In 1992, the US military lowered its flag and withdrew from the Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines. This marked a pivotal movement in Philippine history and was the outcome of a historic vote by the Philippine Senate that rejected an extended lease of the base and ordered the US military out of their land. However, as Filipinos said their goodbyes and took over the former military base in a collective effort to transform it into a commercial and freeport zone, the legacies of the US military remained. They remained not just in the cultural imprint of the American empire in the Philippines, nor in the political and economic structures that held the country together.Footnote 1 They also lurked in the very soil and water that had hosted the US military presence. Decades of neglecting leaky underground storage tanks and the lack of sufficient drainage in fire-fighting training facilities produced toxic, underground chemical plumes while an incomplete sewer system and treatment facility treated only about 25 per cent of the estimated 5 million gallons of daily sewage produced during the years of the military base.Footnote 2 Pollutants from the fire-fighting facilities, the ship repair facility and the power plants directly seeped from storage pits and leaky drums into the water and air. Why was the US military able to leave without cleaning up this environmental damage? How did Filipinos respond to this damage? What can the state of environment in and around the former bases tell us about the broader Philippine–US relationship?
In this essay I analyse a 2002 class action lawsuit brought by the Philippines against the United States regarding environmental damages caused by the US military, and the environmental stipulations, or the lack thereof, in military agreements signed by the United States and the Philippines as a way to understand the ever-evolving relationship between the two countries. Central to understanding Subic Bay's environmental landscape is its role as a global borderland, a legally plural place based on international exchange, an arm of informal empire.Footnote 3 Within and around the literal and metaphorical walls of Subic Bay are cultural contestations and negotiations over labour conditions, money, and power from which broader political-economic relationships are built.Footnote 4 Drawing on a cultural sociology approach that focuses on the role of practices, understandings, and meanings in social life, I argue that different understandings of time, sovereignty, and the relationship between the two, are at the root of the conflict around the US military presence and its environmental accountability.
Whereas US military and government officials understand the legal case through what I call a contractual timescape by focusing on the present-day sovereignty of the Philippines and dismissing claims that centre on the environmental damage caused by the former US bases, Filipino organisations and activists rely on a stewardship timescape, that is, a long-term understanding of time and the legacies that remain from the US military and colonial rule in the Philippines. Second, I show how Filipino officials used environmental issues strategically in their discussions with the US military over its role in the Philippines, and that progress on environmental conditions is indicative of the growing leverage the Philippines has in this relationship. Environmental conditions and protections are not static but evolve, and in analysing the military agreements over time, I show how concessions and compromises have been made in the logics surrounding contractual and stewardship timescapes. Finally, I show how the cultural logics associated with contractual and stewardship timescapes can be applied beyond environmental damage. I argue that they can also be connected to contemporary activity in Subic Bay: from practices of littering to understandings of cleanliness and the built environment as symbols of modernity.
The environment and the Anthropocene
In 2000, Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer put forth the argument that we are currently living in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene, which is defined by the noticeable impact people have on the environment.Footnote 5 Although these two scholars were writing about the Anthropocene from an atmospheric chemistry and biology perspective, the term has taken hold in the social sciences and humanities. The Anthropocene is ‘also a heuristic device that enables humanity to “think like a planet”’ and a way to collectively understand the stories of history around and across the globe.Footnote 6 This is the age of the Great Acceleration, of the onslaught of modernity, and the rise of hybrid ecologies and eco-fusions of nature and people.Footnote 7 Indeed, the environment itself is culturally constructed, tied with race, and expansions of empire.Footnote 8 So, too, has managing the environment been central to nation-building, ‘civilising’ projects and the broader political economy,Footnote 9 and a key factor in a host of global security issues, from food, water, and energy politics to climate change, and the history of human impacts on the environment.Footnote 10 This article builds on this research by highlighting the differing cultural constructions of time and the cultural agency of political elites in shaping environmental discourse around Subic Bay. Ultimately, I argue that using a cultural lens to examine environmental conflicts reveals different cultural schemas, or logics, that underlie this political economy.
