This piece is the cover story of the November 2024 issue of Pandora Curated.
In October, Google and Microsoft announced plans to build several nuclear reactors in the United States to help power AI advancement, with the latter planning the reopening of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the site of “America's worst nuclear accident” (BBC, NY Times). Interestingly, the country has not had much luck in building safe nuclear waste infrastructure; abandoned plans in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, and the shutdown of a facility near Carlsbad, Mexico, are just a few recent examples.
However, little is known even to specialists in the field. The United States built two nuclear repositories in the late 1970s, filled them with its plutonium waste, and walked away. One is capped under a cement dome in an idyllic Pacific atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands; the other is buried under Greenland’s ice sheet.
As melting ice caps and rising seas are unsealing these nuclear tombs, with the cumulative effects of seeping radiation reaching far and wide, a disturbing pattern is exposed—colonial histories, Cold War nuclearism, and now climate colonialism, have formed a single deadly continuum in the regions most rapidly affected by global warming.
Two Indigenous women, one from a remote corner of the Pacific Ocean and the other meeting her in her homeplace, Greenland, embark on a video poetry investigation on the collapse of nuclear waste disasters and rising seas into singular spaces of intensifying colonial destruction. While at it, they deliver lessons in resilience and adaptability, thinking with/as water.
History in a Nutshell: Legacies of Hazardous Disposal
The Marshall Islands and Greenland, settled by Indigenous people millennia ago, have experienced violence by various dominant settler powers, eventually coming under the US and Danish colonial governance respectively.
Within 10 years during the Cold War, the US built up an immense arsenal of nuclear weapons and carried out roughly 68 atomic explosions in the Marshalls Islands, leaving behind severely irradiated, uninhabitable islands and “one of the most contaminated populations on Earth” on which they performed radiation experiments without consent afterwards (Hogue, Ahmed, Deloughrey).
Akin to the Marshallese experience, Denmark permitted the US to forcibly remove Inuktun populations from their territories in Greenland to construct Camp Century during the Cold War, also known as the “city under the ice”; a nuclear arsenal housing 600 nuclear missiles intended for launch using nuclear generators beneath the Greenland icecap.
Within the US, the policy for all kinds of nuclear waste is that zero releases are tolerable—the law calls for secure storage or disposal in highly engineered structures. In the case of the Marshall Islands, however, the US Department of Defense’s Nuclear Agency performed a considerably hasty cleanup to enable Marshallese relocation. The radioactive waste was bulldozed into the lagoon, while plutonium-contaminated fragments—with a half-life of 24 thousand years—were pumped as a concrete slurry to the bottom of a crater that another bomb had left on Runit, the most irradiated of the islands.
Nuclearism and Climate Change Intersections
The Runit Dome, as it came to be called, was built without any liner at the bottom, on a coral rock below sea level at high tide, naturally permeable and already fractured from nearby detonations.
Recently, cracks have begun to appear around its edges, with seawater gradually seeping in from below. Due to frequent storms and rising tides from climate change, the concrete cap could potentially “slide off”, according to Maggie Wander. The radiation, meanwhile, is drifting great distances, with scientists tracing plutonium isotopes with Runit’s atomic footprint as far as the South China Sea.
Similarly, upon Greenland’s Camp Century’s decommission in 1967, military planners abandoned the hazardous radioactive stuff there, assuming they would stay locked up in the ice sheet, as a “tomb for eternity” (VICE). Currently, however, as journalist Kate Lunau and environmental editor Damian Carrington report, global warming is causing Greenland to lose 30 million tonnes of ice per hour and the nuclear waste is about to re-emerge, putting vulnerable communities in Greenland, and as far away as Arctic Canada, at risk (VICE).
Even though the issue has caused quite a reaction from scientists, Jeff Colgan, professor of political science at Brown University, mentions that in the US government, “it’s not a high priority. In fact it’s a barely known [issue] in Washington” (VICE).
Isolates, Labs, and Canaries in the Coal Mine
Why, some might wonder, were these regions chosen to become the West’s military labs of harmful testing, and turned afterwards into nuclear landfills? Because of their remote location, and faulty notions of barrenness and emptiness, these spaces are being perceived as what Hawai’ian scholar Epeli Hau’ofa termed “nations supposedly too poorly endowed with natural resources and too isolated for their inhabitants ever to be able to rise above their present condition of dependence on wealthy nations”.
Western cultural imagination has, for a long time, conveniently cultivated colonial imaginative geographies of Pacific and Arctic islands as ‘geographical isolates’, according to UCLA professor Elizabeth Deloughrey. She and researcher Carol Farbotko, among others, have linked that with the use of these locations as ‘laboratories’ for all kinds of military and scientific experiments that would otherwise be impossible.
