In 2006, the United States Army announced plans to expand the Fort Carson site by approximately 653 square miles, a significant portion of Southeast Colorado.
As would be expected, there was much opposition to this expansion from various angles.
Eric Perramond, professor of Southwest Studies and Environmental Science at Colorado College, and David Havlick, Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, saw this as an opportunity to combine their skills and examine how rural communities have confronted this expansion.
In their article “Militarized spaces and open range: Piñon Canyon and (counter)cartographies of rural resistance,” Perramond and Havlick explore how opposing groups—the Army and a rural citizen opposition group called Piñon Canyon Expansion Coalition—used different cartographic representations to debate the use of the land as military training ground versus open range.
Perramond and Havlick knew each other as fellow geographers and decided to begin on this project together in 2007. Perramond focused his research on the ranchers and agricultural use of land in the West, while Havlick focused on the militarization of the West and the conversion between military lands and nature preserves.
“The goal of the research was really trying to find a way to tell a story about all this in a collaborative sense,” said Perramond.
Perramond and Havlick ran into some significant difficulties communicating with the Army for research. In the 1980s, the Army had promised not to expand Fort Carson, and many people in the area of the new expansion felt betrayed. When Perramond and Havlick questioned the Army on this and other issues, they received nothing but silence in response.
Perramond explained that, in order to back up the expansion, the Army was “able to use a set of counter-mapping strategies to show to the public that ‘no one’ was willing to sell their land close to the Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site (area of interest), and that (because of resistance by rural communities) eminent domain would have to be used by the government for any expansion to occur.”
Perramond said that some students did work on this controversy, but the issue outlived any single-year projects that could be done because of the seven-year hold on information and confirmation.
The expansion of the Fort Carson site is currently on hold, but there is no guarantee that plans will cease.