Environmental accountability
In December 2002, ten years after the US military withdrew from the Philippines, a group of two non-profit environmental organisations — Arc Ecology and the Filipino/American Coalition for Environmental Solutions — along with 16 individuals who ‘live and/or travel … and/or have family members that live and/or travel on or near the Clark and/or Subic properties’ filed a class action lawsuit against the US Navy, US Air Force, and the US Department of Defense.Footnote 11 The coalition sought to compel the US to conduct an official and complete assessment of the environmental impact of the former US Subic Bay Naval Base and US Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. The petitioners argued that their claim fell under the US Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), which ‘created a tax on the chemical and petroleum industries and provided broad Federal authority to respond directly to releases or threatened releases of hazardous substances that may endanger public health or the environment’ and was applicable to both long- and short-term removals and actions.Footnote 12
Petitioners claimed that they were or likely had been exposed to environmental contamination while the United States occupied the bases, and that the US Congress clearly outlined that CERCLA is applicable to the overseas military bases because of the definition of the United States as ‘the several States of the United States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the [US] Virgin Islands, the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas, and any other territory or possession [emphasis added] over which the United States has jurisdiction’. Furthermore, they argued, the Defense Environmental Restoration Program (DERP) also lays out this applicability to overseas bases when it says
The Secretary shall carry out […] all response actions with respect to releases of hazardous substances from each of the following […] each facility or site which was under the jurisdiction of the Secretary and owned by, leased to, or otherwise possessed by the United States at the time of actions leading to contamination by hazardous substances.Footnote 13
In making these claims, they relied on international principles and the ‘view that activities within a country's jurisdiction or control should not cause significant injury to the environment of another country’. Their stance is that the United States is responsible for the long-term environmental damage accrued by the Clark and Subic bases.
Indeed, although the extent of the long-term environmental damage caused by the bases was then unknown, US officials did have some sense of their hazardous impact. Before the United States withdrew, the US General Accounting Office gave a report to Congress entitled Military base closures: U.S. financial obligations in the Philippines, which included known environmental damages and outlined the obligations, if any, of the United States.Footnote 14 The damages initially identifiedFootnote 15 at the Subic Bay Naval Base, for example, included: underground storage tanks without leak detectors, no drainage systems in the fire-fighting training facilities, and no completed sanitary sewer system and treatment facility — and they estimated that of the 5 million gallons of daily sewage, only 25 per cent was treated.Footnote 16 Pollutants from the fire-fighting facilities, the ship repair facility and the power plants went directly into the water and air, respectively. Indeed, according to personal interviews and newspaper reportsFootnote 17 from those living within and around the area, the Kalaklan River that separated the base from Olongapo City, where US servicemen and Filipinos would race along the river on fishing boats, canoes, or whatever was available, was colloquially known as ‘shit river’ precisely because raw sewage flowed directly into it. Even US officials admitted that all of these things did not comply with US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards and stated that estimates to clean up and restore the area would be upwards of $25 million, the average cost of cleaning up the worst hazardous waste sites in the United States.Footnote 18 Yet, because none of the military agreements had any environmental clauses, nothing was done in preparation for, or after, the US military withdrawal from Subic Bay.
Because of the lack of environmental clauses in the United States–Philippine Military Bases Agreement (MBA),Footnote 19 the respondents of the lawsuit asked for a motion to dismiss, citing the US Federal Rule of Civil Procedure (12(b)(6)) when they suggested that the petitioners ‘fail[ed] to state a claim upon which relief can be granted’. The original district court granted the motion, dismissing the claim and concluding that CERLA does not apply to extraterritoriality, that is, to places outside of the United States and its territories, because Congress would have made that intent clear in their writing.Footnote 20 The respondents appealed and presented their arguments to the ninth circuit of the US Court of Appeals.
