souvent décrite comme imposée par les agents dominants, la nucléarité spatiale est également reproduite par les acteurs locaux qui perçoivent des opportunités politiques.
The Cambridge History of the Polar Regions is a landmark collection drawing together the history of the Arctic and Antarctica from the earliest times to the present. Structured as a series of thematic chapters, an international team of scholars offer a range of perspectives from environmental history, the history of science and exploration, cultural history, and the more traditional approaches of political, social, economic, and imperial history. The volume considers the centrality of Indigenous experience and the urgent need to build action in the present on a thorough understanding of the past. Using historical research based on methods ranging from archives and print culture to archaeology and oral histories, these essays provide fresh analyses of the discovery of Antarctica, the disappearance of Sir John Franklin, the fate of the Norse colony in Greenland, the origins of the Antarctic Treaty, and much more. This is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history of our planet.
This article brings together the geographic literature on nuclear topics, and draws out the geographical dimensions of broader scholarship on ‘nuclearity’, to consider the premise of a nuclear landscape, and to offer a partial history of such landscapes. Places such as New Mexico’s Trinity Site have become iconic, at least in the United States, and a study of nuclear landscapes must consider the cultural force of spectacular weapons tests and related origin stories. But critical scholars have also looked beyond and below the distractions of mushroom clouds, to additional and alternative landscapes that are obscured by secrecy and relative banality.
This article begins with a guiding framework for how we might think about environmental justice (EJ), from a sociological standpoint. The next section argues that, if we would like to move societies closer to a state of environmental justice, then future EJ research and activism might move in a much more transformative and radical direction. The need for this kind of analysis and action is illustrated in a discussion of the problem and promise of "crisis." Crises represent policy failures in the eyes of mainstream scholars and observers, but this article views many such phenomena as the result of routine functions of our policy-making apparatus and market-based political economies. When we view environmental inequalities in such a light, one might then reach the conclusion that transformative and radical ways of thinking and being are required to address these situations.
Increasingly managers and scientists are recognizing that solving environmental problems requires the inclusion of a wide range of disciplines, governmental agencies, Native American tribes, and other stakeholders. Usually such inclusion involves communication at the problem-formulation phase, and at the end to report findings. This paper examines participatory research, the differences between the traditional stakeholder involvement method of communication (often one-way, at the beginning and the end), compared to full collaboration, where parties are actively involved in the scientific process. Using the Department of Energy's (DOE) Amchitka Island in the Aleutians as a case study, we demonstrate that the inclusion of Aleut people throughout the process resulted in science that was relevant not only to the agency's needs and to the interested and affected parties, but that led to a solution. Amchitka Island was the site of three underground nuclear tests from 1965 to 1971, and virtually no testing of radionuclide levels in biota, subsistence foods, or commercial fish was conducted after the 1970s. When DOE announced plans to close Amchitka, terminating its managerial responsibility, without any further testing of radionuclide levels in biota, there was considerable controversy, which resulted in the development of a Science Plan to assess the potential risks to the marine environment from the tests. The Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation (CRESP) was the principle entity that developed and executed the science plan. Unlike traditional science, CRESP embarked on a process to include the Alaskan Natives of the Aleutian Islands (Aleuts), relevant state and federal agencies, and other stakeholders at every phase. Aleuts were included in the problem-formulation, research design refinement, the research, analysis of data, dissemination of research findings, and public communication. This led to agreement with the results, and to developing a path forward (production of a biomonitoring plan designed to provide early warning of any future radionuclide leakage and ecosystem/human health risks). The process outlined was successful in resolving a previously contentious situation by inclusion and collaboration with the Aleuts, among others, and could be usefully applied elsewhere to complex environmental problems where severe data gaps exist.