Military Chafes at Wildlife Rules

The Pentagon is moving toward asking Congress to rewrite the Endangered Species Act and other laws so military training exercises can be exempted from restrictions to protect sea turtles, desert tortoises, shorebirds and other rare creatures.

Military officials have said they would like more flexibility in environmental rules, in large part because of growing friction between those protections and training exercises on California’s military bases, including Camp Pendleton, Ft. Irwin, Point Mugu and Coronado’s Naval Amphibious Base.

Amid the vast urban sprawl, military reservations with expanses of open country have become de facto wildlife refuges for rare and endangered species.

Yet officials contend that the armed forces are being penalized for being good stewards of their land. Laws to protect these last refuges are obstructing plans to drop live bombs, fire weapons, maneuver tanks and conduct exercises designed to keep troops ready for battle.

“We are definitely moving out with action plans,” said Rear Adm. Larry Baucom, the Navy’s director of environmental protection. “We are looking at the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.”

Baucom said these laws are “fairly vaguely written” and subject to widely differing interpretations. The Navy, designated the lead branch of the armed services on many such “encroachment” issues, would like to see definitions clarified to make them easier to follow and more compatible with the military’s central mission: national defense.

“It’s a matter of balance,” Baucom said. “How do we balance our environmental stewardship with training and maintaining national security?”

The answer proposed in Defense Department documents, leaked by an environmental group made up of government employees, is to rewrite the Endangered Species Act so the secretary of defense could “grant exemptions for reasons of mission readiness.”

A memo and slides from a presentation carrying the Department of Defense seal recommend that the agency work with Congress to reauthorize the act with changes that:

* Delete all references to “critical habitat.”

* Allow increases in “incidental take,” meaning harassment or death of endangered species, when federal agencies can demonstrate a rise in the species’ population;

* Shorten the time allowed for environmental review and require consultation with wildlife agencies only when a military activity “may adversely affect” a protected species, rather than the current language, which requires a review when such activity “may likely affect” the wildlife.

Glenn Flood, a Pentagon spokesman, said Wednesday that he could find no one familiar with the documents.

“This document exists, but whether it’s an official Department of Defense document, I’d have to say it’s not, based on what I’ve heard,” Flood said. “I haven’t talked to the top people. But the worker bees, who are doing these things, aren’t aware of it.”

Yet Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the group that released the documents, said they were leaked by a military official helping to prepare the recommendations to be delivered to Congress this fall.

“Nobody should be surprised that this is happening,” said Dan Meyer, the group’s general counsel and a former Navy lieutenant. “It’s entirely predictable to come out of the Bush administration as a way to weaken progressive environmental rules of the Clinton administration.”

Hugh Vickery, spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said that although he has not seen the documents, his agency has a good track record dealing with military concerns.

“We’ve worked very successfully all over the country with the military to balance their need to train with the need to conserve threatened and endangered species,” he said.

Congressional staff said that after Bush took office, the Pentagon started lobbying Congress to lift some of the restrictions of the Endangered Species Act.

“It’s clear the Department of Defense is doing a serious lobbying effort to try and make the Endangered Species Act subservient to their needs,” said one Democratic congressional staff member who asked not to be named.

Republican congressional leaders have been interested in changes too.

Earlier this year, Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform, asked leaders from all three branches of the service to recommend ways to amend environmental laws that restrict military training.

He and 15 other House leaders formalized that request May 24 in a letter to President Bush to “initiate government reforms” of environmental laws, airspace restrictions and conflicts over radio waves that threaten national security and military readiness.

The leaked documents maintain that the Endangered Species Act, more than any other federal law, has the potential for obstructing the Defense Department’s mission.

The documents say military lands nationwide provide habitat for more than 300 species listed by the federal government as threatened or endangered. The expense of conservation programs increases every year, they say.

In a series of congressional hearings earlier this year, military leaders complained of environmental laws, urban sprawl and other constraints hampering activities.

Major Gen. Edward Hanlon Jr., former commander of Camp Pendleton, said the base’s number of endangered or threatened species has risen from three in 1977 to 17 today.

“The presence of these listed species on Camp Pendleton and required measures to avoid them have resulted in significant constraints on where we train, when we train and how we train,” he testified.

Vice Adm. James F. Amerault echoed the frustration in his testimony about San Clemente Island, part of the only ship-to-shore live firing range left in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

The site, he said, is home to the San Clemente Island loggerhead shrike, an endangered bird whose numbers have fallen as low as 13. Shore bombardment exercises must be curtailed during the bird’s breeding season, he said, adding that the Navy is spending $2.5 million annually to protect 42 birds in the wild and 64 birds in a captive breeding program.

Amerault said that a rare bird known as the Western snowy plover is causing problems for Marine and Navy Seal exercises at the Coronado Naval Amphibious Base, reducing the training space by 40% during nesting season.

“At the rate these birds are proliferating, some training operations on the beach may have to be canceled to avoid violating [Endangered Species Act] requirements,” Amerault said.

Environmentalists and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service predict that expanding Ft. Irwin in the Mojave Desert by 131,000 acres will nudge the rare desert tortoise toward extinction.

The Army hopes to expand the 633,000-acre base to provide more space for troops conducting live fire exercises in desert warfare.

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Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren in Washington contributed to this story.