More than 3.5 million acres of land in southern Indiana have been designated a Sentinel
Landscape—joining just nine other such regions across the country—and the IU Maurer School of Law’s Conservation Law Center will play a key role in its management.
The Sentinel Landscapes Partnership, launched in 2013, is a joint effort among the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Department of Defense, and Department of the Interior to conserve the land around sensitive military installations across the country, especially areas that contain residential centers, nature preserves, parks, and farmland.
“Military bases around the country face all sorts of encroachments,” says Christian Freitag, JD’97, PhD’07, executive director of the Conservation Law Center and a clinical associate professor of law at the Maurer School. “Residential development on the edge of military bases can be a problem. That’s just one of 20 examples.”
Southern Indiana is home to four military installations and associated ranges: Naval Support Activity Crane, Lake Glendora Test Facility, Atterbury-Muscatatuck Training Center, and the Indiana Air Range Complex. Add to that large forest blocks and connecting river corridors, and the area ticked all the boxes for designation as a Sentinel Landscape, Freitag says.
“We’ve got [those] four military bases, but we’ve also got three national wildlife refuges,” he says. “We’ve got a national forest. We’ve got 39 state nature preserves. We’ve got multiple state parks. We’ve got this combination of factors in southern Indiana that makes the [land] tell a story.”
That story consists of a multitude of interests trying to use the same terrain without spoiling it for each other and future generations. Whether it’s soil erosion, water quality degradation, habitat loss, or noise pollution and electronic interference from military weapons testing, incompatible land uses next to bases can impact mission readiness and other agency priorities.
The Conservation Law Center will help coordinate the partners promoting sustainable land practices in the designated areas. Those partners include the U.S. military branches, The Nature Conservancy, the Indiana Economic Development Corporation’s Defense Development Office, the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, the Indiana Defense Task Force, the White River Military Coordination Alliance, and numerous local- and state-level conservation organizations.
Landowners within Sentinel Landscapes can benefit from priority access to funding from federal sources, such as the Wetlands Reserve Program.
“The federal government will basically pay people to protect their wetlands,” Freitag says. “That money is existing federal money that goes to private landowners who want to have access to programs to help improve their land management. It’s conservation the way people like to see conservation.”
SENTINEL LANDSCAPES 101
The Southern Indiana Sentinel Landscape, or SISL, is “the largest conservation project ever attempted in the Midwest.” According to Christian Freitag, executive director of the IU Maurer School of Law’s Conservation Law Center.
Indeed. The 3.5-million-acre swath of land stretches from the Illinois border in the west almost to the Ohio state line in the east.
“To give you a sense of geographic scope, that’s nearly the size of Connecticut,” Freitag says. “It’s also 50 percent larger than Yellowstone National Park.”
SISL is one of three new Sentinel Landscapes in 2022, joining Camp Bullis, near San Antonio, Texas, and Northwest Florida, near Pensacola. To date, the program has protected more than 515,000 acres of land, while an additional 2.7 million acres have benefited from technical assistance programs such as the Wetlands Reserve Program.
Once a location becomes a Sentinel Landscape, the federal government and local partners work together to equip private landowners with the resources they need to carry out sustainable land-management practices. Those resources include voluntary state and federal assistance programs that provide tax reductions, agricultural loans, disaster relief, educational opportunities, technical aid, and funding for conservation easements.
However, Freitag says, the Sentinel Landscape designation will mean very little without stakeholder involvement. He urges landowners to contact Conservation Law Center for more information, and he notes that private financial support will also be important to the program’s success.
“The success of this will depend, in part, on people’s willingness to invest in it,” Freitag says. “If there are people out there who love this idea, we are going to need financial support to make that happen.”