The appellate court affirmed the district court's decision for three reasons: first, that there was no evidence that the law was intended to apply to extraterritoriality; second, the timing of the claim — in 2002, the facilities had been under Philippine control for ten years and was no longer under US control; and finally, because the two nations had not agreed on the need for an environmental assessment. Because so much time had elapsed between the US-controlled base and the Filipino-run Subic Bay Freeport Zone, US courts could not order the US military to assume any responsibilities for the environmental hazards in the area. The area was no longer under US control, territory, or sovereignty, and had not been for a decade. Indeed, the Court concluded that any contamination or injury to the Philippines should have been negotiated prior to the military withdrawal.Footnote 21 Sovereignty was again evoked because the Court pointed out that American law is only applicable domestically, and it would be ‘unreasonable’ to assume that a claim could be made on foreign land.Footnote 22
Why does this legal case matter? What do these competing legal arguments tell us? How can we understand the US courts’ decisions? One way of seeing these legal arguments and decisions is as cultural understandings of the issues at stake. Indeed, we know that how we think about ourselves and our communities is culturally constructed. For example, Evitar Zerubavel's work calls attention to ‘culturally specific cognitive traditions’Footnote 23 or the different ways in which groups of people classify the world. That is, thinking itself stems from a ‘process of cognitive socialization that allows us to enter the social, intersubjective world. Becoming social implies learning not only how to act but also how to think in a social manner.’Footnote 24 Time itself is socially and culturally constructed, from how people remember the past to our understandings of calendars and schedules.Footnote 25 Hence, I argue that at the heart of the conflict, which is centred on accountability related to the environmental consequences of the former US military bases in the Philippines, are different cultural understandings of time, and how time relates to sovereignty and accountability. That is, through the lens of this environmental case, we can see two distinct timescapes, ‘the embodiment of practiced approaches to time’,Footnote 26 or cultural ways of thinking about time (see table 1).
Table 1: Two approaches to the environment and environmental damage
The first is what I call a contractual timescape. Broadly conceived, contracts are legal, voluntary commitments centred on achieving a particular goal, and are legally and informally (for example, through reputation or morality) enforced.Footnote 27 They are central to the legitimacy and functioning of markets,Footnote 28 states’ ‘double transitions’ to democracy and capitalism,Footnote 29 and also ‘constitute powerful constraints on the behavior of both the state and private agents but only when they are consistently enforced’.Footnote 30 They also are the result of negotiations between two or more contracting parties, each of whom come to an agreement regarding who gets and gives up what and what understandings underlie this transaction. That is, the content of the contract is constitutive of the relationship among those involved.Footnote 31
The contractual timescape in which US officials orient their arguments in this case study emphasises the present-day. Here, time is bounded. It is bounded to a particular place and situation, in this case, the military bases in the Philippines and the environmental damage from them. Time is also bounded by the responsibility of actors. That is, there are bounded limits on when a particular entity — in this case the United States — can be held accountable for its actions. This contractual timescape is based on the language of respect among equal actors, where both the United States and the Philippines are sovereign entities acting in a homo economicus tradition of self-interest and individuality as offers of similarly rational nation-states. The Filipino organisations and groups, on the other hand, viewed the environmental damage through a different lens, one based on the notion of stewardship.Footnote 32 In management studies, stewardship theory revolves around managers thinking collectively, pursuing the greater good for the organisation in which they work, rather than by self-interest.Footnote 33 In organisations, the focus on stewardship is on the long-term — how to produce motivation and involvement, rather than control and surveillance, of workers.Footnote 34 I use the term stewardship timescape to emphasise arguments orientated toward the long-term good of the collective. Here, the view is that the past bleeds into the present — they cannot be distinctly separated from one another. Geographic locations affected by environmental disasters and contamination cannot be bounded spatially, since wastes and pollutants seep into the ground and flow to places not within a quarantined place on a map, while gases and pollutants waft in the sky, beyond the clouds and any lines demarcating specific stretches of territory. Nor can geographic places be bounded temporally, since the consequences of actions may have long-lasting effects that are only noticeable years after the original occurrence. As such, responsibility for these long-lasting effects cannot be similarly bounded. Residuals of the past continue to linger and are a part of the present. Moreover, relationships built on power and inequality, for example, through empire, do not automatically become equal after independence. Instead, the inequalities underlying the US–Philippine relationship during the American colonial era continue to play a role, long after the 1946 Treaty of General Relations that recognised the Philippines as a sovereign nation-state. This legal attempt to hold the United States accountable for environmental damages that stemmed from its military bases is one more step in recognising and addressing the institutionalisation of the inequalities between the two nation-states.
