Opportunistic conservation at former military sites in the United States

I Introduction

Great Bay National Wildlife Refuge sits just 5 km across a bay from the university town of Durham, New Hampshire, USA. The wildlife refuge offers mixed messages of welcome: attractive signs mark the entrance and trailheads, but just a few meters away stand imposing gates and barbed wire fencing (Figure 1). The fences surround an aging high-security site replete with twin rows of concrete military igloos, the former storage area for missiles and munitions that lie ready to load into fighter jets on a nearby air force runway. The guard towers now sit empty, but the runway remains just off-site, a reminder that this wildlife refuge was better known for decades as a US Strategic Air Command site named Pease Air Force Base.

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Figure 1.

Former missile storage area, Great Bay National Wildlife Refuge, New Hampshire, USA.

More than 1000 hectares of this site are now managed as a national wildlife refuge, open daily to visitors and guided by a conservation mission that directs federal officials to ‘administer … lands and waters for the conservation, management, and where appropriate, restoration of the fish, wildlife, and plant resources and their habitats within the United States for the benefit of present and future generations of Americans’ (US Fish and Wildlife Service, 2012a). Only after the base closed in 1991 did the full extent of operations here become known to nearby residents of Durham, and today US Fish and Wildlife Service personnel are faced with managing this site that for decades was shaped by military activity.

This article considers particular conservation implications of recent military base conversions and realignments in the United States. Many of these sites present conservation and ecological restoration opportunities, but environmental measures are also often constrained by artifacts remaining from military activities. Management of these sites necessarily takes into account the military hazards and infrastructures that remain, and the institutional limitations that may come with inheriting militarized space. These factors in many cases limit and shape the conservation efforts directed by wildlife personnel. Even as wildlife refuge officials work to take advantage of the real conservation opportunities provided by former military lands, their efforts to open refuges to public uses and restore the sites’ ecology face obstacles that challenge managers and their agency. Without structural and institutional changes to address these shortcomings, military-to-wildlife (M2W) refuges will be characterized by conservation gains that are shaped at least as much by the sites’ military pasts as they are by their current mission to conserve and protect plants, wildlife, and habitat.

The cases provided in this article are intended to provide insights into how conservation goals can sometimes be delivered from unlikely contexts, including landscapes that are more likely associated with militarization and preparation for conflict. Examples from these M2W sites may provide information, inspiration, and in some cases cautionary lessons for efforts to generate conservation outcomes from other types of lands.

This study is based upon research conducted at 15 national wildlife refuges in the United States that have been created out of former military lands since 1988. Research visits from 2004 to 2012 included semi-structured interviews and/or meetings with more than six dozen US Fish and Wildlife Service officials, defense personnel and contractors, federal and state regulators, members of citizen groups, and refuge volunteers. Interviews were taped and transcribed, then analyzed for latent content (e.g. Dunn, 2010). Interviewees were selected for their direct involvement in management of M2W refuges or for their engagement with policy issues relating to the transitions taking place at these sites. Quotes from interviews and meetings are intended to provide representative perspectives on current policies and management issues particularly relating to conservation efforts at M2W refuges (see Baxter and Eyles, 1997).

II Military base closure and conversion

In 1988, the United States convened its first Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) commission, which established a new approach to evaluating and closing US military bases that were no longer needed. With four additional rounds of BRAC commission-directed closures between 1991 and 2005, the US Department of Defense (DOD) has closed or reclassified more than 400 military bases in the past 25 years, including approximately 130 major installations (US Department of Defense, 2002, 2005). ¹ Closed military bases are converted to a variety of new uses, ranging from playgrounds or recreational facilities to housing developments, business parks, and university campuses, but many military lands face limited options for future use due to chemical hazards, munitions, buildings, or aging infrastructure that remain on site. Due in part to these reasons, more than 15% of the major US bases closed since 1988 have been redesignated as national wildlife refuges managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Former military lands redesignated as US National Wildlife Refuges since 1988.

