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NY Times, June 26, 2019
Bombing Range or Nature Preserve? A Battle for Control of the Nevada Desert
By Thomas Fuller
DESERT NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Nev. — Beams of sunlight shone through
the clouds like a celestial spotlight on a recent evening in the Mojave
Desert, lighting up cliffs, tracts of yucca plants and slabs of volcanic
rock covered with ancient stone carvings.
Greg Anderson, a member of the Moapa Band of Paiutes, bathed in the rich
light, miles from the nearest paved road, and studied an image of a deer
etched on the rock face. The connection with thousands of years of
history gave him the chills.
“Goose bumps all up and down my arm,” he said.
This vast stretch of desert north of Las Vegas is part of the largest
wildlife refuge in the contiguous United States, six mountain ranges
that are home to bighorn sheep, a resplendent palette of wildflowers and
sites that Paiute and Shoshone tribes, among others, say are crucial to
Native culture.
As early as next year, the grounds could be reclassified and absorbed
into another superlative: the largest military training area in the
United States. The 2.9-million-acre Nevada Test and Training Range is
already one of the country’s most vital aerial gunnery and bombing
domains, where the Air Force and its allies practice dogfights and
launch missiles onto targets positioned in the desert valleys.
The Air Force is now proposing to expand the range, which was
established just before America’s entry into World War II, by about
300,000 acres, closing off a part of the Desert National Wildlife Refuge
that is currently open to the public.
The tension between these competing goals — warfare readiness and
wildlife preservation — has stirred impassioned debates in Nevada. In a
state increasingly described as politically purple, both Republicans and
Democrats have spoken out against the expansion of the Air Force range,
and it has become the rare issue that unites voices as diverse as the
Sierra Club and the most conservative lawmakers in the state.
[Read about the new billionaires buying up Western land.]
Although the final decision on whether to allow the expansion rests with
Congress, which will take up the issue next year, lawmakers in Nevada
have sought to influence the process, passing a resolution opposing the
expansion by 63-3.
The Air Force, which invites allies like Singapore, Australia and
European countries to train in the desert, says it needs the additional
300,000 acres to test the tools of modern warfare. Weapons used during
the Vietnam War were dropped a few miles from their targets, said Col.
Cavan Craddock, the installation commander for Nellis Air Force Base and
the Nevada Test and Training Range. The weapons used today are released
from “much, much, much farther,” he said, declining to give precise
numbers to protect military intelligence.
“We need the capability to be able to test and train and develop tactics
like we are going to execute in war,” Colonel Craddock said.
Although the Air Force uses simulators extensively, the Nevada range
provides crucial real-world training that enhances the safety of pilots,
Colonel Craddock said. “There is no better training than live fly, going
against the real threat, to prove what you’re doing works.”
The Air Force, which laid out its case for the withdrawal of the public
lands in an environmental impact study last October, says its expansion
would have minimal impact on wildlife and that anything of cultural
significance, like the stone etchings and ancient pictographs on canyon
walls, would not be damaged. It does not plan on using live ammunition
in the expanded areas, but it would station equipment there that
simulates threats to aircraft.
But even after a year of outreach by the Air Force in towns surrounding
the training area, many Nevadans repeat a refrain heard in the
legislative hearings: Nevada has given enough.
“At some point, Nevada has to say, stop, we’re not just a desert that
you can continue to take away from the citizens’ access,” Robin L.
Titus, a Republican lawmaker, said at a hearing of the Committee on
Natural Resources, Agriculture and Mining.
Critics of the expansion, especially conservative ones, say they support
the need for military readiness and training. But they feel the federal
government controls too much of the state’s land and have been urging
the Air Force to look elsewhere. The airspace reserved for training is
around three times the size of Connecticut and off-limits to commercial
aircraft.
