Guns, Bugs, and Bunnies


Hank Williams sang “I’ll never get out of this world alive.” Williams wasn’t making a subtle philosophical point. He was simply celebrating the facts of life. And possibly starting to deal with the consequentially-related fact that he had taken to drinking chloral hydrate as a beverage in place of less-intoxicating alcohol. The only use I’ve ever known for choral hydrate was to clear certain specimens of mites and worms for microscopic examination.


There are times in everyone’s life when you think you may be leaving this world not-alive and that it’s entirely too early to do so. 


I’ve been held at gunpoint twice in my life. Both occasions were associated with contract work for the U.S. military. And both are illustrative for this week’s topic—the positive environmental aspects of military facilities.


Vandenberg Air Force Base in Central California preserves within its borders some of the last high-quality habitats of several kinds. The pre-Columbian regional chaparral vegetation has been mostly lost to development and other disturbance, but large areas remain on the Base. The intertidal marine community is spectacular. It is one of the last places on earth that large abalones not only live in the shallows and intertidal zones, they are stacked several animals deep when the tide is out. And much of the Vandenberg land is culturally important as ancestral home to the Chumash Native Americans. 


Vandenberg sits somewhat uncomfortably in densely populated coastal California. There is public access via hard surface road to some of the beaches, although much of the Base activities are highly classified. Security is tight, and control of public access is rigorous.


I worked with a team conducting an Environmental Impact Analysis for some proposed construction activities on the Base. Part of our work involved observational censuses of marine mammals on parts of the coast. So our team was legitimately working on the Sunday morning we hiked out to the cliffs overlooking the beaches and began to count seals, sea lions, and sea otters. Possibly, however, we should have informed Base Security of our operation, and possibly also not brought along a cooler with picnic lunch and one of the local guy’s pet dogs. I spent a distinctly uncomfortable half hour with a young MP holding a weapon to my back while we straightened things out.


The other time was on Guam. Large areas of the Island are in military reservations. Andersen Air Force Base has a program, led by local Chamorro people, for depredation hunting of wild pigs and deer. The objective of the hunting is to keep the populations in check so they don’t interfere with runway operations. In addition, locals forage for other food including papaya. Our project was to work with the Chamorro hunters and foragers to obtain samples of the foods they were collecting as a check to be sure that chemical contamination wasn’t entering the food chain. We got our on-base and “reference” location deer and pig samples, and other items. On the last day of our work, my science technician and I were seeking off-base “reference” papayas as the last samples we needed. They were not as easy to come by as we had hoped. Finally late in the afternoon we found a neighborhood development all laid out with hard top roads but the houses had not yet been constructed. In the maze of suburban streets were trees with ripe papaya. We pulled our rental car over and started to collect, when a gentleman with an old single-shot 12 gauge shotgun walked up behind us and asked why he shouldn’t shoot us on the spot as trespassers and thieves. He was actually fairly intoxicated. We explained what we were doing—harvesting plants to test for food safety—and he got excited. Invited—well, insisted, really—that we accompany him to his “agricultural experiment station”. It turned out, the guy had appropriated—I’m guessing he was squatting, but I can’t say for sure—part of the neighborhood, and he really did have a series of fields where he was experimenting with different growing methods for yams, fruits, and grains, with different low-technology methods for excluding wild pigs and deer, and other agronomic parameters. He was immensely proud of the operation. He forgot about shooting us as he took us on a tour of his fields, then invited us to join him and his two-person crew of Trukese workers for grilled yams and vodka. Which we did. And escaped safely. I still think of Carl-the-drunk-Chamorro, his experimental farm, the Trukese gentlemen who seemed to operate rather like indentured servants, and the strength of my technician Tracy who took the whole scary incident with aplomb and humor.


Oh. It turned out that foraged and hunted foodstuffs were very safe, being virtually free of any industrial or military chemicals.


The common factor in both these incidents was the high-quality habitat preserved on the military installations. Development pressure on land and land prices is one of the most devastating impacts on biodiversity worldwide. My personal and professional opinion is that such habitat pressure dwarf climate change and chemical pollution as key factors controlling the future health of the biosphere.


While environmental quality is not the military’s primary mission (obviously), the defense infrastructure in the U.S. has grown to be effective and important, and serves as a global model. A few years after my Guam incident, I was engaged as outside expert reviewer for environmental awards for the US Navy. Individual operations—bases or vessels—submitted documentation packages regarding their innovative environmental efforts. From zero-discharge ships to a base in northern Spain that developed a first-rate plan for enhancing and restoring habitat for an endangered species of chameleon, I was mightily impressed at the hard work and sound thinking that the military is bringing to its environmental management.


At the moment, military lands are habitat strongpoints for many species-of-special-concern, for rare and disappearing habitats, and for biodiversity preservation. We are all in debt to the military for their willingness to shoulder the burden of environmental quality, and shoulder it with aplomb.


Note there is new stuff up at all 4 sites: http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ ; http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ ;  http//:endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ ; and http://docviper.livejournal.com/ .  Visit all when you can, thanks so much for stoppin' by!!!