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<div class="field field-name-title field-type-ds field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="dc:title"><h2>Groups Sue Over Navy Sonar Impacts on Marine Mammals</h2></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-full-name field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a class="node-detail-author" href="http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/advanced/search?fq[0]=ts_field_full_name%3ADan%20Bacher">Dan Bacher</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-publish-date field-type-ds field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">1/30/12</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>A
broad coalition of conservation groups and American Indian Tribes on
January 26 sued the Obama administration for failing to protect
thousands of whales, dolphins, porpoises, seals, and sea lions from U.S.
Navy warfare training exercises along the coasts of California, Oregon,
and Washington.</p><p>Earthjustice, representing the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness
Council, Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, Friends
of the San Juans, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and People
For Puget Sound, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District
of Northern California challenging the National Marine Fisheries
Service’s approval of the Navy’s training activities in its Northwest
Training Range Complex.</p><p>“The lawsuit calls on the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to
mitigate anticipated harm to marine mammals and biologically critical
areas within the training range that stretches from Northern California
to the Canadian border,” according to a statement from Earthjustice.</p><p>“These training exercises will harm dozens of protected species of
marine mammals—southern resident killer whales, blue whales, humpback
whales, dolphins, and porpoises—through the use of high-intensity
mid-frequency sonar,” said Steve Mashuda, an Earthjustice attorney
representing the groups. “The Fisheries Service fell down on the job and
failed to require the Navy to take reasonable and effective actions to
protect them.”</p><p>The groups said the Navy uses a vast area of the West Coast for
training activities, including anti-submarine warfare exercises
involving tracking aircraft and sonar; surface-to-air gunnery and
missile exercises; air-to-surface bombing exercises; sink exercises; and
extensive testing for several new weapons systems.</p><p><em><strong>Tribes say exercises will hurt traditional cultural lifeways, whales </strong></em></p><p>“Since the beginning of time, the Sinkyone Council’s member Tribes
have gathered, harvested and fished for traditional cultural marine
resources in this area, and they continue to carry out these subsistence
ways of life, and their ceremonial activities along this Tribal
ancestral coastline,” said Priscilla Hunter, chairwoman and co-founder
of the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council. “Our traditional
cultural lifeways, and our relatives such as the whales and many other
species, will be negatively and permanently impacted by the Navy’s
activities.”</p><p>“Both NMFS and the Navy have failed in their obligations to conduct
government-to-government consultation with the Sinkyone Council and its
member Tribes regarding project impacts,” Hunter emphasized.</p><p>Founded in 1986, the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council, a 501
(c) (3) non-profit organization, is a California Indian peoples’
environmental consortium working to re-establish local Indian
stewardship within the Sinkyone region of Northern California through
land conservation, habitat restoration, and traditional resource
management.</p><p>The member tribes of the Council are: the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo
Indians; Redwood Valley Band of Pomo Indians; Sherwood Valley Band of
Pomo Indians; Hopland Band of Pomo Indians; Potter Valley Band of Pomo
Indians; Pinoleville Band of Pomo Indians; Scotts Valley Band of Pomo
Indians; Robinson Rancheria; the Cahto Tribe and the Round Valley Indian
Tribes.</p><p>In late 2010, NMFS gave the Navy a permit for five years of expanded
naval activity that the groups said will harm or “take” marine mammals
and other sealife. The permit allows the Navy to conduct increased
training exercises that can harm marine mammals and disrupt their
migration, nursing, breeding, or feeding, primarily as a result of
harassment through exposure to the use of sonar.</p><p><em><strong>High intensity sonar results in marine mammal strandings </strong></em></p><p>Navy’s mid-frequency sonar has been implicated in mass strandings of
marine mammals in, among other places, the Bahamas, Greece, the Canary
Islands, and Spain, according to the conservation groups and Tribes.</p><p>In 2004, during war games near Hawai’i, the Navy’s sonar was
implicated in a mass beaching of up to 200 melon-headed whales in
Hanalei Bay.</p><p>In 2003, the USS Shoup, operating in Washington’s Haro Strait,
exposed a group of endangered Southern Resident killer whales to
mid-frequency sonar, causing the animals to stop feeding and attempt to
flee the sound.</p><p>“In 2003, NMFS learned firsthand the harmful impacts of Navy sonar in
Washington waters when active sonar blasts distressed members of J pod,
one of our resident pods of endangered orcas,” said Kyle Loring, Staff
Attorney for Friends of the San Juans. “Given this history, it is
particularly distressing that NMFS approved the Navy’s use of deafening
noises in areas where whales and dolphins use their acute hearing to
feed, navigate, and raise their young, even in designated sanctuaries
and marine reserves.”</p><p>“Whales and other marine mammals don’t stand a chance against the
Navy,” summed up Miyoko Sakashita, Oceans Director at the Center for
Biological Diversity.</p><p>The Navy’s mitigation plan for sonar use relies primarily on visual
detection of whales or other marine mammals by so-called “
watch-standers” with binoculars on the decks of ships. If mammals are
seen in the vicinity of an exercise, the Navy is to cease sonar use.</p><p>“Visual detection can miss anywhere from 25–95% of the marine mammals
in an area,” said Heather Trim, Director of Policy for People For Puget
Sound. “It’s particularly unreliable in rough seas or in bad weather.
