“It’s hard to pinpoint exactly the moment one … starts to see the great game afoot,” Julian Aguon says, before pausing, and catching himself.
“For me, it came into sharp focus in 2005, when the US struck a bilateral agreement with Japan to move thousands of marines from Okinawa to Guam. It was just announced. That’s how these things go, they’re just flung from high heaven. I decided to go to law school right then and there: the law was being weaponised against my people.”
Now an attorney and law lecturer, Aguon is also the founder of Blue Ocean Law, the only human rights law firm focused on the Pacific. As a Chamorro man – the indigenous people of the Mariana Islands of the Western Pacific – Aguon takes his cues from his island’s ancient customs and its reverence for the natural world.
His adversary, for a decade, has been the might of the US government’s Department of Defense (DoD). In 2010, Aguon was part of a group that filed a lawsuit under the National Environmental Policy Act protesting the department’s $US8bn (£6.2bn) plan to move 5,000 troops from Okinawa in Japan to Guam by 2025. By forcing the Navy to conduct extra environmental impact assessments, Blue Ocean Law won several years of delay.
But a Guam-based construction company has been awarded a $78m contract for a live-fire training range complex, to be built on a natural wildlife reserve and several historically and culturally significant burial sites. Construction started earlier this year.
In this Pacific version of David and Goliath, Goliath, it seems, is edging in front.
All a war game
“The thing that’s so sad about our situation is that we are so far from DC where decisions are being made,” Aguon says quietly. A 212-square mile island with 160,000 residents – just 37% of whom are native Chamorros - Guam is the westernmost point of the United States.
“Where America’s Day Begins,” is its unofficial motto, a bleak misnomer, Aguon says. Guam is a non-self governing territory: the people of Guam are US citizens but cannot vote in national elections, they have no representation in government.
Colonised for 500 years, Guam was seized from the Spanish by the US in 1898, before being brutally occupied by Japan during the second world war, until the US recaptured it.
The US Department of Defense now owns 30% of the island, some of which was ancestral land seized after the war. But there is a complicated, symbiotic relationship with the military: military spending is the economy’s top industry, and people from Guam enlist in the military at a higher rate per capita than in any US state.
“Guam has had a long history of dealing with the consequences and the ramifications of US military presence,” Aguon says.
More recently, this has put Guam in the middle of America’s escalating geo-political tensions with China and North Korea. In 2017, when Donald Trump threatened to “bring fire and fury” down on North Korea, the Kim regime responded by saying it was considering missile strikes on Guam.
“It’s chilling to know you’re on the receiving end of these missiles and it’s all a war game,” Aguon says. “We know we’re not players in that game, we’re spectators, but it’s our lives, our children’s lives … on the line.”
With the rapid emergence of Chinese influence across the Pacific, Guam has come to be viewed as an ever more critical piece of American real estate in the world’s largest ocean. It will not be unburdened of US military imposition anytime soon. The US base in Okinawa has long been unpopular in Japan: with resentment driven, in particular, by a series of crimes committed by US service personnel including, rape, assault, and hit-and-run accidents.
Perhaps more tellingly, as a colonial outpost, Guam does not represent the same public relations problem as the Japanese base. The island “is not Okinawa,” Major General Dennis Larsen said in a report on Guam’s existing Andersen Airforce base, but instead a place where the US military “can do what [they] want … and make huge investments without fear of being thrown out”.
The US military insists its move to Guam is being made in consultation and collaboration with those who live on the island.
“I personally want to have transparent, fact-based discussions with the leaders of Guam so they can make informed decisions,” Rear Admiral John Menoni said last year. “We … look forward to our lasting partnership with Guam’s elected officials, and will continue to work for the protection of US citizens and our great nation of America.”
The last tree of its kind
On 6 August, Blue Ocean Law, along with the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation filed Guam’s first submission to the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, arguing the human rights of the indigenous Chamorro people of Guam were being violated under US colonisation and militarisation.
