War's Remains: Slow Violence and the Urbanization of Military Bases in California

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.