Project Censored Award & Tay Wiles / High Country News – 2018-10-04 23:04:02
11 US Air Force Seeks to Control Seventy Percent of Nevada’s Desert National Wildlife Refuge
US Air Force Seeks to Control Seventy
Percent of Nevada’s Desert National Wildlife Refuge
Project Censored Award Winner No. 11
(October 2, 2018) — “More than 32,000 people have submitted comments opposing a military takeover of most of Nevada’s Desert National Wildlife Refuge,” the Center for Biological Diversity reported in March 2018. In order to expand its Nevada Test and Training Range, the US Air Force wants to take control of nearly 70 percent of the 1.6-million-acre refuge. That would give more than two-thirds of the refuge to the US military and would strip protections for wildlife and restrict public access.
The Desert National Wildlife Refuge is the largest national wildlife refuge in the lower 48 states. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936 designated the refuge as a site for the protection of desert bighorn sheep. The Mojave desert tortoise — which has long been in danger due to human destruction of its habitat — is among the many species that inhabit the refuge.
As the Center for Biological Diversity reported, the Air Force’s plans call for industrializing the largely untouched wildlands with dozens of miles of new roads, more than one hundred miles of fencing, two airstrips, and radio signal emitters.
In January 2018, more than two hundred people attended a public meeting in Las Vegas hosted by the Air Force, and everyone who spoke opposed the land seizure. Many of the attendees joined together to chant, “Don’t bomb the bighorn!”
As Tay Wiles reported in a February 2018 High Country News article, loss of access to the land is a “major concern” for the Moapa Band of Paiutes, whose reservation is east of the refuge. Their ancestral lands span much of southern Nevada, and today the Moapa rely on access to the Desert National Wildlife Refuge for traditional resources, including medicinal herbs and big game. “People say, ‘It’s just desert,’ but it means a lot to us,” Tribal Council Chairman Greg Anderson told High Country News.
The Air Force is required to respond to public comments in a final environmental impact statement, which is expected in Fall 2018. Congress will decide the fate of the Desert National Wildlife Refuge when it takes action on the Air Force’s final recommendation.
Media coverage of public opposition to the Air Force plan has been almost nonexistent. In December 2017 the Las Vegas Review-Journal ran a story on the topic, with a follow-up report in January 2018 that focused on opposition to the plan. The closest thing to a corporate media organization covering the topic was NBC’s Las Vegas affiliate, KSNV. Its coverage was brief, though it did provide the dates and locations of the Air Force’s public hearings on the proposed plan.
The Air Force’s plans for the Desert National Wildlife Refuge in Nevada are part of a broader trend toward military expropriation of public lands.
The US Navy is secretly conducting electromagnetic warfare training over the Olympic National Forest in Washington; the Air Force wants to test new high-speed weapons — “hypersonics” — in the air space above more than 700,000 acres of public land in Utah, beyond the boundaries of its current Test and Training Range; and, in May 2018, E&E News reported that House Natural Resources Chairman Rob Bishop (R-UT) had added provisions to the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would “permit indefinite land withdrawals from the Interior Department for military installations with an integrated natural resources management plan.”
E&E reported that the language of this provision is “nearly identical” to a previous bill (H.R. 4299) that passed the Natural Resources Committee in November 2017 before being struck down in conference.
“Thousands Oppose Trump Administration’s Attempted Seizure of Nevada’s Desert National Wildlife Refuge for Expanded Bombing Range,” Center for Biological Diversity, March 8, 2018.
Tay Wiles, “The Air Force Wants to Expand into Nevada’s Wild Desert,” High Country News, February 14, 2018.
Student Researcher: Ky Tucker (College of Western Idaho)
Faculty Evaluator: Michelle Mahoney (College of Western Idaho)
The Air Force Wants to
Expand into Nevada’s Wild Desert
Tay Wiles / High Country News
(February 14, 2018) — One morning this January, I accompanied a group of environmental advocates to the northern tip of the Desert National Wildlife Refuge, 100 miles north of Las Vegas. A short hike brought us to a boulder with a petroglyph of bighorn sheep, eroded after thousands of years of exposure. A more recent traveler left a mark nearby as well, etching the letters “U” and “S”.
