{"id":45166,"date":"2014-07-28T12:00:03","date_gmt":"2014-07-28T11:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=45166"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:33:37","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:33:37","slug":"a-story-of-love-and-obsession-gone-bad-how-the-u-s-navy-is-killing-the-worlds-whales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/07\/a-story-of-love-and-obsession-gone-bad-how-the-u-s-navy-is-killing-the-worlds-whales\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cA Story of Love and Obsession Gone Bad\u201d: How the U.S. Navy Is Killing the World\u2019s Whales"},"content":{"rendered":"

Author Joshua Horvitz on the epic showdown between marine life and national security.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"(Credit:<\/a>

(Credit: Tory Kallman via Shutterstock)<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cYou never truly win a conservation battle,\u201d says Joshua Horvitz. The best you can do is \u201cwin the right to fight another day.\u201d That\u2019s certainly true of the 20-year battle between conservationists and the U.S. Navy, over the military\u2019s use of sonar and the deadly effect its equipment has on the oceans\u2019 whales.<\/p>\n

It was, in fact, just two conservationists: Ken Balcomb, a whale researcher and himself a Navy veteran, and Joel Reynolds, an environmental lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, who worked to link Navy training exercises to the mass strandings of whales on nearby coastlines \u2014 and who took the battle all the way to the Supreme Court. The stakes \u2014 the existence of a majestic species versus national security \u2014 were massive,\u00a0passions were high and each small, incremental victory came only with great personal sacrifice. It was, in other words, quite the story \u2014 one that took Horvitz nearly seven years to tell.<\/p>\n

\u201cWar of the Whales<\/a>,\u201d his resulting book, depicts not just the epic story of this ongoing fight, but of the sincere, often underappreciated dedication required of those who choose to take on such battles, and the ways in which such dedication can ultimately pay off. That Balcomb and Reynolds lost<\/a> their Supreme Court case does little to undermine the progress they made in protecting not just whales, but all marine life, Horvitz argues \u2014 and makes it all the more important that the effort continue today.<\/p>\n

Salon spoke with Horvitz about what he calls \u201ca story of love and obsession gone bad\u201d on the part of the Navy,\u00a0and about what Balcomb and Reynolds\u2019 response can teach us about the other high-stakes battles of our time. Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows:<\/p>\n

What drew you into this story?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m an author as well as a book packager, and like anyone else who works in long-form storytelling, I\u2019m always looking for a great untold story. I stumbled on this really as a headline: \u201cWhales versus Navy,\u201d about the legal case between the NRDC and the U.S. Navy. It was a long-running lawsuit, and it read sort of like a divorce headline, and as I dug deeper into the story I realized it really was in some ways a story of love and obsession gone bad \u2014 the Navy\u2019s own obsession with whales and dolphins went back to the beginnings of the Cold War. And so when I realized this was more than just a contemporary environment verse national security story, and there was really a rich history of cultural war between the military, and specifically the Navy \u2014 which has been deploying militarized dolphins and whales for 40 years, and has researched and studied them for 50 years \u2014 and on the other side you have a \u201cSave the Whales\u201d movement that came of age during that same period, and then it all came to a head in the \u201990s and specifically in the last 10 years. It\u2019s just a great story, a genuinely untold story with great characters, and then the whales, which were a wonderful x-factor, which became more and more the draw for me as I got deeper into it.<\/p>\n

So did you see a shift between when the Navy was using dolphins and whales to serve their purposes and then later on, when they\u2019re harming them with sonar?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There were always parallel programs. So they started their marine animal training program and their marine animal research programs at the same time in the early \u201960s, and the training program was always designed to basically take advantage of their trainability. They worked with small cetaceans \u2014 not just dolphins but orcas and beluga whales and even seals \u2014 and they would take advantage of the echo-location, or biosonar, capabilities of small whales. They were using them initially to clear mines from harbors in Vietnam and to also patrol harbors from enemy swimmers as well as to retrieve objects from the deep ocean floor that had fallen off of ships. And that continues today. They\u2019re still using the Navy dolphins \u2014 or militarized dolphins, whatever you want to call them \u2014 in the Persian gulf, because despite the Navy\u2019s efforts to create a dolphin drone that would do the same thing that these animals do, they haven\u2019t really approached their skill level.<\/p>\n

