Militarized Ecologies, Environmental Racism, and Degradation

U.S. Forces Korea recently began returning military sites to South Korea and, so far, has returned around one-half of the sites designated for reversion. For urban development, South Korea desperately needs this land. However, the returned sites suffer from contamination to both soil and groundwater at well above threshold levels determined by the Soil Environment Conservation Act and the Groundwater Act of South Korea. Although U.S. Department of Defense policy obligates the United States to remedy contamination that rises to the level of “known imminent and substantial endangerment,” so far, the United States and South Korea have not been able to agree on who bears responsibility for cleanup.

Conservation areas within the Korean DMZ generate new “natures” that are deeply political and enmeshed in evolving relations among humans and nonhumans, as seen using the example of migratory cranes. The endangered cranes literally transcend geopolitical borders, providing hope for the surmounting of the ideological differences that separate North and South Korea. At the same time, these cranes have exhibited rather remarkable adaptations to the conditions of the national division: they adapted to utilizing the T’ogyo Reservoir as a habitat in response to famine conditions in North Korea and hospitable feeding programs in Yangji village.

This article reframes human-centric notions of the parasite beyond how humans might be considered invasive others. Instead, it explores the shifts between guest and host in the context of South Korean conversation biologists and their work on the black-faced spoonbill, specifically on Guji-do or Guji Islet, on which the author observes “the detritus of artillery shells” and “the remains of bombing targets in the ground” (208–9). Kim’s focus on regions near the DMZ and the latter’s existing biodiversity argues against the “greenwashing” of the DMZ and instead locates possibilities for alternative futures through the framework of “strange kinship.” Kim argues that the “highly contaminated spaces of militarized natures” produce new “parasitical relations that are also ones of care and interdependence” (205).

Drawing on research in the borderlands of South Korea near the DMZ, this essay analyzes the heterogeneous life of landmines in postconflict militarized ecologies. Humanitarian narratives typically frame mines as deadly remnants of war, which aligns with postcolonial critiques that view them as traces of imperial power. Given that unexploded ordnance can remain live for up to a hundred years, the author suggests that mines and minefields become infrastructural when their distributed agency is redistributed over time, bringing into view nonhuman agencies and affordances that might otherwise go undetected in humanitarian or postcolonial critiques. Kim offers the framework of rogue infrastructure to capture the volatile materiality of mines and their multiple natural, cultural, technical, and political entanglements with the humans who exist alongside them.

This essay explores modes of thinking about disasters and temporality, the Anthropocene, and the social production of risk—set against a case study of the DMZ as a site for historical witnessing. Historical methods are crucial if we are to investigate deeply the social processes that have produced climate change. A “slow disaster in the Anthropocene” approach might show the way forward.

In this introductory essay, Albert L. Park highlights the value of studying environmental issues on the Korean peninsula. He describes how the contributions to this journal issue explain how the state engineered nature for human needs, security, and later economic growth—simultaneously altering nature and remaking institutions, systems, and cultures that influenced people’s agency and identity and reshaped forms of consciousness.

This essay provides a framework for understanding the intersection of militarism and the environment. It introduces a collection of essays that survey the widespread impact that military activities have had on landscapes and ecologies around the world. As Sasha Davis notes, “Military activities do not just destroy nature, they also actively produce it. As the articles in this issue demonstrate this production of nature in militarized environments has both material and discursive dimensions.” As the other study materials show, the U.S. military’s decades-long presence on the Korean peninsula has dramatically altered its ecology, producing militarized landscapes that are both covert (DMZ) and inconspicuous (redeveloped military base sites). How do we evaluate the environmental impact of the Korean War and the subsequent U.S. military presence on the peninsula? How can environmental degradation be used as a framework to discuss the militarization of Korea alongside that of other regions around the world?

