Abstract
Since protest forced the US Navy off Vieques Island, Puerto Rico in 2003, the US military has embarked on one of the largest environmental remediation projects it has ever undertaken. This article explores the way a narrowly conceived, technocratic cleanup process is translated onto an island with a deep history of grassroots mobilization and antagonism towards federal authority. The Restoration Advisory Board (RAB) is a crucible for considering the uneasy dynamics of cleanup. US law enshrines the RAB as the principal venue for public in the cleanup process. However, the prevailing technocratic framework, constrained by under-resourced bureaucratic agencies, clashes with more encompassing concepts of environmental justice. Citizen members of the RAB, nonetheless, approach the committee as a point of access to information about the remediation process, and leverage their participation as a tool for advancing a broader set of environmental justice claims.
Highlights
Since protest forced the U.S Navy off Vieques Island, Puerto Rico in 2003, the military has removed more than 95,000 unexploded bombs and expended over US$215 million on clean up (US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 2017)
Studies of open detonation at the Massachusetts Military Reservation (MMR), among the first to question the safety of open detonation, revealed that open blasts released toxic particles into the air and soil at levels that exceeded guidelines more than 50% of the time
Vieques activists demanded that the Navy utilize closed detonation chamber (CDC) on the Vieques range as well, but met with resistance from the Navy, which argued that the size of Unexploded ordnance (UXO) at MMR was much smaller
Summary
Since protest forced the U.S Navy off Vieques Island, Puerto Rico in 2003, the military has removed more than 95,000 unexploded bombs and expended over US$215 million on clean up (US EPA 2017). The technocratic process treats cleanup as a relatively value-free endeavor where community participants can comment on the comprehensiveness of a particular cleanup activity, while sidestepping the more encompassing issues of community health, lack of land sovereignty, and competing narratives of risk. Does this narrowly conceived technocratic approach to cleanup exclude participants from defining the nature of the process: bureaucratic structures limit meaningful participation. Kohl and Cotton (2015) question the efficacy of achieving environmental justice goals by engaging the state on its own terms Bureaucratic structures such as the RAB, they argue, circumscribe active citizen participation, and divert energy from other tactics that might be more successful in advancing environmental justice. My analysis rested on long-term ethnographic research in Vieques extending back to the early 1990s, and participant observation in Vieques during the summer of 2014
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