The DOD makes clear that base closures are conducted primarily in order to improve military readiness and streamline the use of defense funds (US Department of Defense, 2005), but environmental considerations also feature in the process of evaluating and converting sites. Before creating the BRAC process in the late 1980s, the US Congress passed legislation that made base closures more difficult (Goren, 2003; Sorenson, 1998). Despite a view promoted by the DOD and others that military lands included important ecological reserves, some members of Congress sought to emphasize the dangerous, contaminated character of these lands. In effect, they claimed that military bases were simply impacted beyond remediation and too hazardous to convert to other more public uses (Sorenson, 1998).

In part as a response to these concerns, BRAC legislation in the 1990s required an Environmental Restoration Program that identified key sites for preservation or restoration (Department of the Army, 2002). This requirement roughly coincided with closure and remediation efforts on Department of Energy lands that had been integral to nuclear production throughout the Cold War (see, for example, Burger, 2000; Burger et al., 2003; US Department of Energy, 1994). According to 2002 EPA projections, the cleanup of military lands could require the largest environmental remediation ever undertaken by the US government (see Loeb, 2002).

A converse environmental casting of military lands has also occurred in recent years as groups and individuals advocate military conversions for conservation purposes. This process often begins only after bases have been identified for closure, but increasingly even active bases attract notice from environmental groups, boosters of local communities, or the military itself to highlight the environmental amenities of DOD sites (e.g. Tangley, 2005; US Department of Defense, 2012). At a number of sites, media accounts and the public record of comments gathered during the environmental analysis of base closures reveal support for reclassifying sites as national wildlife refuges or in similar protected status (e.g. Broad, 2012; Jefferson Proving Ground, 1995; Tierney, 2001).

III The US national wildlife refuge system

National wildlife refuges are managed with an express primary purpose of conserving wildlife and plants. Unlike most other US federal land categories such as national parks and national forests, which since the early 1900s have been created exclusively by legislative action, wildlife refuges may still be established using executive authority. More than six times as many national wildlife refuges have been established by Presidential decree or administrative actions that trace directly back to the executive branch than declared by act of Congress (Fischman, 2003).

This approach to designating national wildlife refuges brings spontaneity and flexibility into the system, but sometimes at the expense of consistency, stability, or purpose. The spontaneity of the system at times verges into a state of constantly reacting to external factors, political maneuvering, and the demands of prior land uses and conditions rather than measured planning (see, for example, Hansen, 1997; Olsen, 1996).

Nearly all refuges in the National Wildlife Refuge System also operate under significant budgetary constraints, and many – whether they are M2W sites or not – can find themselves needing to respond to issues caused by prior uses. A 1989 US Government Accounting Office study determined that secondary or non-wildlife related uses occurred ‘on virtually every refuge and include all manner of public, economic, and military activities’ (US Government Accounting Office, 1989: 16). On refuge lands created out of former military sites these issues are often complicated by the fact that they not only pose wildlife-related problems for managers but also create public safety concerns. The challenges of addressing concerns relating to prior conditions and public use are only exacerbated by the Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS) chronic shortage of funds. In 2012, the agency estimated its refuge system maintenance and operations backlog at US$3.3 billion (Committee on Natural Resources, 2011), a figure that dwarfs the refuges’ 2012 annual budget of US$486 million (US Fish and Wildlife Service, 2012b).

IV Military-to-wildlife refuge conversions

The pressure placed upon FWS land managers to maintain a premier conservation network grows more daunting when lands in need of major restoration or careful control of the visiting public come into their custody. Both of these are serious concerns with new M2W refuge additions. These additions can place a strain on the refuge system overall, and also displace funding from existing refuges to pay for more aggressive cleanup activities at prominent, highly contaminated new refuge additions. A former refuge official at Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) described this asymmetry of Congressional expectations, appropriations, and site-specific disbursements in a 2004 interview:

Congress, and the administration now, is telling the [FWS] agency to curb your appetite for land, we don’t have enough money to manage what you have … and then on the other hand they’re turning around and giving us land that we didn’t ask for that’s going to cost more to manage. But no money with it … So, FY ’97, ’98, ’99, just about every new dollar – and those were good years for the refuge budget – just about every new dollar that came into Region 6 came to the Arsenal.

