 Thank you TJ and thank you Derek for inviting me. I'm really it's this is the audience. I wanted to speak to you It's it's really exciting for me to be here because To date the best audience the most interesting audience I had was at the Naval Academy Whereas my book was assigned to the environmental security class and I was invited to speak to them and You know what really struck me is how Focused the Navy has been from the very beginning on a science basis on climate change and They've been the opposite of climate change deniers. They've been way out ahead of the curve They were the first to understand the strategic implications of rising sea levels and melting ice in the Arctic and I'd like to Encourage you to think I mean I'm gonna be talking mostly about about sonar and and the Navy and but really I'd like I'd encourage you to think about the broader issue of and I'm gonna talk about that too of noise pollution in the ocean because really I think that's the strategic Interest that the Navy has in in solving this sort of debacle. They've they've been in for a while I Assume I've been really impressed by the sort of candor and openness of the conversation here So I assume I've been invited here because I might have something to say having spent six and seven years sort of Looking at this from all all angles and talking to a lot of people and giving it a lot of thoughts So I'm gonna give you my candid thoughts on how you can move forward perhaps in a in a constructive way on this front and So, you know, I've also I just want to say I've been really Gratified by how the Navy has reached out to me readers, you know, since the book came out last summer Aside from the Academy in here. I've been I've gotten lots of outreach from retired Fleet officers, Acousticians sonar operators with really specific Suggestions about what could be done not just with sonar to mitigate the risks of sonar But on sound issues in general and that's something I really look forward to after I after my comments to Discussing with you because that you you folks are the technical experts and and of course know the Navy and the Navy culture Better than I do so I'm gonna share some of the the ideas I've gotten from Navy people largely Navy people and you can tell me if any of them are feasible in your mind I Want to Start by just posing the obvious question, which is what do what do whales have to do with maritime? Power and international security and I invite you to consider the proposition that the fate of the whales is integral to the To the central mission of the Navy In terms of national defense and and here's why I say that For the past 20 years the Navy has been bogged down in the legal trench warfare with environmentalists Really largely with one environmental group natural resources Defense Council and one one attorney Joe Reynolds and You know if this were a battlefield situation, I think there would have been a different outcome But I think this is really a cultural clash between the military and environmentalists where There's it's tough for both sides though in individual cases. There have been plenty of settlements and I think Despite the Navy prevailing in a one of the cases went to the Supreme Court in 2008 the Navy prevailed however And I think the Navy expressed to me at the time that the admirals who I was interviewing saying well finally We're done with death by injunction But that hasn't proven to be the case we're back in the Navy is back in court. They've been sued and are back in court On on via alleged violations of Marine Mammal Protection Act other environmental laws on their California and Hawaii Hawaiian ranges And there's a decision to out sort of hoping it was beat that be out by today In the next couple of days or next week you might watch for it It's probably won't be on the front page in the New York Times But if you set a Google alert you'll hear about it and and there's no way to predict how it's going to go But historically the Navy has lost all but one of the cases the one case Which was a fairly narrow ruling that they took up in the Supreme Court. They did prevail in this in a Split decision, but they did prevail but in other cases the The judges have enjoined, you know, I've issued injunctions that have delayed deployment of Strategic sonar systems and other acoustic warfare systems and they have also delayed training and certification of Sailors and battle groups that were going overseas to war zones Two simple examples of that is the low-frequency act of sonar has been delayed I mean they've Navy's only been able to deploy it in one area in the China Sea They wanted to have permission to deploy it all around the world and that was delayed for 15 years and During the 2004 rim pack exercises that a judge ruled in NRDC's favor and Enjoying the Navy and eight navies from from moving forward and they had this idle there in the Hawaiian waters for eight days Until they came to a settlement with with NRDC about what mitigations they were going to use So these are real. These are not just courtroom dramas. I guess it's my point Meanwhile in the court of public opinion, which also counts the Navy's been on the defensive fighting a rear-guard action against environmental and animal rights groups who have been very adept at exploiting images of you know kind of grotesque images of whales on beaches with blood coming out of their eyes and I'm gonna share some of those images with you. You may have seen them but in case you haven't I think it is useful to see what the rest of the world is is looking at and You know when it comes to public relations war You're you're Outgunned and unlikely to prevail on that front. I think and I mean the Navy does have some PR sites