[CPEO-MEF] From Encroachment to Sustainable Range Management

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

FROM ENCROACHMENT TO SUSTAINABLE RANGE MANAGEMENT
A Commentary on the Senate Hearings
by Lenny Siegel, Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight (CPEO)
April 11, 2001

At the March 20, 2001 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on
"encroachment," three generals and an admiral fired a figurative warning
shot across the Congressional bow: environmental conditions and rules
and making it increasingly difficult to train. If Congress wants our
armed services to be ready for combat, suggested the flag officers, then
they must act quickly. The officers stopped short of requesting that
military training be exempted from environmental controls, but it
appears that's only because they've been restrained by more politically
astute civilian leaders within the Pentagon.

For the last two decades, many in the Pentagon have resisted assuming
responsibility for environmental protection and restoration. It's
costly. It's not the military's principal mission. And many requirements
appear unfair or inefficient. But current pressures - which have been
building steadily over several years - go further. They threaten the
military's principal activity: training for war.

At its poles, the tension between readiness and the environment seems
like an irreconcilable difference. On the one hand, there are military
leaders and their political supporters who resist any environmental or
regulatory limitation that inhibits the armed forces from "training as
they fight." Wrapping themselves in the flag, they argue that
restrictions on training not only reduce American military
effectiveness, but they also put American fighting men and women at
unnecessary risk. Thus, national security trumps the environment.

On the other hand, there are neighbors of military facilities, as well
as environmental and natural resource regulatory agencies, who believe
that a key purpose of national security is to protect Americans and our
natural resources. Training that threatens either should not be
permitted. The military should obey the same environmental laws as any
other organization, even if testing and training programs are hurt. Many
of these people are veterans or supporters of the U.S. military, but
they consider no external threat to the U.S. to be so serious as to
undermine the need for strong environmental standards.

Neither of these positions is extreme or irrational. I personally tend
to support the latter, because I think our nation is all too ready to
resort to military force. However, I think it's politically unwise to
use the environmental tail to wag the dog of U.S. foreign and military
policy. That is, I am prepared to seek compromise, to find a way for the
U.S. military to accomplish its mission with a minimum of environmental
disruption, because the political majority in this country generally
backs military preparedness. I will work through other channels to
reshape our foreign policy. 

Encroachment

The encroachment debate actually encompasses two distinct, but related
issues. The first, which I consider genuine "encroachment," entails the
expansion of civilian activity into formerly remote military training
areas. Military noise, air pollution, and water pollution threaten or
annoy the public. And public activity, from traffic to electromagnetic
spectrum use to even a rise in ambient light levels at night, may
interfere with military operations.

Military pollution should be prevented, whether it be in urban areas or
the most remote, desolate regions. But encroachment itself is an
environmental problem, better recognizable perhaps by its other name,
sprawl. The continuing development of historically open spaces in our
country not only directly damages our landscape - natural and
agricultural - and waterways, it leads us to waste resources on
infrastructure and energy consumption. While I don't favor plowing over
subdivisions and shopping malls, I do support policies that promote the
revitalization of existing urban areas.

Accidentally, the military is an ally in the battle against sprawl. Many
of its bases, from Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland to Camp Pendleton
in California, have stood in the way of urban growth. I recall, around
1960, bicycling with my siblings from our home in west Los Angeles to
San Diego, and noting, even then, that Camp Pendleton's 150,000 acres
were the only thing preventing Los Angeles and San Diego from merging
into a single megalopolis.

Habitat

The second issue is habitat preservation and enhancement. Again
accidentally, the military's need to prevent development on or near
training areas has often created, as the officers testified, islands of
biodiversity. Once the Defense Department discovered that, combining
genuine concern with a thirst for positive public relations, it began
programs to protect those resources. 

Some of the biodiverse creatures and flora are protected by the
Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Marine Mammal
Protection Act, and other laws. In their draft testimony, the officers
actually used the term "regulatory encroachment" to describe enforcement
of those laws, but wiser heads removed that language by the time their
statements were delivered to the Senate.

One can understand the military's frustration with the regulatory
framework for the protection or habitat and species. Those landowners -
not just the military - who have preserved habitat and supported rare
species are encumbered with the cost and activity restrictions of
protecting those that remain. It may be unfair, but I don't have a
better solution. It seems, at times, that enormous resources are being
spent to save a small number of animals or plants with no apparent
benefit, but the named species are supposed to serve as indicators of
entire ecosystems. Both the enforcers and critics of these laws often
forget that. If preserving ecosystems is to remain an important national
goal, then having the military support that goal - as a normal cost of
doing business - is an effective way of pursuing it.

