ABSTRACT
Since 1898 when the United States conquered Spain's remaining colonies, the Puerto Rican environment has served as an experimentation ground for successive economic campaigns, all of which have had inequitable environmental impacts, and none of which has brought prosperity to the people of Puerto Rico. Because of its legal limbo status as an unincorporated territory, justified by the decisions of the US Supreme Court, Puerto Rico has not been able to develop its own environment, and its people have had no voice or vote in the congressional body which oversees their economy. This chapter examines four overlapping and loosely chronological eras of US colonial intervention in Puerto Rico and details the environmental justice implications that each of these sweeping economic eras raises: the agriculture era of sugarcane monoculture, the rapid industrialization by invitation of Operation Bootstrap, the expansive militarization of the archipelago, and the modern development of Puerto Rico for tourism and foreign settlement. Through the lens of environmental colonialism, each economic intervention is examined for signs of resistance and reassertions of environmental sovereignty by the impacted communities.
