Introduction
Since the early 1990’s, the U.S. Armed Services
have developed and implemented a wide range of
initiatives and programs to comply with federal and
state environmental protection laws on the lands they
manage for military training and testing. Beyond mere
compliance, many of these efforts have been aimed at
instilling the foundations of environmental steward-
ship and sustainability practices within the military.
This reality is often counter-intuitive to those groups
who view the military as the federal government’s
largest polluter and agent of environmental destruc-
tion.
More recently the U.S. military has embraced “sus-
tainability” as an overarching concept for managing its
installations, focusing primarily on the built and oper-
ational environments from the perspectives of energy
use, efficiency and security. However, the military’s
management of its landscapes and natural resources –
currently representing over 30 million acres of federal
lands within the fifty states – represents the histori-
cal, geographical and ecological foundation of its en-
vironmental and sustainability ethos. The “ecology of
place” is the underlying and organizing principle of
sustainability. Thus, recognizing and understanding
the relationships between military activities and their
physical/ecological contexts cannot be ignored in the
path to sustainability.
As the U.S. military’s largest land-based compo-
nent, the U.S. Army has arguably led the evolution of
land environmental stewardship and sustainability.
There is a synergistic relationship between the Army’s
training to fight in varied operating environments in
the United States, and its success once it is deployed