National Reports

...As they look toward the future, Americans should realize that existing and proposed conservation programs represent little more than a holding action in the effort to perpetuate the natural America of the past...

...About this time Congressman L. Mendel Rivers, in whose district the refuge is located, exploded in opposition and reminded the service to take note of his seniority in the House Armed Services Committee...

...The third subject of recent Air Force attention has been the great Desert Game Range in Nevada, established for the protection of antelope, deer, turkeys and the rare Nelson bighorn mountain sheep...

...As military craft evolve into nuclear rockets and space ships, the use of the skies and the land by mechanical birds will become still more intrusive...

...The procedure was discontinued only when Engle on October 29 of that year requested the Interior Department to hold up further withdrawals pending consideration of the question by Congress...

...And with national defense given as justification, such requests may become hard to resist despite the fact that the military services demands have been shown to be excessive...

...But "public lands" do not include those Federally owned tracts acquired by purchase, condemnation or as gifts...

...Demands for testing sites, such as that at Cape Canaveral, and for launching sites for operational missiles, are likely to multiply...

...They were heartened, therefore, when in January, Secretary of the Interior Fred A. Seaton declined the Air Force request and suggested that the service investigate alternative sites...

...Early this year the department's Office of News Services pointed out that defense acreage holdings, excluding Alaska and Hawaii (note the exclusions), had actually decreased in fiscal 1959...

...Despite the vigorous opposition of local residents, of the Interior Department and the South Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, in the person of Dr...

...The concern of conservationists over the Romain Refuge, the Kennesaw Mountain Park and the Desert Game Range comes ironically after a campaign in Congress aimed at curbing unnecessary take-overs of Federal land...

...The committee found that in the 18 months preceding June 30, 1955, defense agencies had been grabbing land at the rate of five acres per minute during every minute of the 547 days involved...

...The effect of military flight on wilderness areas and their wild residents is becoming evident...

...Regardless of what legislation is adopted, the status of Federal land would (and should) still be subject to change by future acts of Congress in order to accommodate genuine military and other needs...

...At Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park the Air Force wanted to install an underground radar and communications control center...

...But such an amendment (not yet introduced by anyone) is only one of several essential statutory safeguards if the natural landscape is to be maintained undisturbed in a few places for the quiet enjoyment of space age citizens...

...In historical terms, the military plane is an infant newcomer to the American landscape, but despite its recent arrival, it has already wrought spectacular changes in the national scene...

...Since 1937 the total amount of land held by the armed forces has expanded from three million acres to some 31.3 million acres, an increase of more than 1,000 percent...

...R. 10402) provides for an agreement between the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Interior to safeguard wildlife values...

...A requirement of Congressional action would, however, help to insure more careful consideration of military exigencies...

...What such an intrusion would have meant becomes apparent when it is pointed out that in a recent National Park Service survey, Cape Romain was counted as part of the less than seven per cent of the Atlantic and Gulf coastline still under public ownership for the enjoyment of all citizens...

...A third key item of legislation is the National Seashore Bill (two versions were offered in the last Congress) which would authorize the national Government to acquire a few of the rapidly disappearing sections of uninhabited ocean front for public enjoyment...

...The threat stems in part from the inexorable pressure of population growth...

...Moreover, the bill permits the Air Force to acquire any of the land involved "by purchase, condemnation or otherwise...

...The Air Force finally abandoned the plan in mid-February...

...Congress in 1958 passed a law requiring Congressional approval of any withdrawal for military use of more than 5,000 acres of public land...

...Population growth in turn generates new attempts to exploit land for its mineral, timber and grazing resources...

...The crowding of the airways has become obvious in the past few years as nearly 40,000 military craft compete for space with the ever growing number of civilian planes...

...Today, within the 48 contiguous states, the services control a domain as large as the state of Virginia...

...The Defense Department has already acquired control of a portion of the Desert Game Range on a temporary use basis and is now taking legislative steps to secure a 10-year withdrawal and reservation of the tract...

...By extending to "acquired lands" the necessity of legislative approval for changes in the status of large tracts, Congress could provide protection to many significant areas not covered by the Engle Act...

