Soldiers in the garden: managing the US military training landscape

Abstract

Despite a reputation for destruction, militaries across the world may maintain important biological natural resources that are key to achieving global biodiversity conservation goals. On lands used by militaries for soldier training, numerous rare and endangered species can be found. The study presented here explores the relationship between the Department of Defense (DoD) and the species it hosts by considering the military training landscape as perceived by DoD employees. To construct a more complete understanding of the conceptualizations of the ideal training landscape, we interviewed land managers at several training installations. We found that the underlying beliefs that managers have about training, war, and nature influence their view of the ideal training landscape. These beliefs have indirect yet tangible impacts on the environment as the management practices implemented to bring about the ideal training landscape contribute to achieving conservation objectives and promoting threatened and endangered species on military land.

Keywords:

• Military land
• Department of Defense
• military landscapes
• biodiversity conservation
• land management
• cultural landscapes

Introduction

Travelling among military lands—those owned and used by the military for activities such as weapons testing and soldier training—you might expect to find mostly desolation. There should be muddy craters, rusting barbed wire, towering tanks, and concrete bunkers that clearly show the military presence on these landscapes. Yet, driving through the pine forest of Fort Stewart, Georgia or standing at the foot of a mountain in Fort Carson, Colorado, the vistas we found were so beautiful, we could almost forget we were on a military base if not for the gunfire in the distance. And just beyond sight is a rich community of wildlife not always visible. Rare and elusive butterflies thrive in the ammunition impact areas; endangered woodpeckers nest in trees above practice foxholes and camping soldiers; little purple flowers found nowhere else in the world grow in tank tracks. This is the wonderful irony we found while travelling among United States (US) Department of Defense (DoD) training installations (though we are certainly not the first to wrestle with this irony, see, for example: Brady, 2008; Coates, Cole, Dudley, & Pearson, 2011; Davis, 2007; Havlick, 2018; Pearson, 2012; Pearson, Coates, & Cole, 2010; Woodward, 2001). Of course, this is only one way of reading the landscape; the land and natural resource managers with whom we toured these lands presented a different way of reading the landscape using a highly militarised lens. Trees are concealment for soldiers and a vista is judged by its visibility to enemy targets. The natural elements blend into the military ones. In this study, we bring to light how those who work on military lands think about and conceptualise the military training landscape. While a substantial body of prior literature has examined military spaces, much of that work has shared the perspective of scholars rather than those who help shape these landscapes.

As military geographer Rachel Woodward (2014a) so succinctly states, ‘Military landscapes are everywhere’. (p. 141). Following the geographic tradition, we approach the concept of landscape as more than just a material location. Rather, landscapes may consist of a mixture of cultural meaning, imagery, and experience of a physical place (Greider & Garkovich, 2010; Rech, Bos, Jenkings, Williams, & Woodward, 2015; Schama, 1995; Short, 2005; Woodward, 2014b). A landscape has layers that can be pulled apart and ‘read’ like a text (Hoskins & Taylor, 1955). A landscape, both the physical reality and the imagined cultural idea, shapes and is shaped by human interaction (Cosgrove, 2008). Military landscapes are simply those that are intertwined with various military activities and purposes. Active war zones, battlefields, contested country borders, training installations, weapons factories, storage depots, war memorials, soldiers marching in parades, and war representations in video games are all military landscapes that have drawn the attention of scholars (Brady, 2005; Davis, 2007; Lookingbill & Smallwood, 2019; Martini, 2015; Palka & Galgano, 2005; Pearson, 2012; Pearson et al., 2010; Rech et al., 2015; Russell, 2001; Woodward, 2014a).

In particular, many researchers have used military landscapes as a lens to explore the often-complicated relationship between the military and the non-human environment. One aspect of the non-human environment that has gained recent attention are the species of plants and animals that live on military lands. The coexistence of endangered and rare species on military lands is more than just a set individual anecdotes. In general, military training lands tend to be teeming with wildlife and have much higher biodiversity than surrounding lands (Aycrigg, Belote, Dietz, Aplet, & Fischer, 2015; Cizek et al., 2013; Harabiš & Dolný, 2018; Lindenmayer et al., 2016; Stein, Scott, & Benton, 2008), leading various thinkers to wrestle with this phenomenon. Environmental historian Edmund Russell pondered the similarities between military installations and wildlife refuges and describes both as wielding great power over people, space, and nature. He asks, ‘Are armed forces and conservationists allies by the oddest and most ironic of coincidences as we usually aver? Or have our perceptions about the actions of each—taking life on the one hand and protecting it on the other—blinded us to their deeper kinship?’ (Russell, 2010, p. 232).