The redesignation of former military lands into national wildlife refuges has a long history in the United States, but the pace of transition has accelerated with recent rounds of base closure. Contemporary M2W lands often come with very different qualities than other national wildlife refuges. The ongoing process of transferring lands from the DOD to the FWS may appear to be simply the continuation of a centuries-old pattern, but in fact often comes with novel complications today that justify consideration as an entirely new kind of phenomenon. For the land managers tasked with reorienting these sites from military uses to wildlife and habitat conservation, the challenges and opportunities can seem both unique and quite pressing. These factors can serve to limit and shape in important ways the conservation efforts that subsequently take place at M2W refuges.

V From conflict to conservation

Each M2W refuge is unique in terms of the array of military activities that occurred, the suite of impacts these created, the ecological features that exist, the remediation or restoration treatments prescribed, and the variety of social interests such as recreational activities, economic incentives, or political pressures that factor into land management decisions. In this way, the cultural and physical geography of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal NWR in Colorado – a former chemical weapons plant in the arid high plains – is dramatically different from the Big Oaks NWR in southern Indiana, which sits in a humid karst landscape of deciduous forest and for four decades served as an important proving ground for US Army munitions.

Very obviously, these and other M2W sites include substantially different qualities that refuge personnel must contend with on a daily basis. However, the broader policy framework in which refuge managers operate is largely the same. According to the 1997 National Wildlife Refuge Improvement Act, the refuge system’s mission is to maintain a set of lands dedicated to the conservation and, where appropriate, restoration of fish, wildlife and plants (US Fish and Wildlife Service, 2012a). This mission provides the Fish and Wildlife Service with the most crisply defined conservation mandate of any US land management agency (see Fischman, 2003), and has helped affirm a culture within the agency that reflects a nearly singular focus on fish and wildlife. This shows up in the kinds of programs offered at many national wildlife refuges, adds to the tensions caused by incompatible secondary uses, and is reflected in the natural sciences background common to many FWS employees.

In addition to the overarching mission of the National Wildlife Refuge System, refuge managers must also direct their efforts toward their own refuge-specific charters, which typically emphasize conservation and habitat concerns, often in the interest of a particular suite of species. For example, a former Army ammunition storage site in Massachusetts was redesignated the Assabet River NWR due to its ‘particular value in carrying out the national migratory bird management program’ (US Fish and Wildlife Service, 2010).

While these conservation-focused directives for refuges come as a well-meaning effort to steer management effectively, at M2W refuges with complex histories and confounding habitat conditions including chemical contamination and leftover munitions, this guidance can also constrain what happens at refuges in at least two important ways: first, managers find little institutional support for programs that are not perceived to be ‘wildlife first’, and second, considering the background, training, and culture of Fish and Wildlife Service employees, military use rarely qualifies as the most urgent priority. Measures such as the cleanup of military ordnance or other legacies of prior land use are set aside for more pressing concerns that support the wildlife and habitat conservation mission more directly. As a M2W refuge official in Virginia observed, ‘If you don’t have enough money for your primary job, then how are you going to pay for dealing with bunkers?’ Refuge personnel often apply a policy of managerial triage stemming from inadequate funds and wildlife-oriented programs that cause remediation projects to be set aside.