So that was one strand, and then the other, their marine science research program, that was really trying to deconstruct and reverse-engineer their biosonar, which is echo-location in the same way that bats echo-locate in the air. The Navy became intrigued by these animals, really obsessed with them, because they could do things that the Navy had been trying to do in terms of lighting up the dark oceans with sound. The thing you have to understand about whales is that they live in a very dark environment. And so they\u2019ve evolved over tens of millions of years to navigate and hunt in the dark and that\u2019s what the Navy has to do. They have to navigate and potentially hunt and track, locate and kill enemy submarines in the total dark. And so they do that acoustically, either by listening for submarines or using active sonar to bounce sound off of them. They\u2019ve been doing this, crudely, since World War I, but compared to what they discovered whales and dolphins have been doing for millions of years, they realized that they were way behind and that these animals have had a huge head start and were just maestros of sound. A whale, a dolphin can tell the difference between a decoy mine and a real mine, they can tell the difference between a disc made out of copper and made out of zinc. They can find objects that are buried 6 feet in the mud of the ocean floor, half a mile down. They can do remarkable things and it\u2019s because they have evolved to use their biosonar in very specialized marine environments over eons.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s a long way of saying that there are two fundamental ironies that grabbed and held me and guide the story. One is that there was no marine mammal research before the Navy got involved \u2014 it didn\u2019t even have a name. Once they realized that these animals echo-located and wanted to learn more and train them, and try to reverse-engineer their biosonar, they recruited biologists, veterinarians, anybody they could find who was a bioacoustician. They basically created this whole science and mostly what we know about dolphins comes from Navy-funded research, and this information fed directly into their development of their sonar systems. The other tragic irony of this story is that the Navy came to deploy more and more powerful super sonars, long-distance sonars, if you will, high-intensity sonars, that ended up causing not just mass strandings of certain species of whales but real non-lethal impacts on whales of all species, as well as all marine life. They\u2019ve done studies now that show even coral withers in the presence of intense sound, so they really have just been dumping huge amounts of sound energy into the ocean and we\u2019re only now coming to understand the consequences of that.<\/p>\n

So far as the Navy\u2019s use of these marine animals goes, would you characterize it as exploitative?<\/strong><\/p>\n

What other adjective might you assign?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m thinking of Sea World and just using them for entertainment value, while this is serving a national security function.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, for Sea World that\u2019s serving their commercial value, it\u2019s a commercial driver. And scientists have studied them in captivity (although less and less); you could say the scientists are exploiting them for their own research. And the fact that most of the scientists are funded by the Navy is not an accident.<\/p>\n

I mean, look, the \u201cWar of the Whales\u201d is a culture clash between the Navy, which cares deeply about the oceans and whales but for totally different reasons than the \u201cSave the Whales\u201d movement or any of the environmental, humane or conservation concerns might be about whales. So they have very opposing agendas and this is what played out in court and eventually in the Supreme Court. I think what\u2019s interesting is, there\u2019s no longer debate that sonar causes stranding: There were just strandings<\/a>\u00a0in April, involving U.S. Greek and Israeli navies in war games in the Mediterranean. So this isn\u2019t a situation that\u2019s gone away and the Navy acknowledges that they need to take better steps to prevent mass strandings, but they still happen.<\/p>\n

The question was, is it exploitive? Well, I certainly believe that these animals did not join the Navy, they were pressed into service. Let me put it this way: If you\u2019re going to make the decision that you\u2019re going to capture animals in the wild and breed them in captivity, explicitly to train them to clear minefields and do other hazardous work on your behalf for military purposes, the least you can do is take every measure possible not to cause mass strandings of other whales during sonar training exercises \u2014 and again, all these lawsuits are around training exercises. Right now there\u2019s an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, named after George H.W. Bush, that\u2019s a vulnerable target. If you\u2019re the Navy, you want to make sure a rogue submarine doesn\u2019t fire a torpedo at it, so obviously they\u2019re using sonar in the Gulf to defend the ship, and no one\u2019s saying that they shouldn\u2019t. What they\u2019re saying is, if you\u2019re doing training exercises don\u2019t do them in known whale habitats when whales are there, they\u2019re seasonally there; do it when they\u2019re not there. I mean, that seems straightforward, right? To me that\u2019s a no-brainer.<\/p>\n

Are there a lot of straightforward ways to just keep these exercises from being so destructive? And if it\u2019s that simple, why is the Navy resistant to it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

One thing to do is what are called seasonal and geographic exclusions. To do that, you first have to know where the whales are. The Navy has ranges all up and down the East and West Coasts, Alaska, Hawaii \u2014 everywhere we have coastlines \u2014 where they do testing and training. And they\u2019ve agreed to do what are called environmental impact statements, which are pretty rigorous. You have to find out what the environmental impact of these missions are going to be before you have permission to do them. That will allow them theoretically to know where the whales typically are in what season, and to stay out of those habitats when the whales are there. They don\u2019t do that in their foreign exercises.<\/p>\n

So stay away, at least seasonally, from whale habitats \u2014 and that\u2019s basically it. That\u2019s the simple thing they can do. The Air Force has been training its pilots with simulators for decades and so I\u2019m sure the Navy could do a lot of their required training on simulators. They don\u2019t have to be out there in whale habitats training the way they are continuously around the world. I\u2019m not saying all of it, but they could do a lot of it on simulators. So it\u2019s basically that kind of approach: \u201cThis matters enough for us to come up with solutions,\u201d as opposed to, \u201cWe\u2019ll do the minimum amount possible and deal with the collateral damage as it arrives.\u201d<\/p>\n

