The Navy has settled the lawsuit filed by the National Resources Defense Council:
The Navy said Saturday the deal reached with the Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups requires it to continue to research how sonar affects whales and other marine mammals.
It doesn’t require sailors to adopt additional measures to protect the animals when they use sonar.
The agreement comes one month after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Navy in another sonar lawsuit the NRDC filed…
The Navy said the long-range research program it adopted under the settlement is basically the same as the one it set out to follow in August 2005, two months before the lawsuit was filed.
Thanks for playing. Now we they can go back to training to fight and win the nation’s wars.
And people wonder why it’s so durned costly to operate these days. One lawsuit after another, impact study upon impact study, and ‘Oh, can we shoot this terrorist? Please! Oh. Permission Denied? Aye. Aye. Sir!’
I don’t get why people disparage micro-management so often, when it’s such a wondrous and expansive art form that a great many seem enthralled with.
I really wish these groups would stop wasting their hard-begged cash on these frivolous lawsuits.
At least when they buy boats and helos and attack Japanese whalers it’s entertaining. (Whale Wars)
Dang, you sailors are heartless! Reminds me of one of my buds when we served together in NC and there was a great hue & cry regarding the Yellow-Cockaded Woodpecker habitat in old-growth forests (read most mil ranges on the mid-atlantic coast)- he “mounted” a dead “RCW” behind his desk – ok, once the smell died out, it was fine. A few years later one of my NCOs caught a Gaia acolyte intentionally marking/assigning phony RCW nesting sites in another training area and escorted the fella out of the AO. When those folks “get religion” it can get intense.
Mongo,
It’s the same modus operandi that has served them well in the past. They use the “lawyered-to-death” approach to eliminate anything they can’t get through legal means and ballot initiatives. It was used to make nuclear power so expensive that no new plants have been built in decades.
Just keep filing suits until the other side runs out of money or gives up.
NRDC got what they wanted…full employment for whale huggers, I mean, whale song researchers.
The Navy’s problem is that their sonarmen are not granola swilling, vegan acolytes who just love the whales to death, literally all to often. Not their fault since keeping America safe kind of eats up your whole day leaving little time for whale mugging.
Really, when you see them chase down a whale to take a skin biopsy with a crossbow, you wonder does anybody read Moby Dick anymore. Fortunately, the whales don’t take them seriously.
This whole episode is a mystery to me. I remember listening to a scientist from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute saying, on Public Radio, mind you, that naval search sonar works on a frequency that whales can’t hear.
So the USN has been forced to waste all this time, effort, funding, and ASW training , to protect whales from something that they can’t hear, and would not be effected by.
When did, ” I belive that this is an ill advised policy, and here are the reputable, peer reviewed studies I should like to present in support of my position that it should be stopped “, become totally replaced with ” Stop, because I say so! I am more morally pure than you, and that makes me right, no matter what the actual experts say “? My personal belief is that this is one of the longest lasting horrors visited on us by the ’60′s generation, perhaps the most self centered, hypocritical bunch that ever lived.
If it weren’t so sad, one would have to conclude that the NRDC has taken the Marx Brothers crowns as Kings of Camp away from them.
P.S. Lex, you are still serving in your new career, so it’s OK to say “we.”
Shoot, I still say “we” when referring to Navy Football, so scr&w ‘em if they can’t take a joke!
I imagine that your average nerdy sonarman kinda likes whales, as fellow nautical noisemakers, and wouldn’t lift a finger to hurt their ears.
Must check Jackalgirl’s blog for her opinion of this.