with Joel Reynolds

How do you feel when you hear a piercing fire alarm or siren? You cringe, become a bit disoriented and want to get as far away as you can from the terrible noise, right? Well, imagine you’re a whale and you hear deafening high-intensity sonar from the Navy. But, if you’re a whale, you can’t exactly flee to higher ground.

Whales, dolphins and other marine mammals depend on sound to survive in the depths of the ocean. Through sound, they are able to navigate, communicate, find food, avoid predators and find mates. However, the sonar sounds cause massive disruption to their natural way of living in the oceans, thus threatening their very survival.

While this is depressing and disturbing, our friends at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) have been tirelessly leading the fight for more than a decade to reduce the impacts of sonar to marine mammals. Recently, a Supreme Court ruling on sonar was a slight set-back, but has further energized the organization to continue fighting for stronger protection measures when sonar is used in military training. Learn more from NRDC’s senior attorney, Joel Reynolds, about the recent Supreme Court ruling:

Supreme Court Limits Protection for Whales
by Joel Reynolds

In its first decision of the Term, the Supreme Court recently struck down by a vote of 5-4 two important safeguards that protect whales from dangerous mid-frequency sonar used during naval training off the coast of California. While we believe these safeguards are necessary to protect marine mammals, the ruling was actually very narrow and left in place four other vital safeguards that we won in the lower courts. In fact, the Court explicitly recognized that the military does not have absolute discretion but, like all of us, is subject to the rule of law. In this case, the Court majority was troubled by what it determined to be an inadequate balancing of the respective interests by the district court.

Notably, the Supreme Court did not accept the Navy’s broader rationales for vacating the safeguards, such as its reliance on a purported exemption issued by the White House relieving the Navy from complying with environmental laws during its training exercises. Instead, it simply invalidated two safeguards that had required the Navy to shut down active sonar when a marine mammal was detected within 2,200 yards of the ship, and to power down sonar when water conditions would allow sound to travel farther than normal. The Navy will still be required to avoid key whale habitats and a 12-mile coastal zone, and to monitor for marine mammals.

Collectively, these safeguards are vital for the protection of marine wildlife. Even the Navy itself estimated that the exercises at issue were likely to permanently injure more than 450 whales, damage the hearing of about 8,000 whales, and significantly disturb 170,000 marine mammals. Because of these potentially devastating impacts, NRDC will continue to push, both administratively and through the courts, for reasonable safeguards to ensure that, when the Navy trains, it does so in an environmentally responsible manner — as we are doing for training currently scheduled off the coast of California, Hawaii, Washington and the entire eastern seaboard of the U.S. and Gulf of Mexico.

As the lower courts indicated, what’s really at stake for the Navy is not its ability to defend ships and sailors, but convenience. True, reducing sonar harm to whales and dolphins may occasionally slow things down. But if our bedrock environmental laws mean anything, it is that convenience does not trump our duty as stewards of the natural world.

takepart and help protect whales from harmful sonar.

Joel Reynolds is a senior attorney and director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Marine Mammal Program in Santa Monica, CA.