For example, active projects at the Big Oaks NWR include a substantial program of prescribed burning to maintain grassland and shrub landscapes, biological studies of the relatively unknown crawfish frog, and annual bird counts. These are each worthwhile, relevant efforts given the refuge’s declared purpose ‘to preserve, conserve, and restore biodiversity and biological integrity for the benefit of present and future generations of Americans’ (US Fish and Wildlife Service, 2009: 2). To their credit, refuge managers accomplish this work across nearly 20,000 hectares on a shoestring budget. The site remains cluttered by approximately 1.5 million rounds of unexploded ordnance and seven million inert projectiles with live fuses following five decades of US Army shelling and munitions tests (Jefferson Proving Ground, 1995). To this day, the Indiana Air National Guard maintains a 405-hectare laser-guided bombing range near the core of the refuge. Elsewhere, a former firing range within the refuge still harbors 75,000 kg of depleted uranium. Technically, remediation of military residues within the refuge remains the responsibility of the Department of Defense, but with day-to-day management turned over to the Fish and Wildlife Service there is little incentive for the DOD to act and no dedicated budget for this cleanup. As one FWS manager commented, ‘The Army in some ways thought they could just walk away … even though the ordnance and depleted uranium and some of these other things are here’. Scouring the site of all munitions would almost surely cause more ecological harm than leaving ordnance in place, but the DOD has never even conducted a thorough survey of munitions remaining on the surface of the refuge.

Big Oaks personnel readily acknowledge the challenges and limitations of operating a wildlife refuge on the site of a former proving ground, but they typically work to maximize the habitat and wildlife conservation benefits of their actions, rather than press the DOD to fully remediate the site. In conducting prescribed burns, for example, one Big Oaks refuge worker explained how he needed to change his approach because of pervasive hazards from unexploded ordnance (UXO) that limit access to the interior of burn parcels:

I’m more concerned about the UXO and yeah, everything’s changed, all the standard operating procedure because of the presence of UXO’s changed. I mean you can’t do aerial ignition … [you have to do ground ignition] from the perimeter. You can’t get in there. Normally you’d be walking straight, like strips across the whole unit. But we have to just move around the perimeter. So we’re actually going to try to use a remote control helicopter.

In this way, Big Oaks and other M2W personnel work opportunistically to accomplish tasks that fit their mission. The grasslands and openings caused by years of testing military explosives actually represent valuable habitats in their own right, and these now support populations of rare songbirds and amphibians, the endangered Indiana bat (Myotis sodalis), and mammals including bobcat (Lynx rufus) and river otter (Lontra canadensis). Opportunistic conservation in this case provides genuine protection for biological diversity, even if the particular ecological communities and structures present are the product of military activity rather than more natural processes operating largely outside of human influence.

This work takes different form in each M2W refuge, depending upon the particular restoration activities and the ecological and military characteristics managers face, but opportunistic conservation is similar across sites in the way it represents an effort to turn the material challenges of dealing with military infrastructures or hazards into meaningful measures to protect plants, wildlife, and habitat. This often involves a set of social interfaces as well, as managers try to open M2W refuges for public access and a constellation of wildlife-dependent uses such as hunting, fishing, photography, birdwatching, and environmental education that the FWS deems important (Public Law 105-57, 1997).

VI Ecological restoration and opportunistic conservation

Among the most striking differences across M2W refuges are the diversity of physical conditions that exist and the variation in cleanup and restoration activities committed to by the military. Most sites transferred from the DOD to the FWS in recent decades have come as a result of the Base Realignment and Closure process. Keeping in mind that the primary intent of BRAC is to streamline and advance US military readiness, the fact that BRAC closures and redesignations have facilitated an expansion of the US National Wildlife Refuge System is but a secondary product of these transitions. In a very practical sense, the DOD is not principally concerned with what decommissioned installations become after they leave military control, so long as the military successfully offloads the managerial and financial obligations of its landbase. This is, in fact, one of the reasons that wildlife refuge designations have become a popular destination for military closures: the cleanup requirement is typically significantly less to convert military lands to a new purpose of wildlife conservation than if these same lands were repurposed for commercial or residential use. For a wildlife refuge conversion, the DOD must simply meet a cleanup standard that provides for the safety of a refuge worker’s 40-hour work week, not the more continuous exposure of a resident of the site. This makes sense from the perspective of the DOD, but leaves FWS managers to deal with lands that may or may not be well-suited to fit into the National Wildlife Refuge System.

