The Local Environment at the Department of Defense

The Department of Defense (DoD) manages several hundred thousand buildings at over 5,000 sites, using over 30 million acres of land. These facilities and lands have diverse purposes, including everything from providing training and deployment support to offering a decent quality of life for our military and their families. They also travel the world’s oceans and airspace and are an important consumer of energy resources. As stewards of natural resources, the DoD is faced with structural and environmental management tasks of monumental proportions.

These tasks don’t exist in a vacuum and are often integrally related to the surrounding built and natural environments. The integration of military installations and the local environment involves questions of transportation, land buffers for sound protection, munitions testing, and more—all of which have environmental implications for air and water quality, wetlands and species protection, and land remediation. Ocean and air transportation raise special concerns at a time when DoD is promoting the use of alternative energy sources and energy conservation.

Join our panel of experts at the Environmental Law Institute in Washington, DC (or via teleconference) to learn more about the specific challenges the DoD faces and how they are addressing them through initiatives, policy, and action. The panel will alo discuss President Obama's recently announced climate change initiatives.

When: July 18, 2013, 12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EDT. Please RSVP by July 12th.

Panelists:

• John C. Cruden, President, Environmental Law Institute (moderator)
• Alex A. Beehler, Senior Advisor, FaegreBD Consulting; former Acting Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Environment & Installations)
• John Conger, Acting Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Installations & Environment), Department of Defense
• James G. Van Ness, Acting Deputy General Counsel (Environment & Installations), Office of General Counsel, Department of Defense

Other panelists to be announced.