These two orientations on how to understand contemporary environmental damage in the Philippines and its links to the US military are fundamentally at odds. The two parties in this court case are speaking the same language, but are speaking past one another since their understandings of accountability and time differ. However, that does not mean that the United States’ environmental accountability in the Philippines is a lost cause. Instead, we can see how Philippine officials used their ever-evolving power in the US–Philippine relationship to gain traction on environmental protections.
Negotiating the environment
Many scholars see law as cultural meaning-making systems and often note the difference between ‘law-on-the-books’ and ‘law-in-action’.Footnote 35 That is, culture is entwined with how law itself is created, enacted, revised and experienced. What does this mean for US–Philippine legal agreements? Before answering that question, we first have to understand what international law is. International law is based on a series of treaties and other types of agreements made among nation-states.Footnote 36 To many scholars, global governance, and the international law on which it rests, is based on nation-states voluntarily and partially ceding sovereignty, since it involves agreements to follow particular rules set forth in a given treaty, whether because of norms or fears of sanctions.Footnote 37 Seeing sovereignty as shared and/or ‘disaggregated’Footnote 38 allows us to recognise how global governance can be decentralised and interconnected.Footnote 39 Yet, the creation and implementation of treaties is also subject to differences in power between nation-states, though scholars disagree on whether ambiguity in law or ‘soft law’ — and what that means for those who wrote the laws and how they are implemented — necessarily privileges the nation-state that holds more power than the other.Footnote 40
If the legal case about environmental damage in the Philippines points to two different cultural logics or schemas, then examining the US–Philippine military agreements themselves and how they transformed over time allows us to see the extent to which particular cultural logics are codified into law, and whether and to what extent they can be challenged, revised, and/or reproduced over time. I argue that the changing terms of treaties between the two countries highlights the ever-evolving ability of the Philippines to assert its will by, in this case, placing the environment on the agenda for discussion. The changing treaty terms also demonstrate compromises between the contractual and stewardship timescapes, though these compromises do not negate the continued unequal power relationship between the two nation-states.Footnote 41
The Philippines was finally recognised as independent from the United States in 1946. Yet, on the heels of this celebration were other chains that tied the Philippines to the United States. One such chain was the 1947 Military Bases Agreement, which outlined the rules and regulations that governed the US use of military bases and facilities in the country, the two largest of which were Subic Bay Naval Base and Clark Air Base in the provinces of Zambales and Pampanga respectively. Although the MBA covered everything from taxes to criminal jurisdiction over the military base and US service personnel, it lacked specific attention to the environment, and any environmental issues stemming from the base, such as how the base could potentially pollute the waters of Subic Bay.Footnote 42 To be sure, there were clauses related to environmental concerns which stated that the United States had the right to improve neighbouring constructions (such as bridges), and the health and sanitation in areas surrounding the base. Yet, the United States was not required to return the bases in the same condition they were received, nor was the Philippines obligated to provide compensation for any improvements on the land. Given that there were no specific provisions about environmental rights or standards, the United States was not legally responsible for any long-term obligations related to the environmental impact of the bases. The absence of, and silence on, environmental stipulations is deafening.
Yet, this document was not static. Several important amendments were added through the years leading up to the US withdrawal in 1992, including a 1966 amendment which changed the initial term of the lease on the bases from 99 years to 25 years. This amendment meant that the MBA was now set to expire in 1991. In anticipation of this looming deadline, the United States and Philippine governments proposed the 1991 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Security (TFCS), which sought to extend the MBA by ten years. This treaty did have environmental regulations, including provisions that the United States and Philippine commanders establish
an environmental program and formulate substantive environmental protection standards governing the disposal of hazardous or toxic waste consistent with laws of general applicability in the Philippines. It would also have empowered the Philippine government to monitor and verify U.S. adherence to the substantive standards.Footnote 43
More specifically, the US commander-in-chief would be held responsible ‘for the management and control of the disposal of hazardous or toxic waste generated by the operations, activities and training of the US forces’.Footnote 44
In the TFCS we see not only an attempt to hold the United States accountable for any environmental damage that occurred as a result of its military base activity, but also to heed Philippine legal environmental standards. By focusing on disposal practices, the TFCS also signifies a thinking about the long-term impact of the damage. However, there were no clauses related to the past, and the waste and damage that had already wreaked havoc on the land was left in the hands of the Philippine government. Yet, although this treaty was signed by officials in both countries, it was not ratified by the Philippine Senate. Instead, by a vote of 12 to 11, the Philippine Senate voted for the withdrawal of the US military, spurred on by nationalist movements and sentiments regarding the United States’ unequal power in the Philippines, and concerns about national sovereignty. Since these proposed environmental protections were not in effect, it left the United States with little to no responsibility for the environmental hazards caused by its military bases.
