On Thursday, January 26, an alliance of like-minded environmental organizations and Native American tribes sued the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) for failing to protect higher sea mammals from U.S. Navy military training exercises along the West Coast.

The suit is taking place in a U.S. District Court in Northern California, and blames the NMFS for allowing the Navy to engage in disruptive “war games” along its Northwest Training Range Complex without due supervision. Other suits have preceded this one, of course, and none of them have turned out well for the ocean-going mammals in question.

Organizations involved in the Jan. 26 suit include the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, Friends of the San Juans (a group of islands off Vancouver Island, British Columbia), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), People For Puget Sound, and the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council, comprised of 10 Northern California tribes whose ties to the Sinkyone Wilderness – located 200 miles north of San Francisco – represents an inherited legacy of subsistence fishing, harvesting and gathering of marine resources in the area.

The war games are a direct result of the NMFS granting the Navy a permit, in 2010, to expand naval activity in the area until late in 2015.  These activities include the use of sonar, which has been proven to negatively impact marine mammal lifecycles in a huge way, from reproduction to feeding.

Other Naval activities (beyond sonar)  include surface-to-air gunnery, missile and bomb launches, sink exercises (i.e., sinking another ship, for example) and testing new weapons. But even if activities were strictly limited to sonar, the effects would nonetheless be lethal to sea mammals, which rely on their ability to hear for life’s most essential functions.

Imagine, NRDC suggests, trying to talk to your wife or children, or eat meals, or sleep, with a sound thousands of times louder than a jet engine bursting your eardrums at all hours of the day. Top that off with a constant barrage of bullets, missiles and bombs, and you would likely have no living children, assuming you yourself survived.

This is what sonar represents to dolphins, whales, sea lions, walruses, porpoises, and killer whales, or Orcas (so-called because they feed on the other marine mammal species, not on humans); a death sentence. It is as a result of sonar, in fact, that many whales and other marine mammals have stranded themselves on area beaches – and beaches around the world – suffering disorienting and debilitating physical traumas like bleeding in the brain, ears and other skull tissues. The mammals also display physical symptoms very similar to a diver’s illness known as “the bends,” which occurs when human divers surface too quickly from deep ocean waters.

Given that even the Navy agrees its exercises will harm more than 10 million marine mammals over the course of the next five years, it’s amazing that the games continue.  But continue they do,  because making war has become more important, profitable and meaningful than creating an ecosphere that protects the natural world.

Where can we expect this most recent suit to end up? Probably much like the 2008 suit against Naval military activities which ended up in the Supreme Court, where justices overturned two of the six protective requirements imposed on Naval operations by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Los Angeles, California. Two of the most important, I might add, since they involve the use of mid-frequency sonar.

Image Credit: Rochelle Constantine. ONLINE MEDIA BRIEFING : sciencemediacentre.co.nz