Of all recent M2W conversions, the most dramatic case of contamination and cleanup comes from the Rocky Mountain Arsenal NWR just north of Denver, Colorado. Once reputed to hold the most toxic square mile of land on the planet, the Arsenal has been the focus of a multi-billion dollar groundwater and soil cleanup funded by the Army and a corporate lessee of the site, Shell Chemical Corporation (now Shell Oil) (Consent Decree, 2009). As a result of two decades of remediation and restoration, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal NWR in some ways now merits the ‘Pearl of the Prairie’ label an early Congressional sponsor of refuge designation tried to attach to the site (Allard, 1991). Yet even as American bison (Bison bison), mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), burrowing owls (Athene cunicularia), prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus), and other native denizens of the shortgrass prairie site thrive, portions of the land remain too hazardous to ever be released from Army control. Conservation is clearly a successful outcome of the legal tangles and years of preparation for military conflict that characterize this site, but even here the actions of managers and the degree of public use continue to be confined to a certain array of opportunities. FWS personnel at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal NWR point to the historical activities conducted on site as creating a mix of material conditions and less tangible perceptions they must contend with as visitors continue to associate the site with its past military productions.

One FWS employee described the operational challenges he faces at an M2W refuge as follows:

… we have other constraints. But we have a lot fewer now, in the sense that the cleanup is really over, other than some groundwater cleanup. And they’re [the Army is] just maintaining their little landfills and so forth. But we used to have lots of constraints from all of the cleanup actions. And we lost a number of areas that were doing really well, from a restoration standpoint, because they decided at a later date, ‘You know, our soil samples show that right in your restoration area is the best clay that we can borrow, and put on the caps-and-covers [landfills]’. And they have to do it. We knew that. But we didn’t know that at the time we put in the restoration site. You know, no one knew that. We do all this in conjunction with the [Army and Shell] so there are as few of those kinds of problems as possible. But we still had quite a few. So that is a managerial constraint.

As we saw earlier with the efforts to manage fire at Big Oaks NWR, for managers at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal NWR and other M2W sites there are almost invariably cases where ecological restoration goals need to be modified to accommodate public safety or access concerns. One FWS specialist working on prairie restoration at Rocky Mountain Arsenal NWR described how this played out at the cap-and-cover hazardous waste landfills established near the center of the refuge as part of the Army’s remediation project:

We had actually spent quite a while developing a plan where we might have been able to graze the caps-and-covers with bison and do fire up there and do all the things that we do with a normal prairie. And we had a plan almost in the [works] … And we got to point where the state regulator said, ‘No, we’re not going to do that’. So right now, yes, there should be some cooperative management up there. Right now the [Fish and Wildlife] Service doesn’t have any real authority to go out there and do anything.

Even where the FWS does have clear authority to manage its lands, the agency can run into problems that stem more discursively from past military management. The community of Commerce City, which abuts the Rocky Mountain Arsenal to the west, suffered for years from problems of groundwater contamination emanating from the Arsenal’s chemical manufacturing facilities. With the contaminated groundwater plume now carefully monitored, and clay barriers and groundwater treatment facilities installed on the Arsenal grounds to clean water before it leaves the site, FWS officials report that Commerce City residents and refuge visitors remain wary:

Sometimes the perception is worse than the reality. And I think that’s probably one of the biggest constraints out here. There are a lot of perceptions of this site that exist that is not necessarily the reality of what’s here … A lot of visitors come out here and they either think it’s radioactive or it’s highly contaminated. And, you know, it was only the central core that was really disturbed. You know, when the Army bought this as a base, it was the central core. They wanted the rest of it for security. So there’s a lot of this land area that surrounds us that really wasn’t affected too badly. But public perception here makes it kind of tough.

Most M2W sites have not seen the level of contamination or cleanup that has been conducted at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal NWR. At several refuges in the northeastern United States, the most tangible reminder of prior decades of military management is dozens of hardened concrete structures. These pose little risk of contamination, but even as inert relicts they present managers with incongruous landscapes of militarization and conservation. The DOD has largely dispensed of any further action to maintain or demolish these structures, so FWS officials treat them in a variety of ways: for vehicle storage, as experimental habitats, as historical attractions, or as objects of neglect.

