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A Pivotal Event
The buffering concept had its genesis at Fort Bragg, in the Sandhills Region of North Carolina, near Fayetteville. The base is the home of the Army’s Special Operations Command,  the 82nd Airborne Division and the headquarters of the 18th Airborne Corps, a combination known as the Army’s “premier power projection platform.” In the last three years, some 65,000 troops have left Fort Bragg for combat overseas.

The 161,000-acre facility is also home to a huge expanse of longleaf pine forest that has been protected from logging. This forest is part of an ecosystem that once stretched from Virginia to east Texas, and whose component plants, like the longleaf pine itself, require the renewing effect of periodic fires to germinate and prosper. Land managers here have used controlled burns for decades to keep the forest open for troop maneuvers, while other parts of the post are often swept by fires caused by artillery and bombing practice. Outside the post, fire has been almost totally excluded from the system, so that even in undeveloped areas, the composition of plants and animals has changed detrimentally.

The forest at Fort Bragg is like an ark, crowded with the biological remnants of that lost fire-dependent system.

“There are 30 species of concern here and five endangered species,” says Rick Studenmund, who coordinates the Conservancy’s work with the Army at Fort Bragg. “It’s an amazing place.” One of those endangered species is the red-cockaded woodpecker, a creature once as prevalent as the longleaf pine forests, and now in equal decline.

In 1990 the Environmental Defense Fund threatened to sue the Defense Department over its failure to protect the woodpecker at Fort Bragg. But what began as an acrimonious dispute turned into a collaborative effort between the military, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and environmental groups to identify and improve woodpecker habitat beyond the post. The aim was to build up the population and take pressure off the post.

“This was a pivotal event,” says Studenmund. “The Army needed some incentives, rather than just the threat of penalties for noncompliance, and the main incentive here was to reduce or head off restrictions on training.” The best way to do that, he says, was to find and restore habitat off the base and have a functioning population of woodpeckers there, so that all the best habitat was not in the middle of the training area. “What brought all of us to the table was this species that had legal protection,” he adds, “and what we figured out together was that we had more than enough common interests to work out the buffering solution.”

Army lawyers used a 1960 law called the Sikes Act that allowed the use of funds from both the Defense Department and members of the public to enhance wildlife habitat on military bases. The Sikes Act gave the Army the legal framework for collaboration and funding. Because the Conservancy was already working with Fort Bragg on habitat conservation within the fence line, extending that partnership was a natural. And the Army needed the Conservancy’s help in protecting and then managing those buffering lands.

Pentagon environmental lawyer Van Ness explains: “At DOD, we are neophytes when it comes to negotiating and acquiring conservation easements, and we need expert conservation land managers to protect the habitat that we are acquiring. The Nature Conservancy has the expertise in those fields. We prioritize the training mission; they work to find and protect the habitat on and off the base. Hopefully, that will let us operate without the constant threat of more restrictions.” He adds: “You could say that we’ve learned the hard way that wildlife makes a much better neighbor to a military base than a subdivision.”

In 2000, Col. Addison Davis, then Fort Bragg’s garrison commander, threw his weight behind the buffering project, saying that restrictions related to encroachment posed one of the most serious challenges to his base. No surprise, because at Fort Bragg, neighborhoods are literally pressed against the fence line. Some have sprung up just outside the drop zone for parachutists, tanks and other equipment. “All of a sudden they had guys winding up in people’s swimming pools,” says the Conservancy’s Studenmund.

The Conservancy and the Army joined with state and federal wildlife agencies and local conservation groups to form the North Carolina Sandhills Conser-vation Partnership. Thus far, the group has protected from development 9,100 acres crucial to training and the ecosystem. The protected areas include habitat critical to red-cockaded woodpeckers and a host of less threatened species. And the parcels create “stepping stones,” connecting habitats in a network of 225,000 acres of public lands.

The Conservancy is working with other military branches to create similar buffers and corridors throughout the country, including at such key installations as Camp Pendleton, California, and Camp Ripley, Minnesota. One of those installations, Camp Lejeune, is home to the Second Marine Expeditionary Force, the largest amphibious military base in the world, located on the swampy and species-rich coastal plain of North Carolina. Over several years, a developer bought tracts totaling 2,500 acres of private land that was sandwiched between the M-1 Abrams tank live-fire range and the rifle and explosives demolitions range. The developer was planning a golf community centered around two large courses. The plans were, in the words of then base commander Marine Corps Maj. Gen. David M. Mize, “a disaster” for the future of both training and the ecosystem. Instead, the Conservancy negotiated the purchase of the property from the developer, sold the development rights to the Marine Corps and transferred title to the state. The deal guaranteed that training on both ranges would continue. It also protected the headwaters of a major creek, foraging habitat of red-cockaded woodpeckers, and a forested corridor connecting areas of the base supporting forested uplands and wetlands.

Protecting corridors is also the goal of a buffering project at Eglin Air Force Base, in the Florida panhandle. Working with the state of Florida, the Defense Department, and a number of other agencies, the Conservancy is trying to buffer the flight paths of five Air Force and Navy installations near rapidly expanding coastal towns. Once described by some as “the Wilderness Coast,” the panhandle is now experiencing a rush of unprecedented population growth and development.

The project is called the Northwest Florida Green-way. Air Force Col. Robert C. Nolan, the vice commander at Eglin Air Force base, oversees 45,000 training flights every year, many of them flown at night. “We need room to operate,” he says, “and that’s what we’re hoping to get from the greenway project.” What the Conservancy and others want are corridors of protected land on the ground, underneath those flight paths. Nolan’s hope is that the corridors will run north from the base to the Conecuh National Forest in Alabama, east to the Apalachicola National Forest and west to the Blackwater River State Forest. On the ground, the greenway will protect a network of rivers, swamplands and estuaries that are among the country’s most intact and diverse ecosystems, home to the rare indigo snake as well as the rare Florida black bear.

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