They have a Facebook page about all the good things that are doing the marine mammals, but I Actually did a media metrics check and there isn't much traffic there And there are lots of sites that are circulating other information on the other side So the bottom line there is the Navy whale should matter to the Navy because they matter to a lot of people I was talking to general how I gave him a copy of the book before he had to leave today And he said oh my wife's a big whale. I wish I love this book and she's always giving me a hard time about the Navy and sonar and so even if you folks who you know in your somewhat tribal Community of the Navy are sort of all on one side of the issue that doesn't represent the country as a whole and That's part of what my book is about Also, you know, unfortunately the focus public focus on sonar has really Overshadowed an otherwise very impressive environmental record by the Navy in terms of developing a novel biofuels and recycling and sea programs But you know, I think the Navy has allowed itself in some ways to be tarred by this brush of you know being a Heedless steward of the environment, which is neither accurate nor of course desirable So and it also distracts attention from the primary sources of industrial noise pollution that are really what are endangering marine mammals You know more than these acute Local episodes where whales are driven ashore So this brings me to the most important reason the Navy should be paying close attention To whales and that is that they are the bellwether of probably the most important Change in the in the global ocean climate or one of the most important I think and that's the rising tide of ambient noise from industrial sources in the ocean those are 95% of it is is oil and gas exploration and drilling and international shipping and These are So I mean this is just an overview of them and it's not proportional, but that's just kind of what sound in the ocean and and and My point is that it's not I mean so you have Seismic air guns Sorry, these are some of those nasty images. We go to so seismic air guns are our Chris crossing ocean looking for oil and and letting off, you know, these these very compressed very loud air cannons You might know what they sound like every six seconds for hours and they ricochet around and bad for local wildlife needless to say and This is how many of them there are around it's the loudest industrial noise in the oceans about 256 decibels I think at the source these days So you can imagine that that noise radiating out is a lot of ambient noise and and Then then there's international shipping which you know You have these enormous tankers and there are tens of thousands of their thousands of those super tankers I'm sorry cargo ships on the on the water and tankers and super tankers and large ships with a lot of propeller cavitation and and these have a really Needless to say negative impact on marine mammals. I won't go through all the problems but I mean in addition, you know, these are these these Chronic sources are not driving them onto beaches, but they're stressing these populations and not just marine mammals Fish by cat a fish catch goes down about 40% in the presence of of chronic noise Even coral has been shown to wither in the face of chronic noise So all marine life is very sensitive and you know, we can we can identify with that, you know It's we're all sensitive to noise. It's stressful. It brings down productivity rates. Everything is bad about it And most importantly for this conversation is it's it's bad for the Navy The Navy's always battled the problem of acoustic clutter in terms of particularly an ASW and so You know the Navy and the whales are very much bedfellows in this in this conundrum And I don't have to explain all the ways this makes it harder for the Navy to To do both passive and acoustic work in the in the in the in the ocean and for the for the marine mammals, it's been called acoustic smog and and it's they're choking on it, so This is just one most recent example of Of how both whales and the Navy are being Impedient if you will by by industrial noise in the ocean This is a map of the proposed permit sales that the the interior department released this summer last summer and is now About to be sold to oil and gas companies This is after a 27 year moratorium on oil and gas on the east coast and actually it's just the southern half of this initially but any of you who who are involved in the Atlantic will recognize that that's exactly on top of the sonar and explosive training range of the Navy and I Don't have to tell you how hard it will be for the Navy to operate on that range with seismic air guns going off and pile Driving of rigs and then oil and gas and that's the reason the Navy is actually testified a couple of years ago in front of Congress opposing this But the the Interior Department and its wisdom has has okayed it so there is gonna this is gonna be the next legal battle front and the good news for you is It's a possible distraction for the same environmentalists who are taking you to court not a distraction, but another front Let me put it that way so The my kind of overarching message and I'm gonna tell you a little bit about the kind of background of the story and how you got here and You know, maybe some some choices that were made along the way that might inform choices going forward and But my overarching thing is that the Navy Needs to be a part of the solution if there's gonna be mitigation Reduction of noise levels in the ocean the ocean obviously oil and gas are not going to go away Shipping are not going away, but what they need what those industries need is technology and innovation And that's what the Navy