1/13/15

The U.S. Navy docks at the Wharfinger Building on Friday, Jan. 16 from 5-8 p.m. to present a supplemental environmental impact statement to their Northwest Testing and Training plan, circulated last spring.

Last time in port the crowd opposing them filled the Red Lion. It’s important to attend this meeting, as it is a rare opportunity to comment as a community on a critical geopolitical issue.

The Navy has been testing weapons offshore for decades.

In recent years they have been required to invite public comment. That the responses are almost universally negative explains the Navy’s preference for low-profile publicity.

For example, the Navy concocted a plan to install equipment on Octopus Mountain (Olympic Peninsula) which would operate Mobile Electronic Emitter Warfare Training systems mounted on vehicles throughout public lands on the Peninsula. Low-flying jets would cruise over the forests and obliterate the emissions, as practice for destroying enemy communications. The lasers employed are said to be powerful enough to “melt a human eye.”

Though the Navy claimed it had posted the plan in local papers, it escaped the notice of the mayor and all residents of the nearby town of Forks, as well as the Audubon Society, until it was too late to comment.

Wrote Christi Baron, Forks Forum editor, “Does the Navy and the USFS believe that ‘we’ the people that live in Forks are not worthy of knowing what is planned?”

For coastal towns, the question of Navy testing is especially poignant this month, since if you watch the ocean for three minutes you’re bound to see a few spouts of gray whales cavorting southwards in their breeding migration. The Navy itself has assumed millions of “takes” (destroyed or damaged animals) as a result of its continued exercises.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported on a lawsuit against the Navy, brought by the Conservation Council for Hawaii, Earthjustice and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Similar suits have been brought, none successfully. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 (Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council) that security trumps marine mammals. The current suit claims that Navy use of sonar violates limits on the levels officially permitted as safe for marine mammals, recognizing that marine mammals must die in order to protect American security. The issue, as the WSJ points out, is just how many should be saved.

The lawyer bringing this lawsuit deferentially states, “No one is suggesting that the Navy shouldn’t be allowed to do testing and training.” The question here, realistically narrow in terms of any expectations, is whether they need every inch of the ocean. The lawsuit meekly wants them to leave a few whales for our grandchildren. Meanwhile those grandchildren are watching horror shows such as “Interstellar,” set in a near future, where humans have made Earth unlivable and are forced to embark on a desperate search for another world in a hostile universe. This is the stuff of nightmares.

The monstrous nature of this security is never questioned.

For the U.S., the most dangerous nation in the world by near-unanimous acclaim (Israel does not agree), security means offense, not defense. In the name of that security, the U.S. spends more than three times their closest rival, China, and with 1,000 bases dominating the world, has destroyed entire countries, killed millions of people since 1990, made millions more refugees, and our armed forces have polluted the planet more than any other entity except a few whole nations, and helped to impoverish the country they claim to protect.

Today, because of our malignantly spreading national security, order is collapsing around the world. Any hope for restoration of peace is intimately connected to the survival of salmon, blue whales, gray whales, bees, polar bears, plankton and ourselves.

We can channel our despair into action by confronting the Navy at the Wharfinger. We are not alone. Right across Humboldt Bay a group of people, led by Veterans for Peace, is busy restoring the “Golden Rule,” the world-famous ketch which sailed out into U.S. Navy testing grounds in 1958 and stopped atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons for good. This group has announced they will be in San Diego in less than a year.

They still need donations, materials and volunteers to help them abolish war as an instrument of national policy.

What better, more luminous, more inspired champion to send forth (for a second time) against the Goliath of our own self-destruction?

Ellen Taylor resides in Petrolia.

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