Unlikely Ally

How the Military Fights Climate Change and Protects the Environment

Marilyn Berlin Snell

• Publisher: Heyday
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781597144612
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Warming & Climate Change
• Index: Biological Sciences

An environmental journalist reveals how some California military bases are leading the charge in the fight against climate change. In California, the US military has begun to redefine how our national security operations relate to the destabilizing effects of climate change. Several bases have taken on a largely unrecognized yet crucial role in renewable-energy innovation and in preserving cultural and natural treasures. These facilities are going beyond environmental stewardship to align national defense with energy security and the protection of endangered species. In Unlikely Ally, environmental journalist Marilyn Berlin Snell takes readers through these bases to examine what twenty-first-century sustainable-energy infrastructure looks like; whether combat readiness and species protection can successfully coexist; how cutting-edge technology and water-conservation practices could transform life in a resource-constrained world; and how the Department of Defense's scientific research into the metabolic secrets of the endangered desert tortoise could speed human travel to Mars.

CHAPTER 1

THE BATTLE FOR NET ZERO

ARMY NATIONAL TRAINING CENTER FORT IRWIN

Take a guess at which Southern California municipalities struggle with water scarcity, power outages, maxed-out landfills, and interests that hinder creative problem solving and sustainable innovation, and odds are you’re right: Most towns in the region suffer one or all of these plagues. Now, imagine a center for innovation that is attempting to fight through the encumbrances of short-term thinking and perceived limits of technology to create a sustainable model for resource-constrained urban life. Imagine a place that strives to set the standard—to embody “proof of concept”—and has been engaged in Herculean efforts to bring on line some of the most promising green technology around.

If you’re stumped, Google “middle of nowhere California.” The first series of hits are spot on: One advertises a sky-blue T-shirt emblazoned with “Middle of Nowhere Fort Irwin” (it’s going for $19.99). Another is a YouTube post by an army spouse documenting her and her husband’s cross-country road trip to the base. After passing from Texas through New Mexico and Arizona, the video shows a vast, empty expanse with a few creosote bushes and a whole lot of sun-bleached dirt. A caption reads “Middle of Nowhere,” and a voice that sounds slightly freaked out intones, “Fort Irwin. Ugh. Look at this!”

The base’s total population of around twenty-four thousand consists of four to five thousand rotational soldiers and approximately seven thousand family members; military personnel assigned to the base plus a civilian workforce make up the rest. The army’s National Training Center at Fort Irwin is tethered to California’s already shaky power grid by what the base’s public works director, Muhammad Bari, has not-altogether-hyperbolically called “one 30-mile-long extension cord.” All it takes is a tree striking the power line to knock out electricity to the entire base, something that’s happened before. During a national crisis such as a natural disaster or terrorist attack, a prolonged power outage at the energy-insecure base could be catastrophic.

Fort Irwin is also water constrained; it’s in a part of the Mojave Desert that sees fewer than 5 inches of measurable rain per year on average. Generally, a desert is defined as an area that gets fewer than 10 inches per year, so Fort Irwin can rightly be considered serious desert. Its northern boundary almost touches Death Valley, the country’s hottest, driest, and lowest national park.

Upon arrival at the 1,000-square-mile base, I receive a fluorescent-orange card—bright enough to find on my person when preoccupied with being lost but small enough to fit in a wallet. The card contains the “ten commandments” of desert survival, from #1: “Hold on to a survival attitude”; to #3: “Move only when absolutely necessary and only at night”; to #8: “Keep your mouth closed (Breathe through your nose to minimize evaporative water loss)”; to #10: “Use your head, not your sweat—drink the water you have.” That is, if you have any water left.