Indeed, military authors such as L. Peter Boice (2006) assert that the military and conservation missions are inherently compatible. In an endangered species management guide for the DoD, Nancy Benton and colleagues (Benton, Ripley, & Powledge, 2008) state that, ‘Biodiversity conservation is essential in sustaining the natural landscapes required for the training and testing necessary to maintain military readiness’. (p. 26). Given the apparent compatibility and the vast size of the global military estate, conservation scholars Rick Zentelis and David Lindenmayer (Zentelis & Lindenmayer, 2015) advocate for taking better advantage of the conservation opportunities on military lands. In a similar vein, Todd Lookingbill and Peter Smallwood (Lookingbill & Smallwood, 2019) present several edited case studies exploring the various ‘collateral values’ of military activities for non-human environments.

At the same time, other scholars are more critical of the military-environment relationship. Katherine Keirns (2015) challenges the narrative of a peaceful coexistence of endangered species on military lands by recounting how the DoD reacted to the passing of the Endangered Species Act (ESA)—many installations struggled to adhere to the new rules, while some commanders refused to comply at all. Similarly, Robert Durant (2007) chronicles the repeated requests by the DoD for exemptions from environmental laws that allow that agency to regulate itself. Rachel Woodward (2001) argues that ‘khaki conservation’, or military environmentalism, is simply a method of justifying military control of land in Britain. In his work on military sites that have been converted into wildlife refuges in the US, David Havlick (2018) reveals other motivations for military conservation; namely, converting old military sites to refuges—rather than residential or commercial uses—requires less costly clean-up of contamination by the DoD. Sasha Davis (2007) claims that there is also a high risk of erasing the negative—but important—aspects of history by referring to military lands as natural instead of as sites of significant human history.

Finally, there are many who maintain a stance somewhere in the middle of this debate, viewing the relationship between the military and the non-human environment as complex resulting in both environmental benefits and costs. In his discussion of wildlife in borderlands and other ‘no-man’s lands’, Peter Coates (2014) provides multiple examples where the natural and historical narratives coexist, as opposed to human history being erased in favour of a new environmental story as Davis had warned. In response to Rachel Woodward, Chris Pearson (2012) criticises her focus on how the military uses environmental narratives while dismissing the actual environmental benefits, such as the preservation of species that live on military lands. Finally, Peter Coates and colleagues (2011) end their historical investigation of three military estates by describing the challenge for scholars of military landscapes ‘to thread [their] way through this minefield to attain a vantage point from which militarised landscapes and military environmentalism are visible in all their detail, complexity, subtlety, and national distinctiveness’ (Coates et al., 2011, p. 480).

Military training landscapes in the US

In this paper, we focus on military landscapes associated with the preparation of war, rather than those associated with active conflict or the aftermath of war, with emphasis on military installations used for soldier training. Specifically, we consider how those who currently work on military installations within the US understand and conceptualise the military training landscape. Despite their substantial influence on shaping the landscapes, the voices of those who manage these lands have largely been absent from this literature to date. In this paper, we endeavour to paint the training landscape as viewed within the military imagination. We conclude by commenting on the significance of our results on the larger debates about military environmentalism. Adding the land managers’ perspectives to the story enhances the detail and complexity of how we understand the relationship between the military and the environment.

Within the US, the DoD manages around 28 million acres (Department of Defense, 2018) of which about 24 million acres are used for land training exercises (Office of the Under Secretary of Defense, 2016). Most of this land was acquired during or after World War II (Brady, 2014) and though some conflicts have arisen over time regarding the military ownership of these lands, such conflicts have occurred less frequently than in other national contexts where the nation’s land mass is smaller (for example, Woodward, 2001). As a federal landowner, the DoD is required to comply with the major environmental laws including the Clean Water Act (CWA), Clean Air Act (CAA), Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), and Endangered Species Act (ESA). Over the decades since these laws have been passed, the DoD has requested the inclusion of exemptions into the laws for the purposes of national security resulting in amendments that have made environmental law within the context of the DoD incredibly complex (Durant 2007). With the passing of the Sikes Act in 1960, the DoD was given the ability to manage its land for conservation purposes and work with other agencies in doing so. Amendments to the Sikes Act in 1997 now require every DoD installation with natural resources to create an Integrated Natural Resource Management Plan (INRMP). At each installation there are two main parties contributing to land management and INRMP planning, the Integrated Training Area Management program within Range Control of the Training Division and the Environmental Division.