As climate change intensifies, apart from the butterfly effect that makes the Arctic ‘drown’ the Pacific in meltwater, these regions share another common thread in the Western eye—they are seen as mirrors or bellwethers, barometers for planetary transformation, and what Farbotko calls “canaries in the coal mine”.
Impacted more directly, rapidly and spectacularly than any other place in the world, they become not of importance themselves, but spaces where “the fate of the planet is brought forward in time and miniaturised in space,” while the date of their annihilation is dangerously “brought forward to a time already past” (Farbotko).
As a result, the two regions share the paradox of visibility in disappearance; the rapidity with which they are approaching tipping points correlates directly with an increased presence in the collective Western consciousness through culture, media and art.
RISE: Indigenous Voices Trace (Neo)colonial Waves
This interconnectedness of the Arctic and Pacific regions did not go unnoticed by Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Climate Envoy for the Marshall Islands Ministry of Environment, and the first Marshallese woman to publish a book of poetry. Together with Aka Niviâna, an Inuktun female poet and Greenland native, they created RISE: From One Island to Another, a stunning video-poem investigation of the tides of intensifying colonial violence that is drowning their homes—ultimately a form of trans-continental activism available to anyone on Youtube.
Colonisation is everywhere in the poem but mostly in the water that saturates the mirroring visuals, revealing a deadly climate interconnectedness: one of the islands is melting—and thus Niviâna is seen climbing higher and higher—the other is receiving the water, with Jetn̄il-Kijiner depicted neck-deep in it.
With rising voices that reach a climax, the two women then use their words to collapse different colonial spacetimes into a single tidal continuum of environmental and biopolitical violence that is now reaching its bleakest manifestation:
“mourning landscapes
that are always forced to change
first through wars inflicted on us
Then through
nuclear
waste
dumped
in our waters
on our ice
and now
this.” (RISE, 3:06).
The leaking nuclear tombs then become a shared spatial, physical nexus between nuclear colonialism and climate change, painting a saga of shared nuclear and climate legacies that engulf their islands during the Anthropocene. This has the potential to gather what author Nabil Ahmed calls spatial “forensic evidence for environmental crimes”, such as nuclear and climate-change-related ecocide.
According to Ahmed, although ecocide tied to climate change is not yet considered a crime in international law, the “direct causality between perpetrator and victim” in nuclear violence counters the “diffused causality” that characterises climate-change destruction, possibly establishing criminal causality and responsibility.
And yet there is another colonial wave incoming. For the Indigenous people of the Marshall Islands, the geoengineering solutions proposed by NGO-sponsored engineering and land reclamation projects to raise the archipelago’s infrastructure and even build new islands, are the latest link in a chain of unnatural forcings and destruction:
“Let me show you
airports under water
bulldozed reefs
blasted sands
and plans to build new atolls
forcing land
from an ancient rising sea” (RISE, 2:26).
In RISE, technoscientific band-aid solutions become another tool for what scholar of Indigenous Studies Hi’ilei Hobart calls “pumping power” into territories “in the form of infrastructures, waste, water and capital in ways that, in turn, obscure local native presence”.
It seems ridiculous that the Marshall Islands only contribute 0.00001% of global emissions and yet we are being forced to consider possibilities we would never have considered before […] I can’t see this as an opportunity if we have no choice in the matter. Building islands or even just elevating would mean ripping apart our land, as well as uprooting thousands of people in the process, and using processes that could destroy precious reefs. (Jetn̄il-Kijiner, “Bulldozed Reefs and Blasted Sands: Rituals for Artificial Islands”).
RISE: Hydro-ontological Thought Against Fallacies of Containment
The question remains: What to do about the rising water? The two women do not offer groundbreaking concrete solutions; instead, they propose something much more important: a way of thinking about solutions.
In RISE, Jetn̄il-Kijiner travels from the Marshalls to Greenland and gives Niviâna a basket containing shells from the irradiated coral atolls, connecting again the two locations under shared nuclear histories: “Sister of ice and snow / I bring with me these shells / that I picked from the shores / of Bikini atoll and Runit Dome” (RISE, 0:49). In a mirroring image, Niviâna welcomes Jetn̄il-Kijiner with a gift of stones, picked “from the shores of Nuuk / the foundation of the land I call my home” (RISE, 0:58).
The two gifts come directly from and, like the poets’ identities, are shaped by contact with the water. This watery relationality showcases the interconnectedness between Oceania and the Arctic as much more ancient and longstanding than the shared colonial histories; these are people of islands and waters.