As much grief as Fort Irwin receives for being a remote and treacherous outpost of human civilization, its harsh surroundings provide a realistic environment for soldiers to train in. Each month for ten months of the year, often in sweltering temperatures above 100 degrees, the base conducts live-fire as well as force-on-force, brigade-size training on its various ranges (a brigade is between three thousand and five thousand soldiers). In these exercises, rotational troops from other army installations often go up against Fort Irwin’s active-duty personnel. As much as possible, the training simulates the tempo, breadth, and intensity of current conflicts. Units trained at Fort Irwin are sent to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kuwait but also to Europe and South Korea, and on domestic missions. In 2012 active-duty soldiers trained at Fort Irwin deployed for rescue and recovery operations after Hurricane Sandy’s devastation along the eastern seaboard. In 2017 they were sent to Houston for Hurricane Harvey relief.

To help train realistically, Fort Irwin has constructed 15 mini cities with as many as 585 buildings at one site. In army speak they’re referred to as MOUTs, Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain sites. Some have working, man-size tunnels; some have buildings five stories tall; and some have facsimile open sewers that emit the malodorous affronts experienced by many soldiers sent abroad. The combat towns, currently with names like Ujen and Tiefort City, feature mosques and public address systems amplifying music and Arabic calls to prayer. In the parlor of a mock hotel in Ujen, a hookah and tea set greet the visitor. The towns can morph almost overnight to look, feel, and smell like the next geopolitical hot spot.

During my visit to Ujen one April morning, army tacticians make final adjustments before the day’s urban-combat exercise begins. Arabic-speaking actors hired by the base are stationed at roadside stands and prepare to hawk fruits, vegetables, and other goods. My army handler, Ken Drylie, informs me that military spouses will also be observing the exercise, so it will be “much tamer than usual, not the realistic training soldiers usually get.” There will not, for example, be amputee actors fitted with prosthetics—their fake limbs getting realistically blown off by a facsimile improvised explosive device. “There’s usually a lot of fake blood and screaming,” Drylie says over the din of scratchy music and truck engines as a convoy of soldiers lumbers into Ujen. He adds that “the longer it takes to secure the wounded and get out, the worse the soldiers’ lives become. More crap starts happening if they don’t move fast enough.”

The actors have a loose script and play a variety of good guys, mayors, insurgents, people who just don’t like American military personnel—every kind of character, Drylie explains. “The script tells you who you are, who your relatives are and where they live, what their attitudes are, what your attitudes are. Your attitude changes based on interactions with the training unit. Say you’re my cousin and you live in one village and I live in another. Everything’s going great with me and the training unit in my village, but you’re getting roughed up by the training unit in your village. I find out about it and now I’m mad. The soldiers need to figure out why.” Not all the conversations are in English, so interpreters are also thrown into the mix. “The important thing is you’ve got to learn not to piss everybody off. There’s a balancing act. You’ve got to take out the bad guys but make sure you take care of the good guys.”

The violence that ensues in the demonstration is G-rated but still unnerving: As the army convoy passes beneath the bridge where we stand, an IED hidden in a rusted-out car nearby explodes and immediately the rapid cracks of sniper fire break out. The soldier manning one of the convoy’s Jeep-mounted assault rifles “fires” in the direction of the sniper attack, but his target remains hidden in a building—the hotel? the residence next to it?—and keeps on firing. Villagers scream and a soldier is “hit.” Anyone who tries to reach the injured man comes under heavy sniper fire. The medic unit cannot reach the area quickly, so the screaming and gunfire intensify.

“Our MOUTs provide a form of training for the army that we take very seriously, more so in recent decades in light of Afghanistan and Iraq,” says Colonel G. Scott Taylor, Fort Irwin’s garrison commander, when I meet him. “Our whole purpose being here is to provide a world-class training environment to our nation’s army so it’s prepared to deploy in harm’s way.” In lieu of training environments like this, soldiers would be forced to learn survival skills on the job—when the IEDs, sniper fire, and insurgents are real, he says.

This kind of training does more than save lives, according to my eighty-seven-year-old father, who’s army all the way. His was a short stint in postwar Germany, 1954 to 1956, and he saw no action. Commissioned as a second lieutenant in the infantry, he left the service as a first lieutenant and often talks about how the army shaped him. “It was probably the most important and thorough learning experience of my life. I learned how to follow first and then how to lead,” the retired CEO said.

