Essays

Over the past six months, extremely loud naval sonars have stayed in the news.  A consortium of environmental groups challenged routine use of the system, asking a Federal court to require more detailed environmental impact analysis.  The same week, the Navy announced its plans for an Undersea Warfare Training Range off the coast of North Carolina, where this very sonar system would be used about once a week, raising the hackles of fishermen (citing experience of fish departing during training missions).  Even the National Marine Fisheries Service piled on, questioning the Navy’s planned mitigation measures. In July, the Navy agreed to more restrictions and marine mammal observers than ever before, in order to get permits and settle a court challenge over its use of sonar. This time, the system under the microscope is not new (as with the beleaguered Low Frequency Active Sonar now deployed in a court-ordered restricted zone in the North Pacific), but an earlier, mid-frequency active sonar that has been widely deployed by many countries for over a decade and is today installed on over half the US Navy's ships.

As usual, government agencies and defenders of the wild will trot out decibel numbers, tales of hearing loss and strandings, and the waving flag of national security.  Field researchers will try to share what they have learned of sound and animals, though it's likely their measured language and research design caveats will command far less attention than the specter of dead whales on beaches or terrorists lurking in silent subs.

As Executive Director of the Acoustic Ecology Institute, I spend my days working to make sense of this panorama of information, opinion, and dogma.  Hopefully, our Special Reports and ongoing coverage shed some useful light on all this.  But as rewarding as this diligent search for the clear view can be, I am often left feeling that all these debates, lawsuits, regulations, and research studies are distracting us from the real question.  These days, when I think about the deployment of Naval sonars, or the expansion of equally loud seismic surveys as part of the worldwide scramble to uncover the last remote reserves of precious oil and gas, or the projected doubling of large tanker traffic over the coming generation, each offering in their turn sobering decibel details, worrisome animal behavior anecdotes and research, and compelling arguments about their essential role in “our way of life,” there is a core part of myself that wants to scream out: Enough with the facts and figures! Stop trying to "make sense" of this stuff!  What about the ethical questions here?

More and more, I feel that our unfettered noise-making in the oceans (not to mention the land...) deserves far more than rational deconstruction of ambient noise, masking, tissue damage, and evidence of long-term adaptation.  There are far deeper and more important questions that need to be addressed.  Basic questions like: Do we have the right to make all the noise we want to on this planet?  What do we sound like?  Is this the voice we want to offer to the world?  What about our eternal relationships with the others?  How do we want to choose to be here?

Yes, these are big questions.  They are not the sorts of questions that Expert Panels, Scientific Symposia, or Congressional Committees are really designed to address.  These are questions for the public at large.  And the public writ small, one of us at a time, inside our own hearts.

Other questions, less fuzzy, more challenging, also need to be asked.  Are these sonars, or indiscriminate use of airguns, or increased supertanker and shipping traffic, things that we NEED?  We have to get better at distinguishing between a "need" and a simple desire or curiosity.  Many times, once new technologies appear, there is a strong momentum to use them, to explore what they are capable of, to expand these capabilities.  In the scientific or economic spheres where decisions are made about pursuing these new directions, the question of whether we really NEED this is often ignored. 

To be more specific: the Navy touts active sonars as indispensable in our struggle to protect narrow shipping lanes and near-shore areas from attacks by terrorists or rogue nations.   The obvious next question should be: can you demonstrate this need? Have there been times when we've had near-misses (even by parties just probing our defenses), in which only an active sonar provided adequate detection?  Are there really no other options that could provide this protection?

We also must be vigilant against looking at these questions through the “all or nothing” lens.  Certainly, this idealized call for us to clarify whether we “need” active sonars—or more offshore oil and gas—skirts close to this edge.  It’s unlikely that we need active sonars to roam the worlds oceans unfettered, yet it may be that there are a few strategic chokepoints where, at least at present, nothing else will do.  What I’m suggesting is that we avoid the “easy” stance of total bans or unlimited use; to be fair, leading environmental organizations and the Navy have shown by their actions that they are also seeking such a middle ground, though their advocates in the public and congress have often been less nuanced.  The United States Department of Defense, in particular, has adopted a stance in recent years that is extremely closed to any international efforts to even consider limits on sonar training. This appears to be in large part a resistance to concrete legal requirements; the Navy has continued to adapt its operational procedures in response to public pressure, albeit reluctantly.

And now, to push the very edges of acceptable thought: even IF the use of loud near-shore sonar defenses might be the best defense against a stealth attack, must the communities of life in the sea then endure our relentless and ever-intensifying intrusions?  Do military development programs, or even our asserted need for inviolable self-defense, automatically trump all other considerations?  If we have helped to created a world in which a renegade group or country might try to sneak into our near-shore waters and attack us, must the denizens of the sea pay the price of hosting our sonic defense screen in their homes?

Hmm.  Sticky questions.  I speak them here largely rhetorically, to put them out in the open.  The answers are far from clear to me, but I do believe that we should not be so sure of ourselves that we don’t think to consider them.

Back then, to the heart of the situation: the ethical stance we as a society choose to take, in relation to other species and their freedom to live in peace. Ocean life relies primarily on acoustic cues, since light does not travel far underwater.  Should our ocean brethren simply have to deal with our noise, or can we become more conscious about how much noise we make, and move with more consideration for the simple rights of other species to go about their lives with as little intrusion from us as possible?  If we want to live in harmony with other species, we need to address the cumulative and relentless increase of human noise in the sea--periodic exposure to sonars, areas of long-term concentration of airguns, shipping lanes, dense recreational boating zones.  

We need to address this not because it is deadly; in most cases it isn't.  We need to address it not because it is adding up to increase the overall background noise by a factor of two or ten or a hundred in much of the world's oceans; the effects of this clear increase in noise are hard to prove or even discern.  We need to address this cumulative noise-making because we need to re-calibrate our cultural priorities.  Is it all about humans and our needs, or do we value the natural functioning of the ecosystems and lives within them?  I find it difficult to believe that the course we're being led on by government and corporate interests is the one most of us would choose.  Our society's swagger through the world is getting so far off-kilter, in its relation to both nature and other societies, that most of us can now see clearly that we need to look at the bigger picture, and act in accordance with our truer, deeper values, together.  To do so, our public discussion will need to include questions of ethics and values; I suspect that we are far less divided at these levels than we are led to believe we are.  Human consideration for others cuts across political lines, class lines, race lines.  This isn’t to minimize the difficulty of the decisions about how to operate in accordance with these shared values.  But the time has come to open a window to decision-making that is based on ethics rather than pretending to be objectively responding to murky and conflicting information.  As we dare to ask the deeper questions, we will be able to address the most fundamental one: how do we want to move in this world?