“With these shells”, utters Jetn̄il Kijiner, I bring a story of long ago two sisters frozen in time on the island of Ujae one magically turned into stone the other who chose that life to be rooted by her sister’s side. To this day the two sisters can be seen by the edge of the reef a lesson in permanence. (RISE, 1:07) | “With these rocks”, utters Niviana, I bring a story about Sasuma Arna Mother of the Sea who lives in a cave at the bottom of the ocean. She sees the greed in our hearts the disrespect in our eyes every whale every stream every iceberg are her children. When we disrespect them she gives us what we deserve a lesson in respect. (RISE, 2:03) |
Shells and stones; activated through myths become metonyms for virtues like permanence and resilience that help people navigate and combat narratives of disaster, rootlessness and forced migration. The sisters become the stone of the island, and in so becoming, they cannot be washed away from it—they are aspects of the island.
Mirroring them, the two poets vow in the climax of the poem “may the same unshakable foundation connect us / make us stronger / as a testament / a declaration / that despite everything / we will not leave” (RISE, 3:33).
Thinking with/as Water for an Environmentally Just Future
Jaimey Hamilton Faris, professor of art history at the University of Hawai'i, points out that water is not spoken of as a corrosive or destructive force in the poem—as we are accustomed to in climate change narratives—but instead as part of the same interrelated “aquapelagic” environment that has taught and been shaped by generations in Jetn̄il-Kijiner and Niviâna’s communities.
Two mirroring aerial shots of Niviâna laying on ice and Jetn̄il-Kijiner gracefully floating in water evoke landscapes and seascapes that are embodied, lived, and living, flipping the common imaginaries of their island communities as submerged, invisible and isolated, to imaginaries of immersion, interrelation and activism.
As water circulates continuously through all bodies—human, non-human, ocean, and sky—it generates an entangled archive that is constantly becoming. If we pay attention to this archive through the relationality of our porous bodies, sensibilities of responsibility and care, even across large distances, come into focus. We are the condition of each others’ possibilities.
- Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water (19)
This ontological thinking and ‘rising’ with/as the water that the two Indigenous women propose ultimately flows over nuclear legacies of fragile containment and isolation, offering fluidity, porosity, and ultimately relationality as what Faris calls a “method and a practice for an environmentally just future”.
According to her, because the women view themselves as parts and not victims of the rising water, they create an immersive, expandable space for imagining “alternatives to climate discussions that still operate within explicitly capitalist, nationalist and power-elite frameworks”.
As the poem reaches its climax towards the end, the poets turn to the camera and address the audience: “Each and every one of us has to decide/if we/will/rise” (RISE, 5:20). If “we” at the beginning of the poem establishes a trans-oceanic space of solidarity beginning with a community of the two poets, it is now an invitational “we,” open to all viewers.
What does it mean, then, for us to be part of and rise with the water? It means first of all to practise relating from an immersed perspective, to sit within complex individual and community-based responses to local, global, corporate, and scientific climate decision-making. It means understanding one’s strategic and performative part in this decision-making as part of the natural environment, not above it.
Ultimately, being part of and rising with water means understanding the necessity of thinking in aquatic terms, such as porosity and saturation, before conjuring sloppy plans for geoengineering or nuclear containment structures. It means living with vital oceans—in liquid or solid form (ice)—of knowledge, awareness and action. And just in that, we might discover that in our world of flux, connection, change and uncertainty, this watery perspective opens new, more productive and ultimately appropriate, frames for thinking.
Edited by the Curated Editorial Team
Fani Apospori (she/her) has just finished an MSc in Literature and Modernity with Distinction at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), and is a Climate Correspondent at Political Pandora. She is particularly interested in the deconstruction of disciplinary boundaries in the humanities and beyond and is seeking to employ new ways of using arts and culture to reframe and diversify climate narratives, particularly in coastal countries.
She is currently engaged in community-led climate action communications and engagement in the UK, specializing in environmental justice through multimedia storytelling.
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Keywords:
Nuclear Waste Disposal, Rising Sea Levels, Climate Change Impact, Arctic Melting Ice, Marshall Islands Nuclear Legacy, Greenland Climate Crisis, Indigenous Resilience, Colonial Histories, Cold War Nuclearism, Climate Colonialism, Environmental Justice, Nuclear Tombs, Runit Dome Radiation, Camp Century Greenland, Plutonium Contamination, Indigenous Climate Activism, Trans-Oceanic Solidarity, Hydro-ontological Thinking, Climate Change Solutions, Ecocide Responsibility.
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