Methods

We base our description and analysis on qualitative field work conducted from May to August of 2019 at several DoD installations. Knowing that access to these sites is limited, we worked with the Public Affairs (PA) office at each installation to acquire permission for our research. By starting with this office, we ensured not only ability to actually access each installation but also to build trust with our interview participants. We relied on the PA office to identify initial participants and from there used a snowball process (asking participants for whom they would recommend we talk to next) to find others with relevant experience to participate in our interviews. We conducted 19 semi-structured interviews with 26 land managers, natural resource managers, and other employees making sure to interview at least one employee from both the training and environmental division at each location. In addition to the interviews, at all but one location we were taken on a vehicle tour of the training areas to help us gain a greater context for what had been discussed in the interviews. Finally, we collected primary documents such as planning documents and maps. Though all of these sources helped us understand the context of this study, we rely mostly on the interviews for our results here. The interviews followed an interview guide with some allowance for other topics to arise. They were recorded, transcribed and coded by the research team. The coding and analysis process built on emerging themes, the research questions, and the relevant literature and was often an iterative process. The results here are focussing on just part of those results. Though we also discussed species management strategies, structures, and the management of endangered species in the interviews we limit our discussion here to the results that speak to the management goals encapsulated in the ideal training landscape as conceived of by managers.

While identifying installations to include in the study, we prioritised those with significant land holdings and protected species across a diverse spectrum of landscapes and training types. Fort Carson, on 370 000 acres in Colorado, is a projection platform (the troops assigned there are ready to deploy overseas whenever needed) with mainly open prairie training areas in mountain foothills and several species that are under consideration for ESA listing such as the triploid Colorado checkered whiptail lizard. Fort Stewart, on 280 000 acres in Georgia, is also a projection platform with long-leaf pine forests and hosts the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker along with 6 other federally listed species. Fort Jackson, on 52 000 acres in South Carolina, offers basic training for new soldiers within various wooded areas and provides habitat for the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker in addition to several endangered plants. Fort McCoy, on 140 000 acres in Wisconsin, offers training to troops in the Reserves within a mix of oak woodlands and prairies and is home to numerous rare and endangered butterflies. Fort Custer, on 7,800 acres in Michigan, is a National Guard installation with oak barren woodlands and a handful of rare species and state protected remnant ecosystems. Fort Hood, on 215 000 acres in Texas, accommodates a variety of training (mainly those that close the gap between basic training and deployment) on its flat plateau areas and hosts protected birds such as the golden cheeked warbler.

The training garden

Before diving into the specifics of the military training landscape, we want to note that the primary priority of land managers in these locations is to provide a realistic training environment, one that mimics war conditions. However, realism is a complicated idea. The managers’ understanding of realistic war conditions spoke both to their understanding of the training landscape and to their understanding of wars and military enemies. This is especially reflected in the variety of ways they addressed realism. Some described specific physical elements (such as the presence of trees) while others described abstract environmental characteristics (such as danger). Though providing a detailed exploration of the imagined war environment was outside of the original purview of this study, we found that some understanding of their views on this environment was necessary to understand how managers conceptualise the training landscape. The emphasis on realism meant that ideas of war mirrored themselves in ideas of training and were inescapable when describing the latter. In a similar vein, the ideal training landscape reflects how the managers and trainers think about the ideal soldier. Afterall, the purpose of training is to transform the civilian recruit into a soldier. Therefore, how managers describe the ideal training landscape and the ideal training experience also reveals some of the specific characteristics they view as associated with the ideal soldier.

As we examined the different threads that, when woven together, make up the military training landscape, we could not help but be reminded of a private garden. The military installation and its expansive training areas are walled off from the public, often literally. Only those with special permission are allowed to enter and use the land. The landscape behind the fence is believed to be natural by those who create and use this landscape—yet soldiers are here on these landscapes making not the type of nature that exists in isolation of humans, such as pure wilderness, but a nature that is intensely managed to the benefit of humans, and in this case, the military mission.