This article examines the U.S. military’s decades-long history of dumping toxic chemicals in South Korea. It draws on whistleblower accounts of U.S. veterans stationed in South Korea, one of whom estimated that six hundred barrels of chemicals were buried outside Camp Carroll, about twenty miles from the city of Daegu, while he was stationed in Korea during the 1970s. A 2004 study found more than one hundred different harmful chemicals in the ground near the base, with cancer rates in the area almost 20 percent higher than the national average. The troubling accounts highlight the Korean War’s toxic environmental legacy. The article notes that the chemicals found in Korea, including Agent Orange, were similar to those used in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Can ecological degradation and chemical legacies serve to connect the Korean War to other imperialist wars like Vietnam? 

This article provides a critical perspective on the environmental degradation caused by U.S. military bases in South Korea. It focuses attention on the U.S. military’s evasion of responsibility for the decontamination of base sites before their return to South Korea. Originally, environmental provisions were not included in the two countries’ original Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which outlines the terms of stationing U.S. troops in the country. However, as the article notes, the 2001 SOFA called for the United States to “remedy contamination caused by United States Forces in Korea that poses a known, imminent and substantial endangerment to human health.” Despite these provisions, the United States resisted the demand to remediate sites to meet South Korean standards. What does the U.S. stance toward base site remediation tell us about the nature of SOFA, which governs not only environmental degradation but also a host of other issues, like the prosecution of crimes committed by U.S. troops stationed in South Korea?

This news article details the ecological and economic impacts of U.S. military bases in South Korea. It notes that “old, rusted oil tanks containing gasoline, diesel field, and JP-8 jet fuel” are buried throughout the Yongsan district of Seoul, remnants from the U.S. military base that occupied the 2.8 million square meter area until 2018. In addition to the environmental impact, the economic impact of cleaning up military base contamination has been shouldered by the South Korean government, and by extension the South Korean people. In 2012, for example, the South Korean government spent $12.5 million to clean up Camp Hialeah in Busan. How should environmental cleanup costs be divided, especially in light of the rhetoric that U.S. dollars pay for South Korean defense? More broadly, what does military base contamination in South Korea tell us about the global impact of the U.S. empire of bases?

The Real DMZ Project (RDP) was conceived in 2011 to explore the invisible borders of the DMZ through the critical lens of contemporary art and to raise awareness about the division of Korea. Through collaborations with artists, as well as experts in other fields of study, such as history, sociology, architecture, and ecology, the RDP has been conducting research and producing artworks, exhibitions, publications, and more that examine not only geographical but also invisible borders, such as the ideological and psychological divides that operate in our life and society. The RDP has thus evolved into a decade-long study into the DMZ region and many other types and issues of borders that exist in contemporary society at large. From 2012 through 2016, the RDP’s programs centered around Cheorwon, a South Korean city located just north of the 38th parallel, where we organized annual exhibitions. In addition, in Yangji-ri, a small village that used to be situated inside the Civilian Control Line, the RDP established a residency program for artists and researchers, so they can stay there for days or months taking a closer look at the everyday realities of the border area.

Bong Joon-ho’s 2006 film The Host (a closer translation for the Korean title is “creature” or “monster”) was a box-office hit and has been viewed by at least a quarter of the South Korean population. In the film, a mutant creature emerges from the Han River after a U.S. mortician at the Yongsan military base orders his Korean assistant to pour hundreds of bottles of formaldehyde into the river. The story centers on a poor Seoul family who must rescue one of its members, a middle-school girl named Hyun-seo, from the monster’s lair in the sewers. The film depicts the inaction and fecklessness of the Seoul government, who claims that the monster is host to a deadly virus and quarantines the family for having been exposed. The government also greenlights the deployment of a toxic chemical called “Agent Yellow” (an unsubtle reference to Agent Orange) into the river in an attempt to incapacitate the monster. Based on a real event in 2000 of U.S. chemical dumping in the Han River, Bong’s film is a science-fiction critique of U.S.-led militarized pollution and South Korean complicity. It is also a latter-day twist on Honda Ishirō’s 1954 film Godzilla, in which the eponymous monster is awakened by U.S. nuclear tests in Bikini Atoll.