There’s something to be said for being in the right place at the right time. For Col. James Shaver, it turns out that place was in a photograph of a hiking trip, which became the first step in a successful U.S. Army leadership career.
That photograph happened to be hanging in a hall at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Shaver was pictured with a Biology Club group wearing his National Guard backpack as part of an outing. The image caught the eye of an Integrated Training Area Management program official, who did a little digging and reached out to Shaver to invite him to apply for an opening in ITAM.
“He figured that a biologist who was also in the Guard might be right for ITAM,” Shaver said, adding that he interviewed and got the job right after he graduated from VCU. “I got a job in my career field right out of college. I got lucky.”
Shaver, now Garrison Commander at the newly renamed Fort Barfoot (formerly Fort Pickett), began in 1999 in ITAM, supporting training on Army lands for seven years. He then moved into a State Environmental role for 11 years, along the way putting into direct practice the careful balancing act required for Army land management – keeping the resources available to support vital training missions, while also working to protect and preserve the natural environment.
“Training land is not a wildlife refuge, it’s not a national park, and it’s not a state forest. It is a place where we do tear things up and blow things up,” he said of the realities of training needs. “But we can manage things in a way that can protect the resource and preserve it and create the right kind of land management plans.”
He also credits his start in ITAM with giving him a solid grounding in land management practices, which in turn helped him better do his job when he switched to the environmental side of the management equation. He says that career path continues to help him today in his role as garrison commander.
“Doing everything with a sustainability ethic is important to overall success,” he said. “Doing things without that approach is not the way to take care of mother earth, and it’s likely to cost you in the long run because you aren’t preserving the resources you need,” he said.
He also brings his background into his leadership style.
“The ITAM coordinator who is doing the same job I did in 1999, he’s like three or four levels below me, but I still have an influence on what he’s doing,” he said, adding that his role today is not the same hands-on tasks, but holistic and mission driven. “You get that sense of job satisfaction, something like your finger on the trigger, or maybe hands on the wheel where you still have impacts where the rubber meets the road.”
When asked to reflect on some of the accomplishments of his environmental work, Shaver points to his time in ITAM at what Fort Pickett was then, (now Fort Barfoot) the installation he now commands.
“I bought the first digital camera for Fort Pickett and took pictures of everything – projects, training activities, landscapes, endangered species, for education, for outreach,” he said. “We created the very first Fort Pickett website, we hosted the first Army Earth Day there, and did the first National Public Lands Day community project. We also started the ACUB (Army Compatible Use Buffer) Program with about 50 acres in our first conservation easement – now it’s over 22,000 acres protected around an installation that has only 40,000 acres.”
The ACUB program is an Army-wide partnership program that helps create land buffers around installations and establishes conservation easements and acquisitions to protect the land and the environment, while giving the training mission the room it needs to meet the mission.
Shaver said the success of the ACUB program is due in large part to building trust and relationships between the Army and its surrounding community – and looking for ways to find the best solutions for everyone.
“How you tell your story and how you interact with people will tell the tale of how successful you are,” he said. “When we started the ACUB program, we were worried that someone would think this was a land grab, but we have been able to show people how this can benefit them. The good news is, we have more people interested than we have funding for the program – there’s a waiting list.”
“You don’t want to go to your neighbor’s house and ask for a cup of sugar if you don’t know your neighbor,” he said. “You want them to know who you are, they want to know you are proactive, and that you are transparent in what you are doing.”
Shaver said that one area of environmental emphasis across the Army is preservation of rare, threatened, and endangered species of plants and animals, which he noted is something Army installations can often play an important role in.
“Every military institution is their own unique island of biodiversity, because they have been protected from development for many years,” he said.
One success he points to at Fort Barfoot is the preservation of the Michaux’s sumac, a federally endangered member of the cashew family and a non-toxic relative of poison ivy. Shaver said that because of effective land management necessary for training, the Army has created and maintained ideal conditions for the plant to thrive.
“You can see them all over, in many different places,” he said. Adding the best time to see the smallish and generally difficult to spot plant is when they bloom in the summer. He also credited the range fires and prescribed burns utilized at the installation to manage training areas, fuel loads, and forest growth as a contributing factor. This is because the plants thrive when canopy cover is removed, and the colonies need a disturbance like fire every few years to remain healthy.
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