David G. Havlick

Aging Infrastructure and Ecosystem Restoration

Targeted decommissioning of deteriorated and obsolete infrastructure can provide opportunities for restoring degraded ecosystems.

DISARMING NATURE: CONVERTING MILITARY LANDS TO WILDLIFE REFUGES*

Since 1988 the United States has closed nearly two dozen major military installations and reclassified them as national wildlife refuges. By presenting a case study of one site of military‐to‐wildlife conversion, this article examines the formation of these places and the implications of casting military practices and environmental conservation as compatible activities. As lands where military and environmental attributes can be perceived as inseparable, military‐to‐wildlife sites exemplify hybrid geographies that challenge dualistic notions of nature and society.

Opportunistic conservation at former military sites in the United States

Recent military base closures and realignments in the United States have opened dozens of former training and testing sites to new uses and priorities. One common transition is to designate these lands as national wildlife refuges. This presents conservation opportunities on hundreds of thousands of hectares previously under military control, but the ecological restoration and subsequent reuse of these lands is complex and fraught with challenges. Unexploded ordnance, soil and water contamination, reinforced structures, and other military remainders exist on many of these sites, and wildlife refuge managers typically receive little funding or training to contend with such relicts. This paper acknowledges some of the real conservation opportunities provided by military-to-wildlife (M2W) refuges, but emphasizes that restoration and conservation measures at these sites remain bounded by physical and sociopolitical constraints. One outcome of these constraints is ‘opportunistic conservation’, where habitat and wildlife goals are shaped or constrained by the lingering presence of prior military uses. Working from case studies and interviews conducted at M2W sites in the United States, this research suggests that opportunistic conservation represents a limited vision for restoration and conservation at these places that also potentially obscures these limitations. At many of these same sites, however, more affirmative opportunistic conservation efforts exhibit creative responses given the conditions that exist.

Reconsidering Wilderness: Prospective Ethics for Nature, Technology, and Society

In this paper I seek to reconsider wilderness against recent critiques that portray it as necessarily contributing to a separation between nature and society. By examining the historical and contemporary contexts for designating wilderness areas in the United States, I propose that these wilderness lands and their particular constraints on the use of certain technologies may in fact present integrative, open spaces for considering how to live ethical, technological lives in contemporary society. An examination of actual wilderness practices illustrates how wilderness regulations may support a more democratic politics of technology and help develop an ethic grounded in fairness, humility, and restraint.

Practical Wisdom in Environmental Education

To create an ecologically literate, motivated, and engaged citizenry, environmental education must help students develop practical wisdom. We discuss three elements of teaching central to this task: first, greater emphasis on contextualized knowledge, grounded in particular places and cases; second, multi-modal learning that engages students as whole persons both cognitively and affectively; and third, stronger connections between knowing and doing, or between knowledge and responsibility. We illustrate these elements through our experience teaching field-based environmental studies courses, but also emphasize ways in which practical environmental education can be effectively incorporated into campus-based classes.

Land use and land cover in a transitioning militarized landscape

ABSTRACT The repurposing of military lands is common in many parts of the world and presents a variety of conservation opportunities. This study examines land cover at Big Oaks National Wildlife Refuge, Indiana (U.S.A.) as it transitioned from military proving ground to wildlife refuge from 1985 to 2013. We use remote sensing, semi-structured interviews, and a review of planning and management documents to examine this transition. Limited change in land cover composition and distribution are detected, despite changes in use and management. This landscape similarity relates to similarities in land management practices, and the impact of landscape history on current management practices. The findings suggest that military use and conservation objectives at this site yield similar land covers and are not necessarily in contrast to each other. As military base closures continue, the potential to maintain and expand conservation opportunities on these lands will likely grow in importance.

Informal trail creation: hiking, trail running, and mountain bicycling in shortgrass prairie

ABSTRACT This study considers initial impacts on vegetation cover caused by mountain bicycling, trail running, and hiking in a shortgrass prairie environment. Vegetation cover measurements were taken at multiple intervals following experimental recreational use on three uphill and three downhill trail segments. All three activities caused statistically significant increases in bare ground cover between the first baseline measurement and post-treatment sampling one year later. Short-term effects were more variable: walking and bicycling caused statistically significant increases in bare ground, but running did not. The study suggests that impacts to vegetation differ not just between uses, but also within a single type of recreational activity depending upon site-specific characteristics, and that the timing of use and recovery are important factors in informal trail creation. The rapid creation of trail impacts also has management implications, especially as recreational pressures increase and recreationists seek more challenging terrain and opportunities off-trail. This research suggests that the dynamics of trail formation from running deserve further attention and likely differ from hiking or mountain biking impacts.

Militarized Spaces and Open Range: Pinon Canyon and (Counter)cartographies of Rural Resistance

This paper examines how rural communities in Colorado have confronted military expansion. Against the backdrop of a series of base realignments and closures during the past three decades that have streamlined US military holdings nationwide, the US Army base at Fort Carson, Colorado, has been growing. In 1983 Fort Carson expanded into a 95 500-hectare training area in southeastern Colorado known as the Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site (PCMS). In 2006 the Army announced plans to expand the PCMS by 169 000 hectares. Under the Armys proposal, a significant portion of southeastern Colorado would be transformed into the largest Army training ground in the US. This prospect galvanized a diverse coalition of rural residents to oppose the Piñon Canyon expansion. Our research critically considers how the principal actors in this case—the US Army and a rural citizen opposition coalition—mobilized different narrative and political strategies based substantially upon contrasting cartographic representations to shape the debate and construct contested geographies of this space as military training ground versus open range. As of 2014, the expansion of PCMS is on hold, although there is no guarantee that base or military area expansion will not proceed in the future.

Restoration and Authenticity Revisited

In this chapter, Marion Hourdequin and David Havlick focus on one of the central worries raised in relation to ecological restoration: the problem of authenticity. Robert Elliot, for example, has argued that restoration ‘fakes nature’. On this view, restoration is like art forgery: it deceptively suggests that its product was produced in a certain way, when in fact, it was not. Restored landscapes present themselves as the product of ‘natural processes’, when in actuality, they have been significantly shaped by human intervention. For Elliott, there seem to be two sources of inauthenticity in ecological restoration. First, the restored landscape is inauthentic because its natural genealogy has been disrupted by the intervention of humans: it has lost its authentic natural identity. Second, the restored landscape is inauthentic because it pretends to be something it is not; it obscures its own history. Hourdequin and Havlick argue that the first sense of inauthenticity is problematic; however, the second concern – about obscuring history – is important. Using case studies involving the naturalization of former military lands, Hourdequin and Havlick tease out more fully the ways in which landscapes can be ‘inauthentic’ by misleading observers about their genealogy. In such landscapes, it is not departure from ‘the original’ per se that is the source of inauthenticity; rather, restored landscapes fail to be authentic when they deceptively obscure critical elements of their past.

History and Values in Ecological Restoration Workshop

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