“There’s Utah, there’s northern Idaho, there’s areas that they could use
for these fly areas and training,” John C. Ellison, another Republican
member of the Nevada Assembly, said during the March hearings. “I don’t
support any more taking of land and restricting of areas when we have so
little now.”
Around 84 percent of land in Nevada is owned by the federal government,
the highest percentage among the 50 states. In addition to the Air
Force’s training area, the Navy has the Fallon Range Training Complex in
the northern high desert east of Reno, an area that the Navy is seeking
to expand by 600,000 acres. The Energy Department controls an area
around Yucca Mountain, which the Trump Administration is seeking to make
the nation’s permanent repository for nuclear waste, a long-disputed
project in Nevada.
Colonel Craddock said Nevada gives the Air Force possibilities that no
other state can offer.
“We have a large contiguous piece of land that is very sparsely
populated,” he said. And the terrain has the added advantage of
resembling those of countries where the United States military often
operates.
About half of the wildlife refuge — more than 800,000 acres — is already
used by the Air Force.
The proximity of war simulations to the vast refuge can make for a
jarring contrast. On a recent visit, the screech of a red-tail hawk was
followed by the earthshaking sonic boom of a military jet.
“That’s not thunder,” said Amy Sprunger, an employee of the United
States Fish and Wildlife Service who has served as the manager of the
Desert National Wildlife Refuge for the past 18 years.
The sonic booms are so powerful that the Air Force has compensated
homeowners in Alamo, Nev., a town on the edge of the refuge, for damage
to their homes.
At least four drones have crashed on the reserve during her tenure, said
Ms. Sprunger, who is skeptical of the Air Force’s claims that the
expansion would not harm the refuge. Contractors for the Defense
Department would have “free rein,” she said. “There’s no oversight,” she
said.
Kish LaPierre, an archaeologist who is the cultural resource manager at
Nellis Air Force Base, argues the opposite. She has documented 40 sites
of rock carvings and paintings in the current Air Force training area,
and she contends that if the Air Force obtains the extra 300,000 acres,
they would be equally well protected under the National Historical
Preservation Act, which requires a detailed cataloging of culturally
significant sites.
Under the control of the Air Force, “things are better kept, easier to
manage,” she said. “We don’t have the public coming out, unknowingly or
knowingly damaging sites.”
Mr. Anderson, who is a former chairman of the Moapa Band of Paiutes,
said he has seen evidence that the Air Force is not living up to its
promises of protection. When he visited Pintwater cave, a site where
archaeologists found artifacts — including part of a hunting tool that
was estimated to be 6,500 years old — he saw missile fragments embedded
near the entrance to the cave.
“They are supposed to be protecting our cultural resources,” Mr.
Anderson said. “Is that protecting them — dropping a bomb on them?”
(Ms. LaPierre confirmed that pieces of ordnance had been found near the
cave and were determined to be from bombs dropped during training in the
1960s, but she said that the cave was not damaged.)
The Air Force environmental impact assessment of the expansion includes
a joint analysis by representatives of 17 tribes from Nevada, Arizona,
Utah and California. The authors say they do not support “harmful land
disturbing activities currently conducted or planned” within the Air
Force training area.
For Mr. Anderson, who served in the Marine Corps for three years, the
expansion has particular poignancy. His ancestors were ordered off the
land in the 1800s onto a reservation that at one point shrank to just
1,000 acres. He bristles that he needs permission to visit his ancestral
lands.
“We’re in a never-winning battle with the government,” he said.
Opposition to the Air Force expansion has brought together
conservationists, outdoor-enthusiasts, Native American tribes and
Nevadans who simply say they want more control over the land in their state.
Jose Witt, the Southern Nevada director of Friends of Nevada Wilderness,
a conservation group, created a social media slogan,
#DontBombTheBighorn, a reference to the sheep that roam the refuge.
“A lot of people think of the Mojave as a vast wasteland,” Mr. Witt
said. “That’s a perception we are trying to change. It’s a hidden gem.”
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