Article
ID: CBB355206157

Offshoring American Environmental Law: Land, Culture, and Marshall Islanders’ Struggles for Self-Determination During the 1970s (April 2017)

unapi
Democracy Law and legislation Environmental degradation Nuclear testing Nuclear weapons; atomic weapons United States, colonies 20th century, late Micronesia Marshall Islands

This article explores the impact of environmental law in US-controlled Micronesia. Historians have suggested that US environmental legislation and legal activism during the 1960s and 1970s often overlooked issues of environmental racism and injustice. This article establishes the importance of these emerging environmental laws for Marshall Islanders living under American rule and subjected to the harms of nuclear weapons testing. In 1972 the displaced people of Enewetak Atoll—a former nuclear test site—sued the United States hoping to stop a new program of conventional weapons testing on their badly contaminated ancestral atoll. The capacious concept of the environment used in the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 and the statute’s ambiguous territorial reach offered islanders important new opportunities to articulate their environmental values and to further their struggles for self-determination over ancestral lands and waters. This article argues that environmental law transcended the artificial territorial boundaries between the United States and its Pacific dependencies, opening up an important new venue of negotiation and conflict over the scope and environmental footprint of US offshore power.

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Authors & Contributors
Higuchi, Toshihiro
Johnson, Matthew P.
Marino, William
Krzysztof Dabrowski
Zaballa, Robert A.
Sarah E. Robey
Journals
Historia Scientiarum: International Journal of the History of Science Society of Japan
Environmental History
Social Studies of Science
Peace and Change: A Journal of Peace Research
International Journal for the History of Engineering and Technology
Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences
Publishers
Stanford University Press
Helion and Company
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Auburn University
University of Nevada Press
Permanent Black
Concepts
Nuclear testing
Nuclear weapons; atomic weapons
Nuclear and radioactive waste
Cold War
Science and war; science and the military
Government sponsored science
People
Rotblat, Joseph
Hutchinson, Dorothy
Time Periods
20th century, late
21st century
Places
United States
Soviet Union
Great Britain
Marshall Islands
Nevada (U.S.)
Japan
Institutions
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; Partial Test Ban Treaty; Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963)
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
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