“I wonder who did the ‘US,'” said Christian Gerlach, the Sierra Club’s Nevada organizer. “Was it the Air Force or one of the cavalrymen?” By cavalrymen, he meant federal troops encountering bands of Paiute in this region in the 19th century. By Air Force, he meant the entity trying to gain control of this land today.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt first protected the area in 1936, as a game range for bighorn sheep. But just four years later, the US War Department began using part of it as a bombing and gunnery range. Since then, the Air Force has gained a total of 2.9 million acres for its Nevada Test and Training Range.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service co-manages 846,000 of those acres as part of the Desert National Wildlife Refuge — the largest federal wildlife refuge in the Lower 48. Now, the Air Force hopes to gain sole jurisdiction and expand its range to include another 300,000 federal acres, most of it refuge land, leaving the refuge with less than 500,000 acres.
Environmentalists fear the expansion could threaten a uniquely intact habitat for desert bighorn sheep, the threatened desert tortoise and hundreds of other plants and animals. A dry lakebed, a relic of the landscape’s prehistoric past, could become a landing strip, kicking up dust and disrupting wildlife corridors.
The Air Force has also proposed building 30 “emitters,” to simulate threats in training exercises, which would require a network of roads that could disturb wildlife habitat.
In its 1,000-page draft environmental impact statement, the Air Force explains that modern aircraft, which fly higher and faster than ever, require more space to train safely. The Nevada range is the nation’s pre-eminent Air Force training ground and hosts dozens of allied forces from around the world. Every other air space in the country is saturated with flights, making southern Nevada the only option for expansion.
The Department of Defense has a mixed record when it comes to land stewardship in the West. Ecosystems sometimes thrive under military jurisdiction, because they are protected from the kind of development that eats up open space elsewhere. A program at the Barry M. Goldwater Range in Arizona, for example, helped rescue the endangered Sonoran pronghornfrom the brink of extinction after debilitating drought in the early 2000s.
A buffer zone outside Washington’s Hanford Site, where plutonium was once produced for nuclear weapons, became an accidental wilderness where biodiversity thrives. The military has its own experts to ensure training activity adheres to environmental and archeological protection laws.
At a public hearing last month in Beatty, Nevada, James Sample, an employee at Colorado State University on detail at the Pentagon to help facilitate the Air Force expansion, told me, “If we see a sheep, we are not allowed to bomb it.”
Refuge manager Amy Sprunger said the land under co-management with the Air Force is in “pretty good shape.” Many places are even pristine, she said, “because of national wildlife refuge system regulations.” The Air Force “is regulated more or less by us.”
Sprunger considers the current 750 bighorn sheep a healthy herd. She gets annual reports from the Air Force, but her own staffers are allowed onto the testing range only three weeks of the year. When I asked her how the Air Force is ultimately held accountable for land stewardship, she said, “It’s an excellent question. You don’t know what you don’t know.”
She’s most worried about what will happen if the Air Force kicks her agency off that part of the refuge, as it has proposed. Sprunger supports allowing the Air Force to continue using its range, but not expand or take sole jurisdiction.
Aside from environmental concerns, expansion worries Southern Paiute tribal members, as well as hunters and recreationists. Sprunger estimates about 40,000 people each year visit the refuge’s rugged mountains and Joshua tree forests, mostly entering through the southern tip near Las Vegas. That entrance would remain accessible, but much of the western slope of the iconic Sheep Range would be off-limits.
Loss of access is a major concern for many in the 350-member Moapa Band of Paiutes, whose reservation lies just to the east, and whose broader ancestral lands span much of southern Nevada. On the refuge, harvesting medicinal herbs and big game often requires permits. But on Air Force land, the Moapa have to make a special appointment to access traditional resources. “People say, ‘It’s just desert,’ but it means a lot to us,” said Tribal Council Chairman Greg Anderson.
The Air Force will incorporate public comments into a final environmental impact statement by the end of this year. It hopes to pass a withdrawal and expansion plan through Congress by 2020.
Tay Wiles is an associate editor for High Country News.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
