Marine Mammal Protection Act
The heart of the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) – our nation’s leading instrument for the conservation of whales, dolphins, sea otters, manatees, and other marine mammals – is its moratorium on the "taking" of these species. Under the moratorium, wildlife agencies are required to review government activities that have the potential to harass or kill these animals in the wild.
The Pentagon’s proposal would exempt the military from the MMPA by:
·
introducing a major loophole into the statutory definition of "harassment," thereby allowing a range of Pentagon activities that potentially harm marine mammals – that cause them physical injury or impair their ability to breed, nurse, feed, or migrate – to escape review;·
eliminating the requirement that takes be limited to "small numbers" of animals in a "specified geographic region," which would open the door to activities that could take hundreds of thousands of marine mammals across the world’s oceans, without any finer grain of analysis;·
imposing unrealistic deadlines on the wildlife agencies, which would limit their ability to conduct a meaningful environmental review of Pentagon activities and particularly to respond to comments from scientists and from the public; and·
creating broad exemptions that allow the Pentagon to bypass the review process entirely. Unlike military exemptions written into other statutes, the ones proposed for the MMPA are not triggered by war or national emergency and are not conditioned on completion of an initial stage of environmental review, but can be applied to virtually any military activity or technology at any time.
The likely result of these dramatic changes would be far less protection for marine mammals, less mitigation and monitoring of impacts, less transparency, and even more public controversy and debate. Nor has the DoD made the case that any such steps are warranted. Under the MMPA, the Pentagon may receive authorization to "harass" marine mammals through a streamlined process that, by law, can take no longer than 120 days. Furthermore, under the Armed Forces Code, it can obtain special accommodations to meet the needs of military readiness and can appeal adverse decisions to the President. This last provision has never been invoked with regard to the MMPA presumably because – as the director of the National Marine Fisheries Service testified last year – not one of the Pentagon’s requests for authorization under the Act has ever been denied.