does best and you guys invented ship quieting noise isolation You guys are the leader in satellite telemetry to map the bottoms of the ocean. I know there are some people who know about that and The reason interestingly your partnered on ours partnered with Phillips Conoco on that on that Effort and it's pretty remarkable to look and see How much of what they're doing all these air gun arrays seismic tests with they can do with microwaves from a satellite so Hopefully The Navy will continue to support that and move forward on that front because their guns are bad I mean, you know in the Arctic down here wherever it is. So You know, I think the Navy needs to be a part of the solution I was struck by the parallels to the search and rescue operations Panel yesterday they were saying, you know, the irreplaceable role of Navy's in that effort Because they have the assets and so do you in this one and it's I really do believe It's a self-interested Path to take Okay, so let me give you a real sprint through a sort of a look back at how we got here and Some of this you may know, but I suspect there's a lot that you don't so I called this book War of the Whales because again It really is a culture war and it's a culture war between two sizes the American culture that Both care deeply about whales and the ocean but for very different reasons on one side You have of course the Navy which going back to the beginning of the Cold War had a really dire need to see in the dark ocean and to To be able to navigate in the dark ocean and to hunt the Soviet submarine armada and they use mostly sound both passive and active to do that and It was the Navy that turned to Dolphins and other small whales and other marine mammals to help them in this effort and That effort has continued today They went to these animals. I mean that's one of the real ironies of the situation is that the Navy spent a lot of time studying training trying to D reverse engineer Citation biosonar because it's so sensitive and so acute and That's why they're driven on to the beaches by mid frequency sonar and that's why they can't handle Acoustic smog and so the very reason you've chosen to partner with them. They can find mines. They can patrol harbors They can retrieve objects in the deep ocean. So on the other side of this cultural divide is a generation the same generation of Americans who grew up Being introduced to these animals as lovable friends and adorable creatures and marine parks and then later in the in the wild in their natural settings and You know more and more seeking these close encounters with these very charismatic can't animals and These are the same generation that you know We're either passive or actively supporting the Save the Whale movement that eventually ended with a commercial ban on on whaling in 1986 so What I discovered is when I dug deeper into it is that really what's so interesting and again ironic is there before there was this cultural divide There was only one culture that cared about whales certain though there were two one was in 1946 let's go back to 1946 What were two is over on ours just founded and so was the International Whaling Commission because lo and behold the whaling stocks had crashed because the whaling industry had wildly over harvested them with industrial techniques in search of important commodities like brake fluid and dog food and At the time though nobody else cared except they were they were desperately trying to revive those stocks But the only other people who who cared about the whales and thought of them as anything other than a commodity a floating vat of oil was the US Navy and that's because The Navy took notice then in 1940. There was a biologist an undergraduate at Harvard named Donald Griffin who in the basement of a Harvard laboratory finally solved this Balanzani problem Which was the mystery of how whales now. I'm sorry how bats hunt and navigate in the dark And they of course use ultrasonic sound, but they hadn't been able to hear the ultrasonic sound before so the ONR reached out and hired him immediately recruited him to their efforts and He was he worked with them the rest of his career and what he opined was that perhaps other mammals that navigate in the dark use what he had dubbed echolocation and He said perhaps whales are doing this so the Navy there were no whales the important thing to understand is there were no whale Scientists at the time. There was no marine mammology as a discipline. There were no Cetologist, I mean there were only whalers who had only done some observational work. So the Navy sent The its acousticians its zoologist its Veterinarians down to marine land in the Pacific, which was the world's of the country's first marine park in San Augustine, Florida and they Were able very quickly to study these animals and determine that in fact they were using echolocation and that their Biosonar which it soon became called was out distanced anything that the Navy could touch and it's not surprising if you think about it these animals have evolved in different habitats, but Generally in the ocean dark ocean depths to hunt and navigate for 30 to 40 million years, so I won't go into the technology, but the Navy was very interested in deconstructing this technology and these animals were also trainable so the Navy began training them to do again deep ops recovery and Mind sweeping which they totally outdistance human mind sweepers they I won't tell you the one for you But read the book you'll see the cool things they they figured out they could do So here's where the story kind of takes a left turn So again the Navy reached out to people like John Lilly John Lilly is a neurologist at NIH He was famous for doing the first cortical