Environment
The forests and shores of Eglin Air Force Base are at the center of one of the most biodiverse locations in North America. Over 50 species threatened in Florida are found on the base, including sea turtles that nest on its white-sand beaches and red-cockaded woodpeckers that thrive in its longleaf pine forests. The base has a natural resources management team that constantly monitors important species within the base with the goal of balancing their national defense mission with environmental stewardship. Longleaf pine forest, a forest type reduced to 5% of its former range in the last few centuries, covers 200,000 acres (810 km2) of the base. Part of this forest, 6,795 acres (27.50 km2), is old growth, making the base home to one of the most extensive old-growth longleaf pine forests in the world.
In order to deal with the high noise levels of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, officials from Santa Rosa, Okaloosa and Walton counties are studying which homes, businesses and public buildings will require additional noise protection.
Read more about this topic: Eglin Air Force Base
Famous quotes containing the word environment:
“Maturity involves being honest and true to oneself, making decisions based on a conscious internal process, assuming responsibility for one’s decisions, having healthy relationships with others and developing one’s own true gifts. It involves thinking about one’s environment and deciding what one will and won’t accept.”
—Mary Pipher (20th century)
“... several generations of slum environment will produce a slum heredity ...”
—Albion Fellows Bacon (1865–1933)
“The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years. Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.”
—Virginia Thrall Smith (1836–1903)