© Peter McBride/Aurora Photos
Room to Maneuver
A new partnership between conservation groups and the Department of Defense has formed to confront a common enemy: unregulated urban growth that threatens both biodiversity and military readiness.
By Hal Herring
The Army post at Fort Carson, Colorado, is often lit by the flickers and strobes of modern weaponry. Tracer bullets in columns of pinkish fire pour into targets from aircraft hidden in the night sky; cannon rounds slam downrange, illuminating the mesas in blooms of white. The hiss and crackle of small-arms fire is as steady as static on a badly tuned radio. In the darkness, soldiers move fast, their night-vision equipment showing them the battlefield in shades of gray and white—here a patch of juniper, there a rock bunker or a tank rushing forward, its treads churning the hard earth.
A soldier at Fort Carson watches armored fighting vehicles maneuver.
© Peter McBride/Aurora Photos
The isolation of Fort Carson, out on the dry prairies south of Colorado Springs, makes such training feasible. Here—with few neighbors to register complaints, suffer injuries or compromise security—long-range navigation and reconnaissance are possible. Large-scale training exercises, weapons testing and live fire take place. And much of it occurs at night. “There’s only so much darkness left in this world, and we need every bit of it to train,” says Gary Belew, a civilian botanist who was once a soldier at Fort Carson and now oversees environmental compliance at the post.
“A pickup truck with its headlights on totally washes out a lot of our equipment. It’s like looking right into the sun. You need isolation.”
But that isolation is fast being lost. In the 1970s, it was miles to Colorado Springs and Pueblo. Now, says Thomas Warren, another environmental-compliance officer, “we’re watching [the area] become one giant megalopolis.” Warren is a wildlife biologist with the haircut and demeanor of a supersized biker, albeit one who can talk about botany and the interrelation of landscape and wildlife and military training. He adds: “Here we are with this little piece of the public trust that is becoming an island of diversity.”
By diversity, Warren means combat systems, critters, cultural artifacts: “I’ve got multiple launch rocket systems, plus Bambi, Thumper and Indian graveyards,” he explains. “And I’ve got the habitat for thousands of men and women who are trying to learn how to survive on a modern battlefield.”
At Fort Carson, as at many military bases across the United States, the urbanized world—more densely populated, busier and more brightly lit—is encroaching. That world is also encroaching on wildlife habitat. The fact that the U.S. military and the wealth of American biodiversity face the same threat has led to an unlikely partnership between groups like The Nature Conservancy and the Depart-ment of Defense. The resulting alliance holds the potential for protecting thousands of acres of irreplaceable habitat while ensuring that the U.S. military will have the space to continue to train top-notch troops.
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