Machine Gun Range Proposal Has Environmentalists Up in Arms

On a tree-lined street in south Sandwich, everything is quiet. Sprinklers, birds, and the occasional landscaping truck are all that make a noise.

But when physician and retired Air Force colonel Jane Ward walks through the neighborhood, she hears the quiet before the storm.

“We’re pretty close to Camp Edwards or Joint Base Cape Cod,” Ward said, when asked the significance of the location. “We’re in a neighborhood that’s just, you know, a stone’s throw.”

Less than a mile away, the Army National Guard is planning to build Massachusetts’ first and only machine gun range. The eight-lane range would require the clear-cutting of 170 acres of forestland—as part of a 5,000 acre danger zone. It’s just under a quarter of the land on the base.

“To me, in terms of being a citizen and having actually gotten small arms training myself during my military career… environmentally, this seems ludicrous,” Ward said.

The National Guard argues building the machine gun range is necessary to provide required arms training to soldiers without sending them 270 miles to the next-nearest training site in Jericho, Vermont.

In an environmental assessment, the National Guard concluded the range’s overall environmental impacts would be “less-than-significant,” but many environmentalists feel otherwise.

“I lament the loss of big unfragmented habitat,” said Christopher Neill, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Woods Hole. “I think that’s chronic and we’re sort of just marching, marching, marching toward less forest and less good wildlife habitat by a thousand cuts.”

The forest also stores greenhouse gases. Cutting down trees means losing a climate change buffer.

Read the rest of this story at WCAI’s website.