The lack of DOD involvement also draws a diverse set of responses from FWS managers: many would like more from the DOD – to see more cleanup and remediation work, and more reliable funding – but a few indicate that they would prefer less DOD activity, essentially to support opportunistic conservation. In a 2011 interview, one refuge manager noted how some in the FWS view the Navy cleanup of Nomans Land Island National Wildlife Refuge as a potential threat to wildlife and plants that inhabit the site. The refuge consists of a small island off the coast of Massachusetts that is off-limits to all public use since it remains contaminated by unexploded ordnance after being used for aerial gunnery from 1942 to 1996 (US Fish and Wildlife Service, 2011). The Navy has a continuing obligation to remove UXO from the island, which brings remediation and conservation objectives potentially into conflict with each other and raises the question whether additional disturbance as part of remediation or restoration efforts is worth the ecological harm, at least in the short term, that it can generate.

In some cases, military hazards can be used as a type of management tool. As a refuge official at a M2W site along the Atlantic coast noted: ‘From an enforcement and public education standpoint, it’s much easier to keep people out of refuges when there’s a public safety concern, such as UXO, than for biological reasons.’

At other M2W sites, the military residuals may actually pose more of a public attraction than hazard. At Assabet River NWR in eastern Massachusetts, 50 concrete igloos (often called ‘bunkers’) formerly used by the Army for ammunition storage remain on site and have become a significant draw for visitors. Refuge volunteers offer bunker tours as a form of outreach to bring the public into the refuge. These military artifacts can be more of a draw than the biota to which the refuge is dedicated. As one Assabet River official acknowledged: ‘I would consider [the bunkers] an attraction … They’re more popular than anything else here, more so than the birds.’

Even where cleanup is viewed as essential for public safety or reasons of environmental contamination, such restoration efforts also create impacts that affect conservation, at least in the near term. At the wildlife refuge created from the former Navy gunnery range on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico, for example, clearing UXO even superficially from the 5900-hectare eastern portion of the refuge requires removal of the top 30 cm of soil and clearcutting all trees smaller than 8 cm in diameter (author interview with Navy cleanup personnel (anonymous), 11 January 2010). These treatments significantly reduce vegetation cover, change habitat conditions, and increase soil erosion, but may allow for expanded public use at least on roadways in the interior of the refuge (public use is currently limited to a handful of beaches on the perimeter of the refuge). The aesthetic impacts rendered by these surface treatments are also substantial (see Figure 3), and the full extent of public use on the refuge remains in doubt as countless deeply buried munitions will remain across the site.

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Figure 3.

Surface clearing of munitions at Vieques National Wildlife Refuge, Puerto Rico, January 2010.

At Vieques, as is the case with most other M2W refuges, years of military training, testing, and preparation for conflict create an uneasy relationship with conservation efforts. Long-term, the militarization of this space can be seen as the reason other land uses have not developed. While the transformative effect of military use is sometimes not very apparent – when groundwater or soils remain contaminated, or when munitions lie buried deep in the ground – it may be just as lasting as more obvious land-use changes such as agriculture or commercial and residential development. In a very real sense, the militarization of these lands is fundamentally responsible for the mixture of qualities that now make them available for inclusion in the National Wildlife Refuge System. A manager at New Hampshire’s Great Bay NWR observed:

If the military hadn’t come in in the [19]50s, this would probably look nothing like it does today. In a sense, the military presence has made this what it is – the fact that it is a large, unbroken tract of land with six miles of undeveloped shoreline. It wouldn’t have happened. It would have been nothing like this.

A number of wildlife refuge managers recognize the transformative effects that prior military use of their lands wrought. At times there can be synergistic effects between military activities and wildlife management. A FWS employee at Great Bay NWR recalls work the DOD completed:

The fish ladders in this water control structure, they were put in by an engineering unit from the Air Force as a training exercise. I think we probably paid … we paid for the structures and materials, but they did all the labor, and the equipment they provided. It’s that thinking outside the box, that creative solution which makes this place work.