...Doubts were cast on the genuineness of the military land hunger when an Air Force Board of Inquiry disclosed that, of 14.4 million acres held by the Air Force on October 9, 1957, 5.7 million acres were, in fact, in excess of that service's current and long-range needs...

...But the measure still does not identify the Desert Game Range, and the authority of the Secretary of the Interior is expressly limited by the requirements of national defense...

...Its requirement of Congressional approval for withdrawals of more than 5,000 acres applies only to "public lands," a distinctive term which embraces those limited areas put within the public domain by specific act of Congress, and those much more extensive areas to which the United States holds title as a consequence of cession by international agreement or treaty...

...The park site was chosen despite other suitable locations nearby...

...The 60.000-acre refuge on the coast of South Carolina is an expanse of land and water providing a retreat for waterfowl, shorebirds, song birds and wild turkeys, as well as otters, alligators and loggerhead turtles...

...Though the Wilderness Bill and the National Seashore Bill have both been under discussion for several years, neither has reached a vote in Congress...

...Passage of the Wilderness Bill might give the Secretary of the Interior the power needed to safeguard permanently such areas as Cape Romain and the Desert Game Range...

...Only nine months earlier the Air Force had described all of its holdings as "fully utilized and needed for the foreseeable future...

...The Interior Department may be called upon to grant a special permit for military use of a refuge...

...Between 1944 and 1959 military land holdings rose by 11 million acres...

...Though the Defense Department has let it be known that its expansion program for fiscal 1961 now contemplates control of only 4,072 additional acres, it was careful to note that this was "exclusive of missile requirements which have not yet been established...

...G. Robert Lunz, director of the commission's Division of Commercial Fisheries, the Air Force persisted in its efforts to gain access to the refuge...

...As a result of the exertions of Engle and his committee...

...By the year 2000, if the present trend continues, we will have an average of 90 people per square mile—about double today's average...

...By the end of the century, according to Winthrop Rockefeller, member of a family that has done much for conservation, the United States will need 40 times the land now set aside for the national parks and scenic areas...

...And there are unmistakable signs that they would like to make it much larger...

...The project was called off in 1955 only after loud protests by American conservationists and by the Canadian government, which was (and is) trying to protect the breeding ground of the rare bird, then represented by fewer than two dozen individuals...

...Air Force interest in using a part of the Game Range came to public attention during the last session of Congress when a bill was prepared to withdraw for military purposes (presumably target practice) 81,000 acres of public land in Nevada...

...Cape Romain and other areas like it (about a million acres in the east) are thus still subject to disposition by executive action...

...Rivers is number three man below the chairman and heads one of the Armed Services subcommittees...

...Thurmond is well up the ladder in the Senate Armed Services Committee and chairs the Subcommittee on Procurement...

...But there is no reason to suppose that the end of the acquisitive trend is in sight...

...In 1955 the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, under the chairmanship of Representative (now Senator) Clair Engle of California, began a study of land acquisition by the armed services...

...Within the past year the Air Force has set its sights on three unusual public preserves, valuable either for the sanctuary they provide for wildlife or for the natural features they perpetuate for an ever more mechanized society...

...An important reason for expansion of military real estate, aside from the long-range growth of the armed forces, has been the increasing emphasis on air warfare with nuclear weapons...

...The modern menace to wilderness America, however, derives not alone from simple human pressure for living and producing space, but from changed land use unrelated to consumer requirements...

...The present trend offers little hope of attaining the goal...

...Acquired soon after the start of the program to implement the Migratory Bird Conservation Act of 1929, Cape Romain has since been referred to by the Fish and Wildlife Service as "one of he outstanding wildlife refuges in the East...

...A House committee which reported on military land use three years ago said then that, if all pending applications were approved, defense agencies would control nearly 40 million acres of land surface area in the U.S...

...Public Parks By John Lofton AS URBAN AND industrial sprawl have reached into vast unoccupied areas in recent years, Americans have been repeatedly warned that they are in danger of losing their natural heritage of forests and plains, of unspoiled seashore and lake front, and of the wild inhabitants of the diminishing open spaces...