Behind the wall

The physical and metaphorical separation between the public and military on these lands has been noted by other scholars, such as Rachel Woodward (2014b). Indeed, the separation has undoubtably contributed to the lack of scholarship available on these landscapes. It is hard to study something behind walls and layers of secrecy. Doing so requires getting permission to enter and make visible what is hidden away. One member of our research team was familiar with the Army command structure and general military language as a result of growing up in a family with connections with the Army. This familiarity enabled our research team to more easily navigate the challenges required to gain access to these lands and their managers. But even in our own experiences on these lands, numerous features signalled the real and imagined barrier. A sign, for example, warning civilians not to trespass into areas with unexploded ordnance inspires trepidation rather than exploration (Figure 1). Foreboding gates guarded by soldiers—where only a special piece of paper or plastic will signify that you are indeed allowed inside—stirred doubt as to whether we really belonged here.

Figure 1. ‘Danger’ and ‘off limits’ signs at Fort Stewart, GA. Photo taken by author.

However, the barrier is more porous than it may generally appear to outsiders. Certainly, many of the natural aspects of the environment are open for the public to experience. Many of the installations we visited allow public recreation; members of the public can hunt, fish, camp, and kayak within the borders as allowed by the installation commander. Local birding clubs and school groups visit for tours about the local wildlife. Moreover, parts of the bases are visible beyond the borders; we were able to observe the installation from public roads that intersected the installations. But there are limits to such access. Despite being allowed within some spaces on these installations, the public is prohibited from visiting active training spaces and other dangerous areas. Unlike the soldiers that use these lands, the public is not trained to safely traverse the training landscape. Managers expressed that the public does not belong in such places, as they will be in real danger. During this work, we only explored past the public roads when touring with an installation employee.

Recreated ‘nature’

It was on these tours that we were able to get a glance of the garden behind the wall. As we recount above, we found beautiful and natural looking landscapes. It turns out that ‘natural’ was exactly what the land managers had been intending. Training land managers at every installation we visited described wanting a training landscape that was as ‘natural’ as possible. Of course, natural can mean many things. As scholars such as William Cronon (1995), Roderick Nash (2014), and Peter Coates (1998) have noted, ideas and definitions of ‘nature’ are variable, ever shifting, and driven by culture. These definitions are entangled with complex histories and social trends. The use of ‘nature’ in military culture is no different. Here we disentangle to the best of our ability how ‘nature’ is conceptualised in the context of the military training landscape. For trainers, nature is without people and human influence; it is difficult and at times dangerous; random and variable. Finally, nature is almost always more realistic of conditions experienced in war than anything non-natural.

To start, we address the belief that nature is without human impacts. This observation is not unique to the military but pervasive in the wider public’s understanding of nature (Coates, 1998; Cronon, 1995). Managers expressed that the training landscape should be free of both human improvement (including any type of development) and human damage. A land manager at Fort Carson explained, ‘Healthy forests, healthy grassland, healthy wetlands, all of those things add to what we call realistic environment because that’s not something that we ever engineered’. A nature free of people serves two purposes for the military. First, a landscape free of anthropogenic influences, traces of civilisation, and human improvements reflects what managers believe is most realistic of war conditions. Or, as described by a manager at Fort Jackson, ‘Realistic is basically, you know, not being touched, not being manicured or any type of work being done on a particular area’. Some trainers told me that they restricted the number of roads they added in the training areas because they could not guarantee there would be roads in the locations these soldiers would later be fighting in overseas. In other cases, roads were the only human-made improvement they saw fit to add, as an employee at Fort Custer stated, ‘Well, the landscape that we look for is, other than dirt roads, is usually as natural as it can be. Like if you drove in somewhere…not improved land’.

As mentioned above, this understanding of realism reflects as much their understanding of training as their understanding of the locations where conflicts take place. Natural areas without human influences are most realistic if wars are fought in undeveloped, untouched, wild, areas rather than developed, manicured areas. Despite the increasing belief in certain academic circles that there are no longer untouched wilderness areas or nature void of human influence (McKibben, 1989) and despite the fact that soldiers are often fighting in settled areas with local peoples, the training land managers maintained that a lack of development, improvement, and human impact was most realistic of war arenas. This tendency is perhaps a descendent of the historical tradition of describing enemies of war with language relating to nature. Throughout US history, military and political rhetoric have featured natural metaphors that degrade enemies as ‘others’ to justify violence against them. During World War II, propaganda cartoonists drew Japanese enemies as insects that needed to be eradicated like pests (Tucker & Russell, 2004). During the cold war, military officials labelled communism as a virus whose spread needed to be contained (Schlosser, 2007). True war conditions surely run the gamut from cities to rural to wilderness areas, yet managers categorise the typical war landscape as ‘natural’ rather than ‘urban’ or ‘rural’ perhaps reflecting this tendency to align war enemies with nature.

