The ongoing battle between environmental groups and the US Navy over sonar testing and its potentially negative impact on marine life heated up in January with a flurry of legal activity and an intervention by President Bush. The latest developments began on 3 January when a federal judge with the US District Court for the Central District of California ruled that the navy must adhere to a series of strict mitigation measures in its planned mid-frequency (1–10 kHz) sonar training exercises off the California coast, calling the navy’s proposed mitigation scheme “grossly inadequate to protect marine mammals from debilitating levels of sonar exposure.”
On 15 January President Bush issued an order exempting the navy from meeting the provisions in two major environmental laws: the Coastal Zone Management Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. In a court filing, government lawyers claimed that the federal rule limiting sonar testing “profoundly interferes...
