A transition to mission-based environmental stewardship of natural and cultural resources in the United States air force

Failure to comply with conservation laws can directly impact military training by limiting or delaying access to training areas because of potential impacts to archaeological sites, endangered species, or other resources. In the late 1980s, the United States Air Force adopted a compliance-based approach for managing its environmental program. Compliance with environmental laws and regulations became the basis for prioritizing and funding proposed activities including conservation. The annual environmental budget increased and the number of unresolved regulatory enforcement actions dropped significantly during the 1990s. The compliance-based approach was designed to respond to laws that specify deadlines or quantitative standards and impose some type of enforcement action for failure to comply. An inherent weakness in the approach is that programs must be faced with noncompliance or the threat of legal action to compete for funding. Conservation laws that address stewardship of natural and cultural resources rarely specify deadlines, quantitative standards, or monitoring for compliance. Therefore, installation commanders have limited flexibility to develop a long-term stewardship program that supports Air Force readiness training through ecosystem management and biodiversity conservation. The purpose of this article is to present and discuss a mission-based approach to environmental stewardship of natural and cultural resources.