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LOW-FREQUENCY ACTIVE SONAR
by Katy Penland
The Latest on LFA
In July 2002 National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) granted a Letter of Authorization to the US Navy to fully deploy SURTASS-LFA sonar. This was done despite thousands of letters and documents on file with NMFS from marine mammal scientists, acousticians and the concerned public over the effects of this extremely loud sound on the marine environment. In September 2002, the Natural Resources Defense Council filed a petition for a preliminary injunction in the 9th Circuit Court to temporarily halt the deployment of the first LFA ship while the Court further deliberated a permanent injunction, a process that can take many months. In October 2002, the 9th Circuit granted a preliminary injunction but with the compromise that the Navy could continue LFA "testing" in a specified area, in this case a one million-square-mile section of the north Pacific Ocean.
New Threat Before Congress
This preliminary injunction is a great step toward keeping LFA from becoming an operational reality. However, there is now a spate of legislative proposals before the US Congress that will affect the status of the LFA issue as well as a host of other marine environment concerns, such as ocean dumping, seismic testing for oil, ship shock trials, weapons testing, weapons and ammunition disposal, etc.
As the Pentagon did last year but without success, it is even more aggressively seeking a "categorical exclusion" for all military services from having to comply with four primary U.S. environmental laws: National Environmental Policy Act, Endangered Species Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the Clean Water Act. The Bush Administration is hoping that the war with Iraq and the continued war on homeland terrorism will railroad Congress into gutting our environmental protection laws in the name of national security.
However, last June (2002) the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found that military readiness data "do not support the Pentagon's claims that it is being hurt by the encroachment of environmental laws."
As recently as February 2003, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Christine Todd Whitman, testified to Congress that she did not believe that "there is a training mission anywhere in the country that is being held up or not taking place because of an environmental protection regulation."
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Readiness and Management Support Subcommittee hearings were held March 13, 2003, in Washington, D.C.
One of the witnesses at the Hearings was Dr. Darlene Ketten, probably the world's foremost authority on the effects of sound on marine mammals. According to one observer of the Hearings, "Dr. Ketten was the only panel member to bring up LFA; she mentioned that much more research needs to done before one could scientifically quantify or qualify the damage that would result from LFA or any other acoustic source. However, she did mention Tyack's recently blocked research as a hindrance to getting more data (she was under the impression, as were the media, that Tyack's project was to help the whales by testing an anti-ship-collision system). As many know, however, Dr. Tyack's tests were aimed at southbound migrating gray whales and calving humpback whales in Hawaii, which would include pregnant females, a condition his permit did not account for (although it did provide for no testing if calves were present). However, the primary legal reason for Tyack's permit being revoked by the 9th Circuit Court was NMFS' failure to require Environmental Impact Statements from Tyack when the original permit was amended (three times). Yet, apparently, the Chairman of the Subcommittee Hearings inferred that the environmentalists were abusing the law and that perhaps they didn't want the Tyack experiment to be conducted because the results might not have been to their liking, because some groups like to appeal more to emotion than to science.
This clear bias on the part of the Chairman in favor of exempting the military means it is imperative that our Senators and Representatives be accurately informed before these various legislative proposals come out of committee for voting.
While we await the 9th Circuit Court's decision on the permanent injunction against deployment of LFA sonar, we urge you to help us maintain the integrity of our national environmental laws by contacting the key members of Congress listed at the left, as well as your own representatives. Respectfully request that they vote "No" on any proposal or rider that grants to the military blanket exemptions from environmental review.
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