From: John Adams, President, National Resource Defense Council
Email: biogemsdefenders@savebiogems.org Take action.

Please send a message to the secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and to NATO ambassadors, urging their member countries to stop deploying high-powered sonar systems in sensitive whale habitats around the world. It's critically important that NATO officials hear a worldwide outcry from concerned citizens in support of banning the deployment of sonar. As the military alliance of 26 nations -- including the United States -- NATO includes the world's biggest users of lethal military sonar. In fact, several mass strandings of whales have been linked directly to joint NATO exercises, including strandings in the Canary Islands and along the coast of Greece. Intense bursts of high-powered sonar can and do kill whales. The scientists of the International Whaling Commission have stated that the evidence linking such naval sonar to whale strandings appears "overwhelming." The scientific journal "Nature" has reported that intense, active sonar may kill marine mammals by causing their internal organs to hemorrhage. It is simply cruel and wrong to use high-powered sonar in routine training exercises without taking common-sense steps to protect whales, dolphins and other marine life. That is why a worldwide coalition of environmental groups, including NRDC, is pressuring NATO and its member countries to stop inflicting this needless suffering on marine mammals. Please make your own voice heard in defense of whales right now. Go to http://www.savebiogems.org/whales/takeaction.asp and call on NATO to take immediate steps to protect marine mammals from the deadly effects of sonar being used in our underwater oceans.
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"Full Circle"
by Jean-Michel Cousteau
Reprinted with permission from Family Circle Magazine
June 10, 2003, Volume 116, Number 7, page 200

The Sea is Not a Silent World
There are songs in the sea that must be heard.
Some of them are only whispers, but important. Consider this: at age 60, female sea turtles reach sexual maturity and must navigate thousands of miles of open ocean to find the beach where they were hatched. Since they don^?t raise their young, eons of evolution are focused only on their finding the exact place where they know their eggs will survive, as they did. Once close, they listen for the unique sound of their beach--how the surf breaks or how pebbles roll in the tide^?s flow. This melody of the sea sings only to them of the one place in the world where they can create a new generation.

This is only one of many song lines of the sea, including passionate arias of humpback whales, the staccato survey of the dolphin, the territorial pounding of the drum fish. It is a world of aquatic operas, where animals must make sense of sounds to find food, each other and to avoid danger. Now this world is at risk from what has been called an "acoustic holocaust" in the sea^?blasting it with sound.

Along with high-intensity, mid-range sounds, the U.S. Navy is experimenting with a Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System Low Frequency Active sonar (known as LFA). LFA sonar generates extremely loud, low-frequency sounds to detect silent submarines at great distances. Extremely loud. These sounds flood the ocean at the unimaginable scale of entire ocean basins. Scientists claim that noise from a single LFA maneuver off the California coast was detected across the entire North Pacific Ocean.

But in water, sound also has a physical impact. I have been "investigated" by dolphins and felt their sonar in what seemed like the deepest reaches of my beating heart. Dolphins may even use sound to discipline their young or to stun fish. They may naturally carry the sound equivalent of a handgun and have evolved social restraint. We don't know.

We do know that a horrific sound was broadcast in March 2000, using mid-frequency sound, when 16 whales and dolphins stranded in the Bahamas with bleeding in their ears and other evidence that the deaths were caused by sound: in fact, it was a military maneuver for which the Navy took full responsibility.

It was also the first scientific proof of the danger of intense sound, but not the first suspected incident. Since 1985 six mass strandings occurred in the Canary Islands alone, four with known military maneuvers taking place simultaneously. Similar events occurred on Madeira in 1998 and in Greece in 1996.

The Navy hopes to conduct sonar experiments in over 75% of the world^?s oceans. In August, I joined a coalition led by the Natural Resources Defense Council to stop the Navy's LFA project. In October, U.S. Magistrate Elizabeth D. LaPorte issued a preliminary injunction restricting LFA sonar, as a compromise, to one area in the north Pacific, until the case comes to trial in mid-June. For now, we know too little of the potentially massive and lethal effects of these sonar systems to allow them to continue.

In the meantime, we must remember that the Navy is not the enemy. These are people narrowly focused on a single assignment. It is our job to understand the bigger picture and to demand that the military follow standards that preserve life while not at full-tilt war.

We know we have the power to cut every tree in the forest, but we don't. The same applies to the ocean. The ultimate question with military operations and preparedness is this: how safe would we be on a dead planet? Now it is the Navy who must wait and listen.

Whales and dolphins have no choice. They are surrounded in sound, with no escape. Whales typically have three times a human's auditory nerves and sound illuminates their entire world; sound lets them search for food far from each other and stay in touch, like having built-in cell phones; sound converts the vast sea into a single dwelling. LFA sonar interferes entirely with this magnificent system, and then the pain begins.

What would it be like? According to the Navy's own study, scientists exposed a number of divers to LFA sonar at a fraction of the intensity at which the system operates. After 12 minutes, one 32-year-old Navy diver experienced severe symptoms, including dizziness and drowsiness. Hospitalized, he relapsed, suffering seizure. Two years later he was being treated with anti-depressant and anti-seizure medications.

This is no time for us to be silent. We need to speak clearly for those who have no voice, the whales, dolphins, turtles, the hidden creatures of the sea. We must not invade this magical realm with a deadly force of sound. We must protect it for those small, lifesaving whispers.

"Full Circle"
by Jean-Michel Cousteau
Reprinted with permission from Family Circle Magazine
June 10, 2003, Volume 116, Number 7, page 200
Take action.