maps of macaque monkeys and if you've ever seen those horrifying pictures of these macaque monkeys with no skull flap and 100 electrodes and He heard about these big bigger-brained animals down in St. Augustine and he got very interested in these animals and he's the person who gave this vision to the Navy that these people these sorry these creatures who are so Acoustically sensitive and communicative and social could be great allies and he laid out in a book He wrote called man and dolphin which is also a popular book So he did a popular book to the public and the Navy he was explaining all the things that they could do in combat situations So they set him up with the communications lab He went off the deep end and started doing experiments with LSD and dolphins which was legal at the time a lot of Scientists were doing LSD and psilocybin experiments in academic settings But he was cohabitating and the researchers were taking acid and in any case he eventually released his his research animals Well, it was it was I mean it is so funny But it was an embarrassment to this fledgling Discipline so the Navy had set up this discipline which now had convened and had called decided we're going to call ourselves marine Memologists and he was one of the really important early guys He was doing serious work and then he went in this direction He was using ketamine with LSD by the end and he was in astral conversations with them and trying to decode their language and in any case He went on to be an avatar of the new age He retired to California and Esalen and Hawaii and continued to write on this topic, but not for the Navy Another person whose name you might know Roger Payne was a ONR researcher into owls. He was investigating whether owls echolocate. In fact, they don't though They they just have very acute eyesight They do not use sound to hunt at night, but he heard about whales He went he heard about these endangered humpback whales that were in Bermuda and he actually connected with a Navy sonar operator the guy who actually operated the very first Sosa station in the Bermuda and he Handed over to paint these tapes which he had been making with Sosa's receivers and Roger Payne who was actually a musician by training a classical musician Convinced a record company to make a long-playing album called song of the humpback whales that went on to become one of the best-selling albums in 1970 in the same year that Grateful Dead's American Beauty happy road. It was a good year for music. I've listened to this I'm not playing for it because it doesn't sound like music. However, it caught the imagination of The culture and people were ready for that and it became a bit very big deal and it really enshrined what it did Was it restored the whales to this mythic? Stature they had had up until Recent times, I mean they used to have a lot of clout in the in the mythic realm But then they had been reduced to a commodity by the whaling age But now they were back and finally there was Paul Spong who was another neuroscientist and a disciple or a colleague of John Lilly's who was the first person to work with orcas captive orcas at the Vancouver Aquarium And he very quickly decided these animals were not suitable for for captive research and release them Well, he didn't release them He was released by the Vancouver Aquarium they held on to their whales and he set up a research station nearby in Off of Vancouver Island, but what he's notable for is he went to Greenpeace Which had just at the time was working to protest above-ground nuclear explosions tests and he convinced them that they should redirect their fire and video cameras at the Soviet whaling fleet, which they did and I don't know if any of you remember this But there was a time during the wide world of sports if you remember that show where it was a weekly installment where they were following The rainbow warrior and as they followed the the Russian fleet and Walter Cronkite used a clip of them getting like carpooned almost by the by the Russians and it was a big deal so meanwhile on the other side of the divide you do have The Navy this that's that is moving forward continuing to use this So they were deployed as you may know in Vietnam and come on Bay is mostly in harbor patrol But then in the in the mid 80s 87 they were deployed in Bahrain to patrol harbors there and They're still being used overseas. They don't do particularly well In waters that are not natural to them But the Navy has belugas they've trained for for cold water and they use pilot whales and other settings and sea lions But they called them these their wet brain assets and even though and they're you know That's a great expense and a fair amount of flak from and animal rights people they continue to use them and the reason is that The dolphin drones which are these are AUVs. This is an early generation of remiss that was built at Woods Hole were Very much built on what they had gleaned from their biosonar research over decades and they continue to Upgrade them but as refined as they've gotten they only operate on flat bottom surfaces They amount function of course and they're just they still can't touch what dolphins can do dolphins can find Objects buried eight feet in the mud. They can tell the difference between a ball bearing and of copper and zinc from a hundred feet away It's sort of remarkable. So They they've kept them Engaged so Let's jump forward 10 years to 1995 the Cold War is over Joe Reynolds is the lead head attorney at the Los Angeles office of Natural Resources Defense Council also known as NRDC and somebody called him about the ship shock trials that were being scheduled I think for the John Paul Jones and They were worried about the