White House Must Reject Navy’s Assault on the Oceans

Oil drilling in coastal waters from California to Florida. Underwater explosives testing near the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary. Ocean dumping off the Eastern Seaboard. And trawlers scouring increasingly depleted fishing grounds from Alaska to Maine. For more than 30 years, these activities and countless others like them have been illegal unless there was full public disclosure and a thorough review of their environmental impacts.

Now that could change. Under a proposal being considered by the Bush administration, the federal law that has been the cornerstone of the protection of our environment--including our oceans--is under attack.

Considered the “Magna Carta of environmental regulation” in the United States since it was signed into law by President Nixon in 1969, the National Environmental Policy Act imposes this common-sense requirement: If a federal agency is thinking of taking an action or starting a program that could significantly affect the environment, it must consider those effects first. Under the act, a federal agency is required to identify the environmental impacts of a proposed action, consider reasonable alternatives and identify ways to reduce the harm. This information must then be made available for public comment.

Earlier this month, under pressure from the Navy and the Department of Justice, five federal agencies convened behind closed doors to consider a Navy proposal that the National Environmental Policy Act no longer be applied to any activity or program--no matter its environmental risks--in waters beyond three nautical miles from our shores. Activities within this part of the so-called “exclusive economic zone,” or EEZ, of the United States, not to mention activities on the high seas--would no longer receive public environmental review.

The EEZ, which extends 200 nautical miles from our shores, covers more than 3 million square miles of rich ocean habitat and is home to a wealth of fish, whales, dolphins, sea turtles and other marine life. Under the Navy’s proposal, these resources would no longer be subject to the “inconvenience” of public disclosure and environmental review.

According to a Navy “point paper” leaked to the media, both the Council on Environmental Quality, the federal agency charged with issuing regulations under the act, and the Justice Department during the Clinton administration “pressed to apply [the act] worldwide.” As recently as this summer, that was still the position of the council and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency responsible for protecting our oceans. And that is how the act has been applied for years by the federal courts.

Unfortunately, according to sources at the meeting, the five federal agencies agreed with the Navy that it was time to loosen protections afforded under the environmental policy act. Most important to the Navy--and the immediate reason for its demand that the federal government’s policy be so drastically restricted--this would mean that an environmental review might not be required before testing or deployment of powerful new active sonar devices around the world, devices that could expose hundreds of thousands of square miles to potentially harmful sound levels.

One of these sonars has been identified by the Navy as the cause of mass strandings involving four species of whales in the Bahamas. Yet in federal court in Los Angeles, in a case brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council and others, the Navy is now arguing that its program for testing and developing this sonar, and many others like it, is not subject to environmental scrutiny under the environmental policy act.

If the law is weakened, however, this change would affect far more than the Navy. It would affect coastal communities, commercial and recreational fishing, beachgoers, scuba divers and anyone else who depends on the health of our ocean resources for their livelihood, recreation or quality of life.

All of us depend on clean ocean waters full of species diversity and free from oil spills, dangerous chemicals, harmful sounds and other pollution. That has been an essential part of what Congress sought to accomplish when it enacted the 1969 law.

Never has protection of the oceans been more critical. With depleted fish populations, endangered whales and sea turtles, growing ocean “dead zones,” toxic algal blooms and high-intensity sonar systems that can bombard ocean basins with sound, we cannot afford to dispense with the protections of the National Environmental Policy Act and the public accountability that it guarantees.

President Bush must reject the Navy’s ill-conceived and unlawful invitation to weaken the protection of our oceans.