This past February, President Obama delivered his official Guantanamo Bay closure plan to Congress, seven years after he first issued an executive order to close the detention center. If the plan is enacted, the remaining 91 Guantanamo detainees will be transferred off the base, leaving an empty detention camp sitting on 45 square miles of beachfront land the U.S. government currently leases from Cuba.
Joe Roman and James Kraska want to transform Gitmo’s dark past into an eco-friendly future. In a policy piece published today in Science, Roman, a conservation biologist at the University of Vermont, and Kraska, a law professor at the U.S. Naval War College, propose turning America’s most deadly prison into an international peace park that commemorates the history of the area and an ecological research center where scholars, scientists, and artists can work together to solve major environmental problems like declining coral reef systems throughout the Caribbean and the extinction of native species.