The ability to hold the United States accountable for the environmental conditions of the bases was not lost, however, when the Philippine Senate decided to reject the TFCS. This is because the US military never really quite left the Philippines. They continued to visit the Philippines through a litany of military and defence treaties signed in the 1940s and 1950s, which provide links between the US military and the Philippines outside the MBA, and a 1998 Visiting Forces Agreement, which more specifically parcelled out the authority and rights of the United States and the Philippines. In 2014, a new and controversial agreement was signed: the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), which signified a list of ‘Agreed Locations’ that provided a quasi-permanent presence once again to the US military.
The EDCA contained an important article on ‘Environment, Human Health and Safety’ not seen in previous US–Philippine military agreements. It stipulated that both the United States and the Philippines would ‘pursue a preventative rather than reactive approach to environmental protection … [and] cooperation to ensure problems that may arise are dealt with immediately in order to prevent any lasting damage to the environment’.Footnote 45 Furthermore, it stated that the United States would adhere to environmental laws, whichever was more protective: the United States, the Philippines or ‘international agreement standards’, and that the United States would ‘not intentionally release any hazardous materials or hazardous waste owned by it, and, if a spill occurs, shall expeditiously take action in order to contain and address environmental contamination resulting from the spill’.Footnote 46 Thus, moving forward, the United States would be held to an environmental standard in its operations in any Agreed Location. Here again we see a compromise, where the cultural logics and timescape around stewardship and the long-term environmental impact of the ‘Agreed Locations’ is codified into law.
Yet, this article of the EDCA also states that ‘The Philippines confirms its policy to implement environmental, health, and safety laws, regulations, and standards with due regard for the health and safety of United States forces and United States contractors’, resulting in an ambiguous clause where the Philippine government has to take into account how their policies impact US forces. It also is notable in what the article does not include: provisions or aid regarding previous hazardous waste or associated environmental clean-up from the former military base, nor any concrete promises or plans regarding what the clause on their commitment to ‘contain and address environmental contamination’ will entail financially, materially or otherwise. There is a nod to, and incorporation of, thinking about future impacts — an important step in managing environmental waste. But just like the TFCS, the EDCA stipulates terms and conditions for the future, but not the past. Legacies of environmental damage are left to be handled by the Philippine government.
Nevertheless, what these new proposed provisions highlight is the capacity of Philippine government officials to get particular issues, such as long-term planning regarding environmental protections, on the table for discussion. This is important, as setting an agenda, or the ability to shape conversations, is one dimension of power.Footnote 47 We cannot underestimate the importance of these provisions. To do so would mask the impact of everyday efforts that can lead to political gains in the future.
Preserving legacies
Thus far, I have discussed the contractual and stewardship timescapes as they relate to the US military and Filipino individuals, organisations, and governments, respectively. Yet, in arguing for these two cultural logics surrounding time, accountability and sovereignty, I am not suggesting that US citizens or nationals, as a group, are contractual thinkers, nor am I suggesting that Filipinos, as a group, are stewardship thinkers. Instead, I am careful to limit the scope of my analysis by focusing on particular arguments made in, around, and about a specific contested space and the environmental legacies it left behind.
