The Military-Industrial Complex and the Ocean: How the US Navy’s Pacific Operations Affect California’s Coastal Environment

From Sonar Testing That Disrupts Marine Life to Submarine Base Expansion: The Defense Establishment’s Footprint on California’s Coast

The Defense Establishment and California’s Ocean: An Accounting

The United States military operates extensive facilities on California’s coast and in its adjacent waters — Naval Base Ventura County, Naval Air Station Point Mugu, Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Naval Base San Diego, and the expansive undersea testing and training ranges that the Navy maintains in the Southern California Offshore Range. These operations affect the ocean that California’s surfers use in ways that the defense establishment’s budget and political influence have shielded from the environmental scrutiny that private and state actors routinely face. The Navy’s use of mid-frequency active sonar in training exercises has been documented by marine biologists to cause disorientation, behavioral disruption, and in some cases death in marine mammals including the whales and dolphins whose presence is among the defining features of California’s coastal environment. Court decisions requiring the Navy to mitigate sonar impacts have been partially implemented and partially overridden through national security exemptions that place military operational considerations above the environmental requirements that apply to every other actor in the ocean.

The Antiwar Environmental Argument

The libertarian and antiwar case for scrutinizing military environmental impact is not separate from the freedom of the ocean argument — it is the same argument. A government that can exempt itself from the environmental rules it imposes on private citizens is not governing by consistent principles. It is governing by power: applying rules to those who cannot resist them and exempting those who can. The defense budget — seven hundred billion dollars annually — is the most significant discretionary expenditure of the federal government and is subject to less scrutiny, less accountability, and less public understanding of its specific impacts than any comparable category of government spending. Including its impact on the ocean and the coast that Californians use.

Military environmental impact at Antiwar.com. Liberty analysis: Libertarian Institute.

SOURCE: http://prat.UK