1. shiftingbaselines
  2. Good News for Acoustic Feeders: Courts Rule Against Sonar

Good News for Acoustic Feeders: Courts Rule Against Sonar

By jjacquet on January 4, 2008.

As the result of a NRDC lawsuit, a federal judge yesterday ordered the Navy to adopt measures for protecting marine mammals during midfrequency sonar exercises off San Diego County and other parts of Southern California. I wrote about the previous decision to overturn lowfrequency sonar use by the Navy in The Skeptic in 2004 in an article titled Sonar Ban Sounded Good. Pursuing a ban on midfrequency sonar is certainly a step up from pursuing a ban on lowfrequency--almost every navy boat in the world has midfrequency sonar and uses it regularly.

The ban is great news for acoustic feeders off the California coast, but given the many other navy and fishing boats with midfrequency sonar, seismic exploration, and ocean shipping, this ruling chips away at only the tip of the noise pollution iceberg. Listen to Cornell University bioacoustician Chris Clark discuss how noise pollution affects right whale survival on the East Coast at NPR.

Tags
Ocean Politics

More like this

Score one for the whales
It's not over until the Supremes rule on any appeal, but yesterday U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper became my new hero when she issued a ruling that ... ...severely limited the Navy's ability to use mid-frequency sonar on a training range off the Southern California coast, ruling that the…
Bush Administration Hopes to Keep Oceans Noisy
Remember a couple weeks ago how the California courts ruled to protect acoustic feeders and minimize Naval sonar use? Well, NRDC's Kate Wing just informed me that ruling is now being challenged by the Bush Administration who yesterday attempted to override the court ruling. According to NRDC, who…
Nuke the whales
It didn't take but two weeks for President George W. Bush to resume his war on science. Collateral damage this time will be of the cetacean order, thanks to an executive order exempting the Navy from any inconvenient environmental laws. From the AP: WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush exempted the…
A Quiet Place for Whales
Natural Resources Defense Council is leading the fight to make the Pacific Ocean off California a more peaceful place for migrating whales. So far, they have strong support from the California Coastal Commission, who denied the US Navy sonar training exercises once before. A review is due on…

Like you said, it's a good start. Now let's move some of that protection up north to the rest of the coast! I agree with one of the people cited in the article that having spotters isn't likely to catch many of the impacted species. I'll be interested to see how much the Navy is able to move around this ruling in the name of national security.