The plea is, in parts, existential, arguing the US “has shown itself untrustworthy of safeguarding the Chamorro people’s permanent sovereignty over their natural resources, incapable of meaningfully consulting them on matters vital to their collective rights”.
“Guam is not an ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ or ‘the tip of the spear’, as it is perennially described by the United States government and military... Guam… is the ancestral homeland of a people with rich, meaningful traditions, revolving around sustainability, the careful treatment and appreciation of local environments, and a deep sense of reciprocity – traditions presently under threat.”
The filing details – at length – the significant environmental impact of US policies on Guam, which, it argues, continue with the beginning of construction of the firing range.
The US military controls an area known as Ritidian, one of the most culturally and environmentally significant sites on the island.
Ritidian has been under US control since 1963, when indigenous Chamorros were moved off the land. It is home to at least four ancestral villages and their burial sites, and an area where healers, an integral part of the Chamorro community, forage for medicinal plants and herbs.
The military’s new firing range in Ritidian is in the middle of an ancient, pristine limestone forest, home to several unique species, including the endangered eight spot butterfly, and the Guam rail. It is home too, to rare endemic plants, some of which are only found in Guam.
The island’s very last seeding specimen of the Serianthes nelsonii, known locally as håyun lågu, is in the middle of the firing range. The military has proposed leaving a 100-foot buffer zone around the tree, an idea rejected by activists.
The military will cut at least 1,000 acres of forest, 8% of the total remaining.
“It took millions and millions of years for that coral to fossilise and for those trees to grow on them,” Ann Marie Gawel, a conservationist from Guam and PhD candidate at Iowa State University, says. “The fact that we’re losing it because of construction, invasive species and human development is just sad.”
The seas around Ritidian point are home to sea turtles and whales, which could be acoustically impacted by drilling and sonar activity. Local fishermen will be barred from their traditional waters.
“As with any development project, there will be impacts to the surrounding environment,” the Joint Region Marianas command said in a statement. “However, through mitigation measures put in place by DoD, these impacts will be reduced and offset to the greatest possible extent while balancing the requirement to develop the cantonment area for the Marine Corps Base on Guam.”
The DoD’s policy of mitigation is, in practice, only hazily adhered to. When the DoD moved the firing range from Pagat to another area of Ritidian, the range ended up encroaching on a fence originally established as part of a previous mitigation deal.
“The history of the DoD [in Guam] has sown a lot of distrust,” Gawel says. “And that distrust bleeds out to a lot of the other federal agencies – from not keeping their word, to being able to do as they please without any input from the local people.”
The military’s impact on Guam’s environment is ubiquitous. In the 1940s, it accidentally introduced the brown tree snake, an invasive species that preyed on local birds. Today, out of 12 bird species, there are only two left on the island. The lost species were integral seed dispersers, and their extinction has resulted in an “empty forest that looks fine to the outsider, but you can see it’s on a slow decline,” Haldre Rogers, an ecology and biology professor at Iowa State University, says.
Today, the DoD holds the solution for the problem it created. It controls brown snake numbers through the bizarrely effective method of dropping dead mice filled with Tylenol into the forests, where they are eaten by the snakes.
“As a biologist,” Rogers says, “it’s a way to think of restoring birds by depressing the snake populations.” But for many locals, she says, “it could be seen as a way to spread poisoning.”
For this, there is precedent too. The US military has buried hazardous chemicals, including Agent Orange, at nearly 90 sites around the island. And as the new firing range is built in proximity to Guam’s northern lens aquifer, the island’s primary source of drinking water, there are fears that bullet lead or other pollutants could contaminate the water.
Blue Ocean Law sees its filing as an expression of a growing public consciousness, the consolidation of an emerging local movement recognising the military’s impact, and trying to reverse it.
For the people of Guam, Aguon argues, there is beauty in the song of a kingfisher, in the flap of an eight spot butterfly’s wings, in the musky, earthy smell of the håyun lågu. Those, Aguon says, are worth preserving.
“People can’t rush to the rescue of a world whose magic they haven’t seen intimately. We have a different ethos here.”