Sustainability and National Security

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and community members to enjoy the outdoors and
local environments associated with military installa-
tions.
In order to accomplish this multidimensional land
management stewardship, military installations em-
ploy numerous research and support organizations
and programs, staffed by federal environmental pro-
fessionals at all levels of the organization (Doe et al.
2005). Although each installation’s staffs may vary de-
pending upon the scale and scope of its lands, larger
installations are composed of natural resources staff
organized under the installation or garrison com-
mander. These land management efforts are often sup-
ported by a wide range of environmental consultants,
academic researchers and non-profit organizations,
who work under federal contracts or other collabora-
tive agreements to provide these services. As the de-
mands for land management have increased and the
size of the federal workforce has declined, these other
groups represent a much larger component of the
day-to-day natural resources management capacity.
As one example, the author worked for ten years as an
academic contractor and scientist with the Center for
Environmental Management of Military Lands (CEM-
ML) at Colorado State University, which provided
over 300 natural resources management personnel to
military installations nation-wide under a variety of
federal contracts.
One example of these land management programs
is the U.S. Army’s Integrated Training Area Manage-
ment (ITAM) program, conceived in the mid-1980s
by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, under the
auspices of the Corps’ Construction Engineering Re-
search Laboratory (CERL) in Champaign, Illinois. The
ITAM program provides land management profes-
sionals to manage training land resources, including

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