Just as Fort Irwin’s realistic training and harsh environment provide a chance to test one’s mettle and to engage in real-world combat scenarios, it also creates the opportunity to grapple with other real-world threats, including water scarcity, energy insecurity, and climate change. In 2010 Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment Katherine Hammack announced the creation of the Army Net Zero Initiative, with an aim to have installations conserve water and energy, consume only as much power as renewably produced on base, and reduce to as close to zero as possible all waste, hazardous and otherwise. Faced with extreme water and energy challenges, this middle-of-nowhere military base is fighting hard to get to net zero—winning some battles and retrenching after others to prepare to fight another day.

FORT IRWIN’S—AND, BY EXTENSION, THE US MILITARY’S—forward thinking was not always thus. Legislation passed in 1976 to create a legal framework for properly managing hazardous waste, for example, didn’t put much of a dent in the Defense Department’s behavior or its practice of ignoring properties it had despoiled in the past—a fact that became clear through the work of the 1988 Base Realignment and Closure Commission. The goal of the commission was to save the Pentagon millions of dollars by consolidating or closing underutilized installations and then selling off the real estate. The problem was that the installations had been so contaminated by the hazardous by-products of nearly four decades of environmental neglect that the property couldn’t even be given away.

“The military industry has produced the most toxic pollution in the country and virtually every military installation has been extensively contaminated,” the New York Times reported in 1991. The front-page article, by Keith Schneider, noted that hazardous chemicals had been tossed into lagoons or merely dumped on the ground, only to seep into water supplies that spread the poisons more widely. Since federal law prohibited the Pentagon from selling any property on bases until contamination on the entire site was cleaned up, Schneider reported, the government’s moneymaking plan suddenly became a $30 billion bill to taxpayers for cleanup.

More recent investigative reporting by the independent news organization ProPublica found that this toxic legacy persists across much of the DoD-controlled landscape. In the series Bombs in Our Backyard, which began in July 2017, ProPublica’s Abrahm Lustgarten reported that there are tens of thousands of “known or suspected toxic sites on 5,500 current or former Pentagon properties.” He cited an Environmental Protection Agency staff estimate that the contamination covered “40 million acres—an area larger than the state of Florida—and the costs for cleaning them up will run to hundreds of billions of dollars.”

The military has been able to continue the toxic practice of open burning and disposal of hazardous materials via an obscure addendum to 1976’s Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, Subpart X, according to Lustgarten. What was to be an interim accommodation for the problematic treatment and disposal of explosives continues to this day. Lustgarten refers to Subpart X as a “virtual escape hatch from the rest of the law, creating the nation’s open burn allowances and allowing the Department of Defense and its contractors to revert to their 1970s-era practices.”

ProPublica’s critique of the military holds true across most installations. Fort Irwin, too, has a legacy of profligate burning and disposal of hazardous material on the base, but that oldschool behavior is no longer tolerated—a fact attributable to current leadership and some of the most stringent state environmental laws in the nation.

Colonel Taylor, forty-eight, witnessed the slow-motion train wreck of poor stewardship and bad publicity regarding the military. An army brat, Taylor spent time at Fort Irwin as a kid when his father was its commanding general and then again as a cadet. He’s also witnessed the slow-motion awakening in some quarters that the military’s business-as-usual strategy is a losing one: “Between the time I returned [to Fort Irwin] as a cadet in 1991 to my first rotation as a second lieutenant in 1993, the mindset changed to ‘the environment matters; it’s important.’”

The message that penetrated some installations came in 1991, when, for the first time, the environment was spotlighted in the National Security Strategy of the United States. Prepared for Congress that year by the George H. W. Bush administration, the document introduced the idea that environmental or “natural” security is integral to national security: “Global environmental concerns include such diverse but interrelated issues as stratospheric ozone depletion, climate change, food security, water supply, deforestation, biodiversity and treatment of wastes. A common ingredient in each is that they respect no international boundaries. The stress from these environmental challenges is already contributing to political conflict. Recognizing a shared responsibility for global stewardship is a necessary step for global progress. Our partners will find the United States a ready and active participant in this effort.” (In 2017, climate change was dropped from the National Security Strategy document.)