In doing so, we can also see how this sense of contractual and stewardship timescapes applies outside the realm of environmental damage and waste. For instance, the built environment within Subic Bay signifies its military legacies: the gated entrance policed by armed guards or the former US military buildings repurposed and transformed by the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority, the Freeport Zone's local government. To those who repurpose the buildings, the symbolism of modernity is important. So, too, are cultural and environmental practices that stem from the US military period and purposefully maintained by people on the ground.
One example is Cyril, a Filipino visitor at the Subic Bay Freeport Zone and the son of two former base workers. When I interviewed him as part of my fieldwork, he told me how he dislikes the Harbor Point Mall constructed inside the Freeport Zone precisely because it brings an influx of people who do not have a connection to the place. He said that
[T]here's a lot of visitors [to the Freeport Zone] that don't know, in general, the rules and regulations here. I fear that the discipline inside here will vanish. Because of course, some other people throw their waste or garbage in random places. But us, generally, we're not like that. We don't spit on the floor. Normally we don't do that.Footnote 48
Here, in the vein of Mary Douglas, he delineates what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ through specific practices related to hygiene, like littering or spitting on the floor.Footnote 49
Indeed, the cleanliness of the Freeport Zone was an attraction for many Filipinos who lived and worked in or visited the former base. Subic Bay's military history left behind spatial and cultural residues that continue to influence the activities within the Freeport Zone.Footnote 50 That is true for both the environmental toxins in the ground which pollute the water, as well as for everyday practices, such as throwing garbage in the trash cans and maintaining a so-called ‘clean’ environment. There is, however, a distinction between those who have a connection to the former base, whose stewardship logics surround the preservation of practices associated with the US military base, and the temporary contract workers and visitors, whose ties to the place are instrumental, rather than nostalgic, and thus are framed around a contractual timescape and logic.
Alongside these social imaginariesFootnote 51 of modernity and cleanliness is the continued US military presence, though now as a ‘visiting’ or ‘semi-permanent’ form, and the overt forms of sexual violence that can take place between US servicemen and Filipino women.Footnote 52 What also lurks in the shadow is the ‘slow violence’ of the US military and its impact on the environment and the poor. Rob Nixon describes slow violence as
a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all … [it is] a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales.Footnote 53
It is the unseen, slow violence of the environmental damage, pollutants, and wastes that continue to impact Subic Bay and the surrounding communities. The waste in the water, the pollutants in the air, and the inhaled asbestos that has seeped into the walls, products, and machines that made up the former US military buildings,Footnote 54 all continue to both haunt and contemporaneously occur within the Freeport Zone,Footnote 55 even as it remains a symbol of modernity.
Conclusion
As global borderlands, the US military bases in the Philippines were sites of contested sovereignty and home to ambiguous laws and regulations. The cultural, socio-spatial, and environmental legacies of the military bases have remained long after they were repurposed. Environmental conflicts, then, allow us to see how the broader political economy is constitutive of who is responsible for which environmental conditions, why, and over what period of time. In this article, I argue that conflicts that centre on different cultural logics of contracts and of stewardship, related to timescapes, reveal what is at stake: understandings and accompanying financial burdens around accountability and sovereignty. How we understand the impact of time, and whether we have to account for the unintended and intended effects of the Great Acceleration, militarisation, and (de)industrialisation of society all matter.
It also matters whether relationships among nation-states are seen as equal or as having deeply unequal roots, because how these relationships are seen affects how we understand questions of who is responsible for environmental damage and whether and how these damages can be addressed. As such, we see how the cultural logics underlying contractual and stewardship timescapes are associated with particular ethical and political responsibilities, or the lack thereof.
Indeed, places like Subic Bay continue to exist precisely because they are places of contested meanings — of empire and of modernity, of violence by US servicemen, and of fantasies of migration and marriage on the part of (some) Filipinas.Footnote 56 They are places where identities are continually recreated and reimagined, which provide windows into the broader political economy and are new analytic sites for the study of global inequality. Within their walls, sovereignty is contingent and continually negotiated, and cultural contestations, including those around the environment, are most visible. As such, we can think of the dilemma of the Anthropocene as the dilemma of competing cultural logics around the environment, and how to address the long-term impact of US military bases on their host communities, and sort out who is responsible and why.