The heroes of your book are these two people who took a lot of this battle on themselves, and it involves a huge amount of personal sacrifice for them. I was wondering if this has any bigger lessons, for you, about what makes for an effective conservation battle?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Absolutely, I think that\u2019s the takeaway for me from this book. The larger issue environmentally for me, at least, after spending a lot of time on this is the broader issue of noise pollution in the ocean. The major culprits are international shipping \u2014 the motors make a tremendous amount of ambient noise \u00a0\u2013 and of course, oil and gas extraction. So it\u2019s not just military sonar.<\/p>\n

But in terms of the big picture, and the reason this book was worth writing \u2014 and I hope, reading \u2014 is that it\u2019s really, to me, a portrait of two change agents. These people are totally different individuals, personality-wise and in their skill sets. Ken Balcomb is a genuine maverick: He really prefers the company of whales to human beings, he can\u2019t work in groups \u2026 he\u2019s a very good whale scientist and field researcher, and a reluctant activist. Joel Reynolds is a lifelong environmental attorney: He can talk to anyone, deal with anyone \u2014 celebrities, scientists, judges, NRDC members. He\u2019s very good with people, he\u2019s a very smart lawyer, he\u2019s very pragmatic. But what made them an effective team is the degree to which they worked in tandem, and they both had this commitment to stay and fight as long as they needed to, and that they had the perseverance and tenacity to outlast the Navy on this.<\/p>\n

One was a reluctant activist, one was a lifelong committed activist, but they both hung in there. I mean, Ken Balcomb has been protecting this community of orcas up in the Northwest since 1976. That\u2019s almost 40 years. These guys have just refused to go away, and there are antagonists on the other side: The Department of the Navy and the Justice Department and elsewhere have cycled in and out five times in this period, and they\u2019re still there. You don\u2019t ever have any permanent victories in environmental conservation fights; you just win the right to fight another day, and that\u2019s their attitude, and that\u2019s the attitude, I think, of anybody who wants social change. And that\u2019s not just the environment \u2014 it can be abortion rights or civil rights. You look at anything going on today, and you\u2019ll see that there\u2019s a pendulum, and unless you\u2019re vigilant to protect your victories, they\u2019ll be snatched back by commercial interests or government interests.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a line in the book: \u201cYou never truly win a conservation battle.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah, well, it\u2019s true. I think that the significance of conservation battles, and it is an important distinction, is that if you\u2019re fighting to preserve an endangered species or you\u2019re fighting to prevent a nuclear power plant from being built in a delicate environment \u2014 or, in the case of Baja, the last pristine whale sanctuary \u2014 if you lose a fight, and a habitat is turned into a saltworks or a species is allowed to become extinct, then you don\u2019t have a chance to go back and win those. If you lose a court battle over abortion rights, you can go back another day and bring a better case or go to a better judicial panel. But you can\u2019t bring back species or endangered habitats once they\u2019ve been destroyed, so the stakes are somewhat higher, I think.<\/p>\n

You mentioned before that everybody agrees on the science of this, that sonar is causing harm, and now the debate is really about what to do about it. It makes me think about the climate change debate, and there are certainly a lot of other examples. What can this teach us about about reaching compromises over these sorts of battles?<\/strong><\/p>\n

What I learned by watching this case history, the NRDC\u2019s 20-year battle, is it\u2019s really Joel Reynolds. I mean, Joel Reynolds has worked inside NRDC, which has a million members, and they certainly have helped fund this work and whatnot, put pressure on people with letter-writing campaigns, but in the end, it was this guy, who back in the \u201990s decided this was important enough to take on the biggest, most powerful Navy in the world. He\u2019s a pragmatist. So number one, he doesn\u2019t take on frivolous cases. There are a lot of environmental and social activist lawyers who will just file a lawsuit to get publicity, to draw attention to a problem. And that\u2019s a legitimate thing to do, but I think one of the reasons he\u2019s been so effective in changing the way the Navy operates \u2014 and it really has been night and day in terms of how they operated 20 years ago and how they operate now \u2014 is that he was willing to settle. He was willing to come up with compromises that make incremental progress and get the Navy to concede to specific mitigation steps. There are a lot of firebrand attorneys or radicals \u2014 on both sides, and not just this one \u2014 who won\u2019t compromise on whatever issue it is. And I really think his approach has been very effective.<\/p>\n

Also, acknowledge that it\u2019s an issue. I think it\u2019s a cultural thing, and the Navy has come a long way. Because interestingly, the Navy is very sensitive about their public image, and they hate being dragged into court as an eco-criminal and found to be violating the law and be told to go fix it. They don\u2019t want to be in court, and they don\u2019t want to have whales washing up on the shores. Believe me, they\u2019re not indifferent to this issue. But if you think about the Navy, it\u2019s one of the biggest institutions in the world, and it\u2019s by its nature secretive and conservative. The Navy was the last service to incorporate women, put women on ships and submarines. It\u2019s been a slow turnaround for them to kind of get up to speed on lots of issues, and they\u2019ve taken 20 years to get where they are now, but they\u2019re getting there. It just takes top-down leadership to say, \u201cThis issue matters, and we\u2019ve got to deal with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

____________________________<\/p>\n

Lindsay Abrams is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on all things sustainable.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 salon.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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