Non-human nature serves a second purpose in training soldiers: It provides a new enemy, a new ‘other’, against which troops can practice fighting. In a similar fashion as painting enemies as natural, there is a long history of painting nature as a formidable enemy in western culture (Coates, 1998). Militaries have, on several occasions, taken advantage of this natural enemy during training. During the Cold War, military officials sent troops to train in the newly explored Arctic to gain physical and mental toughness from the difficult environmental conditions (Farish, 2006). Rachel Woodward has argued that the association of rural areas with masculinity in Britain partially explains why the Ministry of Defense chose rural landscapes as the perfect conditions for training the next generation of masculine soldiers (Woodward, 2009). Given the links between wild nature and masculinity in the American imagination (think cowboys in the frontier; Cronon, 1995), it is unsurprising that a natural landscape free of people would be considered an optimal environment to train soldiers.

That leads us to the next belief about nature: Nature is bursting with challenges for soldiers to overcome—heat, thorn bushes, snakes, mosquitoes, poison ivy, etc. By tackling these obstacles, soldiers learn to face and overcome significant challenges. A land manager at Fort McCoy shared, ‘I believe that the more intact and natural it is, it gives our training soldiers the opportunity to use realistic situations. I think part of training is they have to endure difficult situations, which means having to deal with raspberry and blackberry [sic] and mosquitoes and gnats and heat…because wherever they're going to be deployed, it's not going to be a golf course…And so, I do feel that having those obstacles encourage training and improve the training conditions’. As described here, there was no substitute for experiencing the trials within nature in person. As an environmental manager from Fort Jackson remarked, encountering a snake in various media was a drastically different experience than waking up while camping in the woods to find a snake only inches from your face. He added, ‘I think offering…a simulated environment, you're not experiencing the climate, the weather, you know, the threats associated with the environment, you know, you've got real insects and arthropods and snakes out here’. Through these stories, we can begin to see nature conceptualised as a means to sharpen and toughen soldiers during training, as described by Woodward and Farish in the above examples. We can also see more clearly the conceptualisation of the final product of training: the ideal solider. The ideal solider is a masculine warrior that can adapt to a challenging environment, survive without the conveniences of civilisation, and be mentally tough enough to withstand hardships.

In addition to novel challenges, nature offers a variability that cannot be rivalled by human intervention. A natural environment contains an inherent randomness. Fallen logs, bushes, and puddles are sprinkled across the landscape. The seemingly infinite variability of nature furnishes a seemingly infinite supply of unique training experiences and scenarios. Training in these landscapes gives soldiers numerous different experiences, even on the same plot of land. A Fort Jackson land manager explained, ‘The more natural it is, the better it is for training because it gives them multiple structures to work with. It gives them different strata levels to work with…I feel that the more natural it is, the more it gives them the opportunities to do different scenarios’. Variety also ensures that the landscape can serve the needs of diverse groups of soldiers that may train for different missions.

The nature of war

When comparing training landscapes to war conditions, not all natures are equally realistic. The most realistic nature is one that most closely matches the nature of the location in which soldiers plan to fight. The military community has labelled these realistic natures as ‘ecological analogs’ to war arenas (Doe, 2011). The trainers aim to not only replicate the general conditions of war during training—danger, variability, and lack of modification or improvement—but also the specific characteristics of the natural ecosystems where wars take place. An environmental and training land manager at Fort Custer reported, ‘Conventional wisdom is that we want to have habitats that soldiers can train like they fight…and that means we have to have a range of different environments, from an Arctic to the desert to a regular European forest kind of thing’. Training like they fight meant troops need to train in a desert before deploying to fight in the deserts of Iraq or to train in a mountainous environment before deploying to fight in the mountains of Afghanistan. Soldiers will struggle to fight in open deserts and prairies if they have only trained in forests with the concealment of trees and shrubs. One trainer at Fort McCoy recounted his own experience training, ‘I did a lot of training in the desert…In the desert…you fight a little bit differently, you know, versus fighting in a woodland area, you know, or any mountainous area. So, the different types of environment…we learn to adapt and fight in a little bit different way based on the area that we go to’.