We learn more every day about where whales and other mammals are most
likely to be found—we want NMFS to put that knowledge to use to ensure
that the Navy’s training avoids those areas when marine mammals are most
likely there.”</p><p>The litigation is not intended to halt the Navy’s exercises, but asks
the Court to require NMFS to reassess the permits using the latest
science and to order the Navy to stay out of biologically critical areas
at least at certain times of the year.</p><p>A US Navy spokesman declined to comment on the lawsuit, while a
National Marine Fisheries Service spokesperson said the agency has not
yet received any information on the suit.</p><p><em><strong>Killer whales threatened by both Navy training and water exports </strong></em></p><p>Marcie Keever of Friends of the Earth pointed out the dramatic impact
that the Navy exercises could have upon endangered southern resident
killer whales (orcas).</p><p>“It has become increasingly clear from recent research that the
endangered southern resident killer whale community uses coastal waters
within the Navy’s training range to find salmon during the fall and
winter months,” said Keever. “NMFS has failed in its duty to assure that
the Navy is not pushing the whales closer to extinction.”</p><p>The killer whales face a double threat now: Navy sonar testing and
increased water exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. A
NOAA Fisheries biological opinion released on June 4, 2009 found that
water pumping operations in the Central Valley by the federal Bureau of
Reclamation jeopardize the continued existence of imperiled Central
Valley steelhead, Sacramento River chinook salmon, Delta smelt, green
sturgeon and southern resident killer whales, which rely on chinook
salmon runs for food.</p><p>For the press release, the full complaint and a fact sheet, go to: <a title="Navy Training Blasts Marine Mammals with Harmful Sonar | Earthjustice" href="http://earthjustice.org/news/press/2012/navy-training-blasts-marine-mammals-with-harmful-sonar" target="_blank">http://earthjustice.org/news/press/2012/navy-training-blasts-marine-mammals-with-harmful-sonar</a>.</p><p><em><strong>MLPA Initiative fails to protect ocean from military exercises </strong></em></p><p>Ironically, one of reasons why this and similar lawsuits are so
necessary is because California’s Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA)
Initiative creates so-called “marine protected areas” that fail to
protect the ocean from military testing, as well as pollution, corporate
aquaculture, wave and wind energy projects and all other human impacts
on the ocean than fishing and gathering.</p><p>The initiative is a privately funded process, overseen by a big oil
lobbyist, marina developer, coastal real estate executive, agribusiness
hack and other corporate operatives with many conflicts of interest,
that is supported by the Western States Petroleum Association, Safeway
Stores and the Walton Family Foundation. The MLPA process parallels the
equally corrupt and corporate-controlled Bay Delta Conservation Plan to
build the peripheral canal to export northern California water to
southern California.</p><p>In an egregious conflict of interest, Catherine Reheis-Boyd, the
president of the Western States Petroleum Association, chaired the
“august body” that designed the so-called “marine protected areas,”
falsely touted as “underwater parks” and “Yosemites of the Sea” by MLPA
Initiative advocates, that went into effect on the Southern California
Coast on January 1. Reheis-Boyd, a big oil industry lobbyist who
relentlessly pushes for new offshore drilling off the California coast,
the Keystone XL pipeline and the gutting of environmental laws, chaired
the MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Force for the South Coast, as well as
“serving” on the North Central Coast and North Coast MLPA Blue Ribbon
Task Forces.</p></div></div></div>
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