LEWISTON – For Tara Thornton, there’s nothing more patriotic than making sure veterans of the U.S. military are protected.

“We’re not anti-military,” said Thornton, executive director of the Lewiston-based Military Toxics Project. The watchdog group lobbies to force the U.S. military to clean up its pollution, especially around firing ranges, bases and weapons manufacturing.

“The U.S. military is the worst polluter and it’s exempt from most environmental regulations,” Thornton said. “And they want more. The Department of Defense wants more exemptions from existing environmental laws. That’s what we’re battling.”

Most Americans don’t think of battlefield waste in their own back yards, she said.

“People think of war, and they think it only happens in far-off places, like Iraq,” Thornton said. “But there’s training and there’s manufacturing and there are impacts from that. And that happens here, close to home.”

So, from her Sabattus Street office, Thornton oversees a sprawling network of environmental activists and military watchdogs. The Military Toxics Project monitors the Department of Defense, organizes environmental training and conferences and publishes a quarterly newsletter.

“We just feel that people who live next to a military base deserve the same protection that someone living next to a Polaroid plant gets,” she said.

The project is actually a network of small local organizations spread around the country. Most focus on one issue, such as cleaning up a particular military base. They depend on Thornton to keep track of what the others are doing and to provide a unified voice.

Depleted uranium

The group also advocates against depleted uranium weapons and armor. The United States first used depleted uranium – culled from leftover nuclear waste – in artillery shells and tank armor in the first Gulf War, in 1991. The uranium hardens the shells and stiffens the armor, making it ideal for combat.

But members of the Military Toxics Project and others argue that the shells and armor give off enough radiation to be a threat to U.S. soldiers firing the weapons and to civilians living around the shells for years to come.

“The shells are designed to burn on impact, and they give off a ceramic dust that may be radioactive,” she said. “That can be inhaled or deposited on the skin. There is evidence that the people firing the weapons are at just as must risk to exposure.”

The group focuses solely on the U.S. military because it is so big and their staff is so small. Thornton is joined in Lewiston by program coordinator Steve Taylor. Erika Taylor, a second program coordinator, works out of a branch office in Memphis, Tenn.

As executive director, Thornton also monitors new legislation and military trends. That makes out-of-the-way Maine an odd choice for environmental advocates, she admits.

“People do wonder how we can make it up here in Lewiston,” she said. “They wonder why we don’t have a D.C. office or work around a particular base.”

The project started as a campaign run by the Boston-based National Toxics Campaign. When that organization closed in 1993, a handful of the bigger campaigns split off. The executive director lived in Maine at the time and brought the project with her.

Thornton has worked with the project since 1997 and took over as executive director two years ago.

Monitoring the network from Lewiston works just fine, she said.

“I think if we were based in one place, we’d get more involved in the local issues,” Thornton said. “We’d lose that national perspective.”

[email protected]