The land managers were cognisant that they could not be certain where future wars would take place and which natural environments would be required, so they needed to maintain a variety of environments. In almost every interview, the land managers explained to me their desire to maintain as many different natures as possible from forests to deserts to prairies. Of course, it is outside of the capability of a single installation to match every ecosystem needed. Rather, the DoD as a whole works to ensure that each of the major ecosystem types of the world (specifically each ecoregion identified by R. G. Bailey of the US Forest Service, see Bailey, 2014), are represented within DoD land holdings (Doe, 2011). For the managers at individual installations, their task is to best maintain whatever ecosystems they have within the installation. If they have the forest that mimics Eastern Europe, then they must make sure to preserve it for years to come. Here a need for the natural environment came up again while talking with managers at Fort Carson: ‘If you keep it as natural as possible, it simulates the same experience for the soldier when they go to a country and have to fight in that type of climate’. Some of these elements were described as only being present in a natural environment. For example, while you can experience the climate of a desert environment in a human-made landscape, you cannot experience the terrain or vegetation.

Despite managing for training and not environmental outcomes, the managers discussed doing ‘ecosystem management’ in order to best preserve the particular ecosystem their installation represented. To our surprise, the training land managers could describe in detail the specific type of ecosystem they were maintaining as the soldier ‘habitat’ whether it be longleaf pine forest or short grass prairie. They could also describe the natural processes—such as fire—that they used to maintain the natural characteristics they desired.

Nature controlled

So far, we have described the many elements of ‘nature’ found in the training landscape: The lack of people, the challenges, the randomness, and the ecological representation. However, we have yet to describe the human aspects that make it a true garden rather than wilderness. The trainers chose the aspects of nature they preferred while modifying others, sprinkling in very unnatural elements among the natural ones. Two of the most often mentioned desired environmental characteristics were manoeuvrability and line of sight. Troops needed to be able traverse the landscape and see long distances towards enemy targets, which often meant cutting away or burning vegetation. On the other hand, the soldiers still needed some vegetation, usually in the form of trees, to use as concealment.

In some cases, promoting manoeuvrability through vegetation thinning or supporting concealment through tree planting also aligned with promoting the ‘natural’ ecosystem. For example, the longleaf pine ecosystem found at Fort Stewart requires frequent burning to maintain ecological health while also opening the forest for line of sight and manoeuvrability (Figure 2). However, the manoeuvrability and line of sight requirement was constant across all installations, even where it was not considered part of the ‘natural’ environment. Maximising the naturalness of a landscape while ensuring manoeuvrability, line of sight, and concealment required a fine balancing act for the land managers. Several managers also expressed a need to balance realism with safety such as a manager at Fort Hood who indicated, ‘We want to provide realistic training but we also want to make sure that it's as safe as it can be relatively speaking because we don't want them getting injured or worse than that here before they even get to deploy’. At Fort Jackson, where new soldiers receive basic training, trainers opted for safer conditions rather than ‘natural’ ones and cleared some areas of poison ivy.

Figure 2. Training area, Fort Stewart, GA, cleared for optimal training visibility and manoeuvrability. Photo taken by author.

Finally, we would like to note that not every acre of the training space was reserved for natural ecosystems. At some installations there were limited acres that have been developed into ‘urban’ training areas with fake villages and cities. However, since this was quite limited—less than 20% of DoD training areas feature any urban characteristics (Office of the Under Secretary of Defense, 2016)—we chose to focus our attention in this paper on the bulk of the training areas where the ‘garden’ is maintained.

Real impacts

Leaving the realm of metaphor, all of the landscape conceptions we have described above have real tangible impacts on the environments we observed. Specifically, the imagined training landscape helps to guide management decisions on these lands, which in turn impacts real environmental conditions. The details of the desired landscape are critically important for determining what management is required. The desire for a ‘natural’ landscape with no human-made structures means that there is little development of the type that destroys habitats on other lands. The desire for ecological analogs means that a diverse set of wildlife habitats are preserved across multiple installations. The desire for a clear line of sight means using fire, a natural disturbance that promotes numerous fire-adapted species. The military, with its ambition to create this type of landscape, has sculpted great refuges for endangered species and other flora and fauna. Reflecting on the alignment between conservation and military activities, a natural resource manager at Fort Stewart explained, ‘If we can burn areas completely, that's going to prevent hardwoods from coming in…which are going to obscure the vision of soldiers in the future. So, it’s for the woodpecker, but we wouldn't be doing this unless it was a military installation to begin with, and these species probably wouldn't even be here…If the Army weren't here, it would not be the conservation property that it is now’.