In California, one of the most effective change agents with regard to the military’s habit of carte-blanche contamination came in 1992, when the Department of Defense lost sovereign immunity. In signing the Federal Facility Compliance Act, President George H. W. Bush gave state regulators the right to access and inspect how military bases were treating, storing, and disposing of hazardous waste. The state could then impose fines and penalties for violations. California has always led the nation in formulating and enforcing muscular state environmental laws and regulations, and this federal law was a game changer for California bases like Fort Irwin. Today, the base must seek and adhere to more than a hundred state permits targeted at different locations. When state inspectors come knocking, now they always get in.

“People are surprised the army cares about the environment. They say, ‘We thought you just rolled in with your multibillion-dollar budgets and did whatever you wanted.’ Growing up, I absolutely saw that. Even in my first years in the army, there was still this attitude of, ‘Oh, we just spilled 150 gallons of fuel on the ground; let’s kick some dirt over it.’ But that’s the old army. That’s not our way now. We train every soldier that comes in: ‘If there’s a spill, you will report it. If you’re caught not reporting it, there will be fines against your unit and we will go after disciplinary action against you.’ We take it very seriously because it turns into poisoning our own training area and potentially our water sources and our community,” Taylor says.

Justine Dishart, fifty-four, is chief of the Environmental Division of public works at Fort Irwin. A civilian now, her uniform is usually relaxed-fit jeans and, in cooler months, a fleece vest. She has a low, no-nonsense voice with a slight twang that originates perhaps in Pennsylvania, where she was born and her grandfather was a coal miner, or in Kentucky, where she spent her high school years. She’s not sure: “I was raised as an army brat, all over the country.”

In 1989, Dishart was already an air force veteran and recent graduate of Eastern Kentucky University when her parents called from Fort Irwin, where they worked, and told her there were jobs. “They didn’t tell me it was in the middle of flippin’ nowhere! I was like, ‘okay.’ Threw my stuff in the truck, threw the cat in the back, drove all the way out here.”

She left Fort Irwin to work with the US Geological Survey in Utah for a while but returned in 1991. “The army was standing up their environmental program and they were looking for people with geologic and hydrogeologic backgrounds,” she says. She signed on as an intern then, but today she runs the division and leads a staff of ten.

Like Taylor, Dishart has watched the army change. When she returned in 1991, the base had forty-four toxic sites that required cleanup—a long and expensive process. “Sins of the past,” Dishart says. Today, things are different. “We’ve put a lot of effort in over the years to eliminate toxics that we could eliminate and to better manage things that we could not eliminate because they were specific to a certain type of mission.”

ProPublica’s exposé of toxic Defense Department lands was published after I visited Fort Irwin, so I emailed Dishart and asked how the base avoided making the list of bad actors. She wrote back and said that, in general, the base has “always resisted” seeking the types of Subpart X permits that allow installations to “legally and routinely open burn/open detonate waste munitions as ‘treatment.’” (Ironic single quotes hers.)

Dishart is an enforcer and has thrived in the commandand-control decision-making atmosphere of Fort Irwin. “That’s one of the good things: If the commander says ‘do it,’ it doesn’t matter if you like it or not. You’ve got to do it.” The federal Budget Control Act of 2011 imposed across-the-board budget cuts that did not spare the Defense Department, which is why the Environmental Division’s FY 2016 budget was only $10 million, Dishart says, adding that it had gone as high as $21 million in years past. (Her department is allotted seventeen staff members, a number she’s not been able to reach under DoD’s budgeting constraints.)

THE BASE’S HAZARDOUS MATERIAL CONTROL CENTER is not a stop on my tour I look forward to, so I’m pleasantly surprised when I am not met with throat-choking chemical smells upon arrival. The facility has a separate walk-in locker for each type of hazardous product, and everything is neatly stacked and bar-coded. When a soldier comes in to get paint, floor strippers, solvents, engine fluids—whatever is needed—his or her name and unit are entered into a database and the bar code is scanned. “This hazmat program is where Environmental sta...