This type of example of cooperation between the military and wildlife professionals provides support for the view of growing military environmentalism, or what has also been called ecological militarization (see Havlick, 2007, 2011; see also, for example, Coates et al., 2011; Pearson, 2011; Woodward, 2004).

This view positions military training, testing, or operations as compatible with efforts to protect the environment. There are, in fact, credible examples demonstrating that fires lit to clear munitions testing areas (or ignited inadvertently by the ordnance itself) can create useful habitat openings and grasslands, that buffer zones associated with militarized sites provide valuable open space habitat, and even that tank tracks, bomb craters, and concrete bunkers can provide useful wildlife microhabitats (e.g. Dudley, 2012; Machlis and Hanson, 2008; Pearson et al., 2010). But, as Woodward (2004) points out, if viewed acritically these examples of military-environment compatibility can be treated too generously as well and used by the military or other boosters to simply overwrite an array of adverse impacts caused by militarization.

Regardless of whether they are inclined to be accepting or critical of military-environmentalism, refuge managers tasked with directing conservation and restoration projects at M2W sites do face real challenges. Even fundamental questions such as determining appropriate historic reference conditions for restoration goals become fraught with difficulty at these sites with complex histories (for discussion of some of the philosophical challenges relating to this, see Drenthen, 2009; Hourdequin and Havlick, 2011). A refuge manager at one former bombing range noted:

We’re certainly interested in what was here, and what the opportunities are from what was here. But because of the soil depletion and changes and the surrounding landscape and the exotics, we have limitations. We can’t just forget about those things. Sometimes those things are more important than what was here in the past.

Speaking more pointedly about the predicaments he faced dealing with military contamination on a refuge created from a former air force base, a refuge manager in the northeastern United States pointed to systemic problems:

The [Washington] DC office, the director, they really haven’t put money in contaminants. To me, I think half of this [wildlife biology] stuff is just ridiculous. I mean, look at the kind of work we’re doing here. If you haven’t done a contaminant analysis on these species, I don’t think you should be doing anything. That’s my bottom line.

This tension between perspectives and the lingering military presence leaves some managers wondering where their conservation objectives fit in the landscape and what they can or cannot do to manage for wildlife. As one M2W manager reflected a bit more broadly: ‘Did we really want this [land] in the beginning? I don’t know.’

VII Opportunistic conservation: challenges and possibilities

It should by now be evident that recasting former military lands into new uses dedicated to conservation carries an array of challenges. As the name indicates, opportunistic conservation makes use of opportunities available at a given site, but is also characterized by significant constraints. Military lands can limit wildlife managers’ ability to plan systematically and to implement plans without the disruption or surprise of encountering new hazards or sites of contamination. FWS officials at M2W refuges periodically find themselves reacting to unexpected problems: munitions brought to the surface by rain events or erosion, wildlife burrowing into contaminated areas, or when otherwise routine remediation work uncovers toxic hazards abandoned by earlier military operators (see, for example, Guy, 2000).

At times, managers need to react quickly and may find themselves veering from the restoration work or conservation planning they anticipated. In these cases, opportunistic conservation may seem a burden and a departure from what the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) casts as ecological restoration’s focus: ‘intentional activity that initiates or accelerates the recovery of an ecosystem’ (Society for Ecological Restoration, 2004). Whereas SER identifies a traditional set of goals for restoration and how it will respond to historical conditions at a site, the organization also acknowledges that contingencies can emerge:

Restoration attempts to return an ecosystem to its historic trajectory. Historic conditions are therefore the ideal starting point for restoration design. The restored ecosystem will not necessarily recover its former state, since contemporary constraints and conditions may cause it to develop along an altered trajectory. (Society for Ecological Restoration, 2004) ²

This emphasis on intentionally restoring a site to be historically faithful to prior conditions runs into obstacles in a wide array of settings, and has proven to be a constant question in ecological restoration: which prior condition should restoration efforts target? In complex landscapes with multiple layers of human and natural history, or areas with particular hazards such as M2W refuges, entire categories of restoration activity may be unavailable. Restoration planning at these sites, instead, will often tilt towards the reactive. Managers can act intentionally or thoughtfully in their broad planning and even with most daily tasks, but the material conditions of complex sites such as former military installations often limit how reliably or fully ecological integrity can be privileged. Such limitations are not only found at former military sites, to be sure, but the unique hazards and infrastructure created by proving grounds, missile bases, or ammunition depots create a suite of challenges rarely encountered by most restoration ecologists.