Conclusion

Training land managers are tasked with creating optimal training environments for soldiers. Though they are given some specific guidelines, such as the grass height on shooting ranges, their decisions are also guided by underlying ideas about training, war, and nature. The managers take their understanding of the ideal training landscape within the military culture and translate that vision on the ground in the landscapes they manage. If we are to understand how the military interacts with the environment, land managers are an incredibly important link. Land managers go out with plants, mowers, and seeds to mould a landscape that also happens to be a refuge for flora and fauna. The underlying ideas about the training landscape, though not tangible themselves, have a very tangible impact on the environment. How the land managers understand the training landscape is just as impactful, if not more so, than the official army mandates on land management, making the land manager perspective critical for understanding the positive (and negative) environmental impacts on military training lands. Though the decisions made by land managers are surely influenced by a gamut of other individual and organisational factors, the goals of what they are trying to accomplish form the foundation on which those decisions are made. Specifically, the military goals of training soldiers are of the upmost primacy and, unlike other land management contexts, this one goal takes priority over all others.

The optimal training environment, as understood by military training land managers, is ‘natural’ because it is not human-made, but rather random, difficult, and representative of the nature of war zones. But these environments are also safe and open. We chose here to organise these disparate themes into the metaphor of a garden. But we could just have easily described it as a park that aims for natural experiences that are only accessible to certain people, or numerous other structuring metaphors. Whatever metaphor, there is a blending of natural and military elements in the imagined training landscape that indicates the coexistence of wildlife and soldiers is, as Edmund Russell suggests (2010), perhaps not so ironic. Conceivably, it is not just the power of the military that helps these landscapes align with conservation but the ideas about nature itself that are held by military employees. In describing the training landscape, managers described a nature that was masculine, a nature that was free of people, a nature that was exclusive, a nature that served to benefit people, a nature that could easily be a site of violence, and a nature that could even be used to categorise other people as lesser. All of these ideas about nature are not unique to military circles but can be found throughout the history of conservation as well.

We hesitate to go so far as to remark that the military is inherently compatible with conservation, as many of the managers we talked to did. For though there are many rare species on these lands, nevertheless there are countless others that are not present. The species that have found refuge on these lands are specific examples of compatibility. They are the species whose needs align with the landscape created for training soldiers. They might be species that rely on disturbances, such as fire, that are created by the land managers but mimic natural disturbances or species that find the ‘natural’ training landscape to be free of the development that limits habitat on other lands. In some cases, they are the species native to the specific ecosystems that installations are set up to represent as ecological analogues. Yet military land managers are guided by many of the same ideas about nature as the conservation movement itself. Given the very real species that thrive on these landscapes and the roots of the ideas that give them form, one can read the military training landscape as a conservation landscape through the perceptive of military land managers. Acknowledging these highly militarised spaces as conservation landscapes gets one step closer to using them for their full potential for meeting global biodiversity goals but only if we continue to grapple with the true complexity of the human-environment relationship on these landscapes.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the DoD employees who shared their experiences and knowledge with us. Your insights and contributions make this work possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emily Rabung

Emily Rabung is a Ph.D. student at the School of Environment and Natural Resources at The Ohio State University, studying environmental social sciences. Her research interests focus on addressing environmental challenges and solutions from a human dimensions perspective while utilising multiple social science disciplines. Emily’s current research projects include an examination of the organisational power of military institutions to complete biodiversity conservation through land management.

Eric Toman

Eric Toman is a professor at the School of Environment and Natural Resources at The Ohio State University. Eric has an interdisciplinary background that includes training and experience in the social and natural sciences. His research is focussed on developing a better understanding of the social dimensions of coupled human and natural systems. Using theory and methods from sociology and social-psychology, he examines the factors that influence the adoption of behaviours that enable adaptation to changing environmental conditions. Prior to joining SENR, he completed an American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science and Technology Policy Fellowship in the Climate Program Office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In this role, he served as a US delegate to the 28th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change/SBSTA negotiations.