The United States Department of Defense has promoted adaptive ecosystem management principles in their land management practices. This application of adaptive ecosystem management in a military environment presents special problems that the author analyzes through a case study of the efforts at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. The evaluation reveals the progress and challenges of applying adaptive ecosystem management at military installations. The main areas of progress have been the employment of a multiscalar ecological focus in land management and the development of open dialog with local stakeholders. The primary challenge is the specification of democratic processes and decision rules that meaningfully consider stakeholder input. This challenge reflects the major tension of employing adaptive ecosystem management in the military: the integration of bureaucratic and democratic decision processes. Military installations can alleviate this tension by vertically integrating decision making such that all military stakeholders—including national policy makers affecting local land management—are included in open dialog with local stakeholders, and by clearly specifying the modes and influence of stakeholder input. Failure to do so may force local stakeholders to revert to more adversarial means of influence such as litigation, the threat of litigation, and political intervention.

Our industrial legacy has left the nation with thousands of contaminated land parcels, known as brownfields, that must be rehabilitated and reintegrated into today's productive urban land inventory. This article presents a framework for site identification based upon the historical record, urban morphology, and hazard assessment. An eight-stage methodology is presented and applied to Keene, NH, a typical medium-sized industrial community in the Northeast. The framework proceeds where: (a) the industrial legacy is temporally demarcated; (b) the industrial legacy is spatially located; (c) relict hazards are identified; (d) quantities of waste produced are estimated; (e) toxicily is classified; (f) waste impacts are determined; and (g) a summative relict hazard waste map is produced as the initial input into a planning model, which project proponents/developers employ to determine the viability of site remediation and redevelopment. The framework's application in Keene, NH, demonstrates the viability of the methodology in delimiting potentially hazardous sites and thus advances predevelopment site identification and its position in brownfields planning.

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has been hailed as one of the most successful environmental statutes ever written, and has been used as a model for environmental stewardship throughout the world. One of the primary objectives of this act is to provide citizens with a voice in governmental decisions. However, recent efforts to make the NEPA process more efficient, less costly, and less time-consuming threaten to undermine achievements in public participation and participatory policy making gained during the last 30 years. This article examines public participation under NEPA and demonstrates that the recent rise in the use of the Environmental Assessment (EA) as the primary document for NEPA compliance, and the corresponding decrease in the use of the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), is due to efforts to streamline NEPA as part of the overall movement to reinvent government. The article examines recent trends in NEPA implementation and public involvement requirements for EISs and EAs, and concludes that the increased use of Environmental Assessments significantly limits the public's ability to respond to environmental impacts caused by federal actions, thereby damaging one of the most effective vehicles for citizen participation in government. Finally recommendations are provided to increase opportunities for public involvement in the EA process without sacrificing improvements in efficiency.