...While the Engle Committee commended the Air Force for the constructive self-analysis in its board of inquiry report, the group condemned the "incalculable wastefulness" of Air Force control of un-needed and unused land and emphasized the inquiry board's finding that "no valid criteria existed for determining range sizes...

...Not all this expansion in military land use was the result of wartime JOHN LOFTON is an editorial writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette...

...As first drafted, the legislation not only failed to make clear that the land involved was the Game Range but also permitted the area to revert to the general public domain when military use was terminated...

...But the new statute, constructive though it is, leaves considerable latitude for capricious military pre-emptions of federal land...

...On being asked by the Budget Bureau to comment on the bill, the Interior Department opposed the original draft and recommended that an agreement with the Defense Department be worked out to insure protection of the paramount wildlife values...

...Yet the Air Force has shown on several occasions in recent years that it covets the limited space set aside for hard-pressed birds and animals...

...Without the leverage of a Congressional hearing, opponents of military inroads on wildlife and park preserves would be hard put to find out whether the Air Force and other services have improved the machinery for determining their land needs...

...In the case of the two other areas that came recently under military sights, a takeover was avoided, in one instance, only by a firm stand on the part of the Secretary of the Interior and, in the other instance, by the intervention of two members of Congress who held influential positions in the Senate and House Armed Services Committees...

...With its injunction to the military to obey local game laws and to cooperate with the states in taking conservation measures, the Engle Act has produced a marked improvement in the attitude of the services toward their stewardship over Federal lands...

...Another measure is the Wilderness Bill which would preserve in their primeval state certain undeveloped areas of Federal land (about two per cent of the total), including qualifying wildlife refuges...

...As late as the first week in February, it told South Carolina's Senator Strom Thurmond that it had not given up hope of obtaining authority to use Romain as a target range for medium bombers...

...and Alaska, plus inland and offshore air space overlaying a surface area of 602,000 square miles, an expanse more than twice the size of Texas...

...Furthermore, there is no guarantee that future Interior secretaries will be as devoted to conservation as Secretary Seaton has been so far...

...In the past 20 years the average annual increase in military land use has been greater than the one million additional acres now being diverted each year to industrial and residential purposes...

...The Interior Department now gets four or five requests a year for military sites on refuge land...

...Several years ago the Air Force proposed to establish a bombing range just south of the Aransas National Wildlife Befuge, the winter home of the almost extinct whooping crane on the Gulf coast of Texas...

...mobilization...

...Withdrawals of public lands...

...These "acquired lands"—consisting of some 50 million acres and including many of the wildlife refuges of the East—are not covered by the provisions of the Engle Act...

...Present Federal waterfowl refuges constitute but a minimal national attempt to compensate for the 120 million acres of former waterfowl habitat already appropriated by agriculture and industry before the conservation system was well started...

...As late as 1955, when Congress called a temporary halt to the trend, the armed services were taking over land at the rate of 50,000 acres a week...

...Though the area involved is small and the project would not have represented a serious change in the nature of the park, conservation groups were worried over possible future modifications of the center and over the precedent such a park use would set...

...A major agency of this change is the military establishment, which is not noted for its devotion to conservation...

...Engle reported later, were being "finalized" within executive departments by executive action...

...Since the time of that Congressional study, the Defense Department has been more discreet in its territorial demands...

...In the Cape Romain area citizens and conservationists first became alarmed last June when an Air Force spokesman proposed the use of the refuge as a gunnery range...

...In two of these areas—the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge in South Carolina and the Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park near Atlanta, Georgia—the threat of military incursion has been removed at least temporarily as a result of opposition by an aroused public...

...Although the Air Force has existed as a separate service for only 12 years, it already controls more land in the continental United States (Alaska excluded) than the total allocated for all wildlife refuges...

...In a report to Congress in 1957, Engle revealed that defense agencies then controlled more than 30 million acres in the United States and Alaska and had applications pending for the withdrawal of 10 million additional acres...

...As hunting increases with population, the existing refuges will be less able to protect the beleaguered birds...

...As resubmitted in the present session of Congress, the bill on the Nevada range (H...

...And these planes require large service areas on the ground...