Analyze

Environmental harm and the safety are often the key categories and concepts used when citizens and activists have advocated for changes to US military infrastructure in South Korea. By Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek South Korea, the environmental costs of US military infrastructures often call on the citizens who live near the bases. In this below a new concrete wall built by the US military had blocked the natural water flow, leading to flooding just outside the base during heavy rainfall. Formally all environmental concerns are mediated through a clause called Known Imminent Substantial Endangerment Clause which asks that citizens must prove bodily harm has been inflicted due to environmental harms caused by the US military in order to receive redress. The US military often chooses to ignore claims of US military infrastructure effecting the daily lives of citizens who live near the occupation as the local governments and lawyers are often hesitant to approach the US military about grievances due to the financial support the city receives for hosting US military infrastructure. While environmental protections exist, when they are used and how they are used are often dictated by the US military who are not lawfully accountable for the citizen's livelihoods or concerns with US military infrastructure. In the case of this flooding incident, an activist organization was able to pressure the local government to make a complaint. It resulted in the construction of a drainage system which sits outside of the US military base and inside the property of a local citizen's land. Because all US military infrastructure technically maintains control over the land 3 past it's actual construction it remains up for debate whether the construction of the drainage system should be seen as a base expansion or not.

Cho, Tony. 2023. "Drainage system for Osan Air Base in reaction to flooding outside its borders." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawaii, Nov 8-11.

Piecemeal approach to self-regulation forecloses more sweeping structural change as well as an actual check on power thru independent control over corporations

No real audit and no punishment for violating something like the UN Global Compact.

Since the CSR initiatives align with some of the infrastructure/development and personal goals of the village elites, it forecloses resistance to the mine and in fact has spawned violent defense of the mine by local people. 

Mistrust of the NGOs, who come in and out, and who the corporations have carefully targeted with smear campaigns, forecloses certain kinds of alliances that could have put a check on corporate power, but perhaps not improved the lives of the villagers in the way they wanted.

They see their environmental training as enlightening the backward locals who eat turtle eggs or fish in the reefs - so here they are helping the charismatic environment and helping the unknowing locals to preserve natural beauty. They wanted to provide waste management - they believe it’s helpful to the locals and it also would help with their distaste for trash at the beaches. The other CSR initiatives are portrayed as being forcefully demanded by the village elites and given as concessions to improve security, so the narrative of “help” to the locals is less prominent.

Their scientists have neutralized the environmental damage their practices do - defining tailings as nontoxic 

Enviro-rituals - (Gusterson) - -Flamboyantly lick, eat, bathe in the tailings - for media, on road shows… Rituals demonstrate but also produce their belief in the harmlessness - cites Geertz 1973 and Althusser 1971. This is also a kind of diversion - because maybe the tailings are not toxic to a human’s licking them, but they destroy the marine life the way they are dumped into the ocean, and they may react with other things in such a way that the end result is extremely toxic to humans, not to mention that it is certainly extinguishing a staggering amount of marine life by nature of crushing, before anything else 

Charismatic species - they hand-release sea turtles near a resort, very publically, a very feel-good moment that “Feels like social action”, and produce narratives of unenlightened locals being the ones bad for the environment because they eat turtles and turtle eggs - criminalize subsistence - attribute to poverty and ignorance, so they spend corporate $ on environmental education, and tell the kids that what their families do is bad. (The subsistence activities are often social - so people do them even if they can afford to buy food differently)

In-house corporate anthropologist - debunking the idea of the “ecological noble savage” as something first world activists made up - of course there are different ways to be ecologically-minded… 

Things that compete with mining corporations for resources or charismatic cases that are easily blamed on the mine are the environmental issues they talk about and they work to address - missing is greenhouse gas, for example. 

Claim they focus on Western corporations to get Western funding - claim they’re not transparent whereas corps have annual reports to shareholders. Various defaming of the NGOs - saying they are in the hands of “international anti-development” NGOs, that they infiltrate and only create illusion of local resistance, say their clear goal is “to bring international mining companies to their knees” - [which is almost funny]

Clandestine strategies: instead of suing, put the NGO on a watch list of bad/ non transparent NGOs, use the NGO as a workshop case study of bad NGO, held by a different cooperative and influential NGO that allies with the corporation secretly; op-eds “placed” into newspapers calling for regulation of NGOs

Basically turning transparency and accountability against the NGOs

Control of information flow - circulating the inaccurate NGO bulletin to rile up anger at the NGO - 

They define themselves as “environmentally friendly,” “good”, “moral”, “responsible” mining corporation, and their moral narrative is defined against these other groups in different ways: they have healthy competition with the backward mines (also “dinosaur”, will go extinct, they do blatant pollution and human rights violation), patronizing superiority for the poor Indonesians, and they straight up vilify the activist NGOs

Mine managers are proud of the mine and the environmental/ social/development projects, which they raise as evidence 

A lot of local groups want to take credit for attacking the activists - attacking the activists and defending the mine becomes morally sensible to many of these actors

Interestingly the narrative here is that village elites have used tactics, including violence, blocking roads, etc., to force the mining corporation to act as the state and provide patronage, goods, development in the material/infrastructural sense. The corporations use the CSR to quell their protesting. 

State gets demoted to one player of “multi-stakeholder” process in these voluntary self-monitoring/ self-regulating situations. Corps are rhetorically also just one player, but come to these events in force and drive the rhetoric, and in fact it’s all up to them what they actually do

In remote areas, the state doesn’t provide infrastructure and services so the mining companies become de-facto state in the provision of these things.

Three features described for CSR - 1) voluntary self-regulation, 2) articulating the value to the profit of doing CSR, and 3) strong ties to development industry 

Differing beliefs about what is development - the Infrastructure -centered development is out of style - now it’s about self-help, participatory, bottom-up - the former is associated with slow state and new is associated with certain types of CSR - tho not the wins that the village elites got in this case 

US foreign policy logic - applied to corporations - get security by giving aid/CSR boons to people - Security guards perform human rights training intensely - laminated cards around necks. → new and different forms of violence

Taking the offensive with PR firms that are doing CSR consulting plus clandestine research and “strategies for destroying NGOs” - with naked instrumentalism in their reports, not using words like “vulnerable, marginalized, underrepresented” - get personal dirt on people in NGOs - use words like “vocal, emotional, aggressive, passive, proactive, and cooperative but unclean” - p158 - also offers contract of clost to $1M for a big secret smear/boost campaign. Advise against suing because of “david and golaith” image. 

“The Project Green Shield report recommended turning public opinion against LOH (NGO that accused Newmont) by using Indonesian movements for NGO transparency and an NGO Code of Ethics.” 

Giving loans to their critics - it may not silence them fully but it discredits and makes them seem complicit/ hypocritical