It’s hard to go even a day without hearing about some military action, military violence. I mean in the world, with news from Gaza, where Israel has already violated the ceasefire brokered by President Trump; and I mean in our own country, where the administration continues to deploy the National Guard to quell protest or dissent in Democratic cities, and where ICE’s funding now exceeds that of the militaries of entire countries. And these are just the military campaigns that I’m hearing about most frequently, to say nothing of all the others.

It’s a small comfort that in the Adirondacks we don’t have to hear it — to actually hear it, the report of gunfire or of bombs. An application to the Adirondack Park Agency to build a weapons-testing facility in the park aims to change that. Michael Hopmeier, the president of a private security firm in Florida, suggests building a range to test-fire 155 mm howitzer cannons “up to 30 times per year on weekdays, between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.” The goal is to test the weapons “to ensure the most efficient means of manufacturing and recuring (Sic) cost of ownership, thereby reducing waste and cost, as well as improving performance,” as stated in the initial application. According to the Adirondack Explorer, Hopmeier owns a “nuclear missile silo … where he is already conducting indoor ballistics testing,” and he recently hosted “military exercises conducted by private contractors … [which] involved gunfire and Black Hawk helicopters flying low, alarming neighbors.”

I guess I can imagine that on the surface, it doesn’t seem like much, just another source of loud, occasional public noise, with no one actually harmed in the testing. What about the environment? That’s another thing you can’t help but hear about, or I can’t, anyway: the Trump administration’s revocation of environmental protections left and right, billionaires getting richer while they suffocate the planet. There’s no stopping what’s coming: the floods and fires, the displacement of people en masse, and the extinction of so many endangered species; it sounds almost Biblical, but it’s the truth. All we can do now is mitigate. Haven’t we done enough? The world has done nothing to deserve our treatment of it. Maybe it’s naive and sentimental, but when I think of the fear of the animals at the sound and the shaking, the red-winged blackbirds and the chickadees, the cedar waxwings, the white-tailed deer, the mice and moles — the fish of the water, the fowl of the air, the cattle and every creeping thing upon the earth — it makes me sick.

The application claims that “the goal has been, and continues to be, the maintenance to the greatest extent possible of the pristine and natural environment in which we live, while still performing (the applicant’s) operations.” I don’t buy it, but I can admit that’s on principle: I don’t believe in the operations, I don’t believe they should be performed at all.

Because even if we pretend we’re okay with the noise, or pretend the testing would not affect the wildlife in the area, testing is for development — “improving performance” — and development is for use, and the tools Hopmeier wants to test in the park are tools for killing. Efficient means of manufacturing, reduction of cost: it’s just violence, deferred violence, and all of it for money. It nauseates me, the thought of machinery like this or even its data, sourced from this place and then used to destroy things or end lives. The Adirondack Park exists because there are people who value the sanctity of life: it exists for conservation, and it is uniquely situated in the world for the protection it affords nature. This project is an affront to that sanctity and those protections, exactly the kind of cynical and anti-human endeavor the creation of the park aimed to avoid.

Public comments on the proposal are open until Oct. 30 on the APA website or by emailing RPcomments@apa.ny.gov with the subject line “Project 2021-0276; Michael Hopmeier; Frederick Aldinger.” There’s so much violence in the world already. Please reach out: tell the APA that we don’t want this here.

In Saranac Lake, I wouldn’t literally hear the cannons firing in Lewis, but I think I would feel it.

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Matthew Keating lives in Saranac Lake.