This brings up a broader concern about how these complex landscapes contribute to the interface of conflict and conservation. At these sites, by virtue of the ongoing need to deal with military hazards, the military-environment relationship can remain biased toward the military even long after military activities cease. Outwardly, M2W refuges change dramatically as the names and management goals reflect new Fish and Wildlife Service control, but the refuges’ actual operations must still attend – at times as their most immediate guiding interest – to dealing with the legacy of militarization. A material presence of the military very much remains in the form of chemical contaminants, munitions, massive concrete structures, or other military infrastructure, but these remains are obscured from public view by the site’s explicit representation as a space dedicated to wildlife and conservation. What we find, then, is that against the sanguine view of an emerging military ethic of environmental awareness (e.g. Armstrong et al., 2000; Durant, 2007; Machlis and Hanson, 2008; Ripley and Leslie, 1997), a number of sites that would seem to embody most favorably this convergence of militarization and conservation actually may in important ways serve to misrepresent how the military affects the environment.

Sites such as the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, Big Oaks, or Vieques refuges are now acclaimed for their habitat amenities, many of which were either created or protected by military activity, but these places will also retain military hazards essentially in perpetuity, creating a mixed legacy of contamination and conservation. Even at former military sites such as Great Bay or Assabet River NWR that today seem relatively lightly impacted and might be tempting to view more exclusively as locations of conservation gain, managers continue to grapple with what to do with the infrastructure bequeathed by prior military occupants. As a manager of a M2W refuge in Maine noted, ‘Our job is to manage for wildlife, not to keep a coat of paint on a concrete bunker’ (see Anderson and Havlick, 2013).

Acting opportunistically to pursue their conservation mission, M2W refuge managers often work diligently and creatively to create safe opportunities for the public use of these lands, to develop environmental education programs, and to make these sites function compatibly within the broader mission of the National Wildlife Refuge System. In this way, a concrete igloo formerly used to store Nike-Hercules missiles may be modified to serve as a bat hibernaculum, or 918,000 m³ (Remediation Venture Office, no date) of contaminated soil and debris can be consolidated and buried at the center of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal NWR, capped, and covered with native grasses. While these transformed sites or facilities remain militarized space – the double-lined hazardous waste landfill at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal NWR, for example, is one of the few parcels within the refuge boundaries slated to remain forever under Army jurisdiction (Rocky Mountain Arsenal, 2011) – they also act as spaces of conservation. This, then, is the lingering paradox of M2W refuges: they exhibit some of the most persistent qualities of conflict and militarization while also revealing new possibilities and opportunities.

There surely are risks that come with the conflation of militarism and conservation, including the historical erasure of the processes and policies that produced some of the worst contamination found on the planet. In highlighting the conservation value of former military sites, M2W refuges may make less obvious the possibilities that have been foreclosed for these places. Yet there are also risks to writing off militarized landscapes as unmitigated disasters that must be relegated to permanent status as brownfields. A visit to the site of the former Pease Air Force Base or the Rocky Mountain Arsenal – both now national wildlife refuges – certainly brings a different experience today than it would have several decades ago. With a conservation mission now foregrounded, military activities are largely absent. Opportunistic conservation can thus emerge as a cynical move to cover the tracks of military negligence or as a genuine and creative effort to achieve conservation successes. In either case, we are better served by working to understand these places in their complexity, to engage with them as sites of conservation and militarization, and to do what we can to ensure that we face the challenges posed by such complex landscapes as comprehensively as possible.