As I suggested above, encroachment and habitat preservation are at times
related. Where urban sprawl approaches the boundaries of military
ranges, development destroys habitat. Military facilities which
previously supported only portions of ecosystems bear increasing
responsibility for protecting the disappearing remainder. In those
cases, policies that discourage encroachment simultaneously are likely
to give the military more flexibility in managing the  habitat that it owns.

Sustainable Range Management

Reviewing the March 20 testimony, it's clear that the military hasn't
just invented the problem. It does face increasing constraints on its
training activity. The Navy and Marines are under particular pressure,
because they own less training land and they have unique requirements -
shoreline and beaches - that are both less available and more likely to
be in demand from either developers or natural resource trustees.

In some locations, the conflicts between training and the environment
will never go away. But nationwide, those conflicts can be resolved or
at least mitigated by pursuing "sustainable range management." Indeed,
some of the officers discussed this concept in their testimony.

Last year the National Dialogue on Military Munitions - an official
discussion group facilitated by the Keystone Center, in which we at CPEO
participated - defined sustainable range/use management. The Dialogue
focused on munitions use, but its principles can be extrapolated to
other environmental issues. The purposes of sustainable range
management, it wrote, are:

"a) to enable continued use of ranges for military training and testing missions;

"b) to assure that military munitions ranges are used in a way that
protects human health and the environment;

"c) to facilitate the return of ranges to other uses when the military
no longer requires their use; and

"d) to promote [Department of Defense] actions to protect human health
and the environment at former military ranges where there are known or
suspected explosive safety and/or environmental hazards."

To build trust with range neighbors and regulators, the military must
stop treating the landscape (or the nation's waterways) as an
environmental bottomless pit. There are bases where the military fires
into a sector until it fills up with unexploded ordnance. When  that
sector is no longer useful,. it moves on to the next sector.

On the other hand, there are promising examples already of the military
moving towards sustainable range management. These practices allow
training to continue, with minimum disruption to the military mission
and minimum damage to the environment. These practices can also reduce
the need to spend extra money protecting the environment from training.

For example, about a decade ago at Ft. McCoy, Wisconsin, a local
activist accused the Army of poisoning the headwaters of a popular trout
stream, by targeting artillery on the stream. He took pictures showing a
concentration of impact craters near the stream. Presumably the Army was
practicing taking out a bridge, but it turned out that moving the target
- the ersatz bridge - away from the creek wouldn't impair the training.
So they did so, minimizing the potential for environmental damage
without undercutting readiness.

With a more long-term view, the Air Force has determined that it can
manage ranges better by "working to ensure that environmental, safety,
and health considerations  ... are integral to requirements definition
and the acquisition process." For example, for many years the Air Force
has used practice bombs, filled with concrete rather than high
explosives, on many of its training runs. That cuts the unexploded
ordnance - that is, dud - problem drastically, but its generates a large
supply of used, non-recyclable concrete bombs, which either remain on
ranges or must be "disposed" of somehow.. To solve that problem the Air
Force is developing metal-only practice bombs. They might be more
expensive to produce, but they can be recycled.

Sustainable range management, as it applies to noise, air pollution, and
the threat to habitat, is likely to require the creation or expansion of
buffer zones adjacent to essential training areas.  This doesn't
necessarily mean extending the boundaries of ranges. It may mean, as the
Army has done at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the creation of
conservation easements, in which development rights are acquired on
behalf of land management agencies or private trusts. Buffer zones keep
homes, schools, and businesses away from the hazards and annoyances of
training, and they can protect species threatened otherwise by
development on the one hand and high intensity training on the other.

A Dialogue

We at CPEO propose a new dialogue, to continue and broaden the work of
the Munitions Dialogue, to address sustainable range management. This
dialogue can develop and promote practices for reconciling military
training needs with community development and environmental protection.
Like the Munitions Dialogue, the new group should include
representatives of federal, state, tribal, and local agencies;
environmental, community, and environmental justice organizations; and
the private sector.

I don't expect such a dialogue to resolve all disputes over military
training. Even within stakeholders groups, there are differences about
what level of training is necessary to protect our national interests.
To succeed, participants in the dialogue should recognize on the one
hand, that as long as we have a military it will continue to seek
realistic training opportunities, and on the other hand, that we cannot
afford to have the military train anywhere, any time, without regard for
neighboring communities or the natural environment.


The written testimony of the generals and admiral are available as PDF
files from 
http://www.senate.gov/~armed_services/hearings/2001/r010320.htm. 

CPEO's summaries of the testimony are available at 
http://www.cpeo.org/lists/military/2001/index.html. See the entries for
April 3-April 6.


-- 


Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 222B View St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/968-1126
lsiegel@cpeo.org
http://www.cpeo.org

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