Let's Farm Again This Year: Korean Ecologies Amidst American Militarization

Since the Korean War in the middle of the 20th century, the American military has remained a disruptive force on the Korean peninsula. This increased militarization parallels an era of rapid industrialization ushered in at the expense of a predominantly agrarian tradition of living. This thesis seeks to explore how increased American militarization on the Korean peninsula has transformed the relationship between farmers and the land they cultivate. By identifying a case study through a series of protests at Pyeongtaek and Daechuri, two neighboring villages home to the American military base Camp Humphreys, I argue that the logic of militarization depends on a form of brute force in order to break the bonds between farmers and the ways they engage with the natural environment through bodies–both individual and collective. The more immediate significance of this investigation lies in understanding and criticizing new, more obscured forms of American empire. More broadly, however, this thesis is an exercise in writing an environmental history. By articulating a worldview of the natural environment specific to the Korean peninsula at the turn of the 21st century, my work aims to unsettle the "natural environment" as an analytical category taken for granted and as, instead, a dynamic concept constructed through contestation. At this intersection between military histories and environmental histories, I hope to imagine more capacious, more critical conceptualizations of both subjects–the case of Pyeongtaek/Daechuri may reveal the variously violent ways the logics of militarization seep through everyday life, including a fundamental disruption of the ways communities may understand the environments and worlds they inhabit.