marine life in the area because the the Navy in its Judgment had decided to conduct these 10,000 pound explosive trials in inside the Santa Barbara Marine Sanctuary, so Joel Reynolds had never done an ocean case before never done a marine mammal case before he had done some terrestrial He mostly was sort of trying to slow down development commercial development in California And he did endangered species stuff, but he knew a winning case when he saw one. So he went to court and The Navy refused to settle and the judge said I don't like the look of this and you should settle and the Navy didn't want to settle and so then she said you can't do them and you know and again enjoying them from carrying this out and So the Navy finally agreed to take them out to a deeper ocean where there is much less Marine life and that's where they've been conducted ever since But following on the heels of that reputation for taking on the Navy. He was next approached by other groups Over the Herd Island experiment ATOC does anyone know what that is anyone ever heard of that? Anyway, one of the most I won't go into in detail, but the one of the Navy's greatest Ocean our physical oceanographers Walter Monk had come up with this very elegant idea for testing Global climate change in the form of Temperature change in the ocean and what he did is he found this place in the South Indian Ocean called Herd Island It's an uninhabited island where you could Create a acoustic ray path to every continent and country in the world And what he did was he borrowed a ship from the Navy because he was in with the Navy and it was Doing other work for the Jason's and whatnot That was being used as it turned out for low-frequency active sea tests and it had a very strong transducer lower through the hole and in any case he He was able and and it was a successful experiment approved I mean the sound signal arrived simultaneously at the east and west coast and his idea was if we leave it on for 10 years That we will be able to measure The the warming of the oceans because of course as the ocean warms up the speed at which it travels from here to various places will increase so it was very elegant and simple, but as Brilliant as Walter Monk is he's still active in this mid 90s he was sort of had a blind spot around the biological level of the ocean and it was after the Cold War and these whale groups were getting activated and they said wait a minute wait a minute and in fact They were this was in violation of the marine mammal protection act in the endangered species act the National Environmental Protection Act all of which were passed in 1972 in the last days of the Nixon administration and Nixon signed them and All through the Cold War the Navy had observed them in the breach So now the reason they heard about that anyone heard about this experiment is that It was a dual use experiment It wasn't disclosed at the time But the Navy is interested in this experiment if you look at this this diagram was this promise to give them the sort of the holy grail of acoustic warfare, which was a synoptic map of the oceans where they could sort of imagine as a great sonogram of the oceans where you could see everything moving in the ocean and So they love this idea so they funded it and But unfortunately for the Navy Joel Reynolds Was able well he threatened to take them to court at which point they agreed to make the first part of the of the project looking at the effect on whales and marine mammals and Whales started coming ashore so they it kind of continued in another form, but it was somewhat Structured so it was in the course of the settlement negotiations over a talk that Joel Reynolds got wind of a Classified the Navy program. There was really a legacy program from the Cold War. It was a beyond the horizon Active sonar. This was after SOSIS had been kind of eclipsed by the Soviet ship quieting and It used the same boat that that as I mentioned it was the Corey Chouest and as you can see there was a There was a bunch of really big Speakers because the idea is this was a long distance beyond the horizons. It took enormous amounts of acoustic energy and so In any case Joel Reynolds said listen This is not in compliance with law and you haven't applied for permits from NOAA and National Marine Fisheries, which is they're required to do so they agree to apply for the permits and in the meantime They also agreed the Navy agreed to do the first environmental impact statement for these kinds of sound experiments or Subsequently exercises, so those went on for years and years and in the meantime Reynolds and other scientists started looking at at at strandings that were occurring And probably had been occurring but hadn't been noticed and and there was one notable one in Greece in 1996 again during NATO joint exercises in deep underwater canyons off of the in the Ionian Sea and then later in Madeira and the Canary Islands and these images started appearing but For better or for worse these specimens No one The Navy didn't investigate them and and the local Veterinarians were not able to reach them for days and the specimens were in a state of decay where it was ambiguous Why they'd come ashore, but it's it's worth noting. This is a species of whale. They're beaked whales Beaked whales are actually 25% of all whale species, but because they're such deep divers spend so much time underground was underwater Sorry, most people don't See them or know them other than marine biologists, but in any case this species of whale unlike others never strands live I mean just some species strand all the time this one doesn't so it was anomalous So Reynolds went to the scientists and said, you know, you should start looking into this and I mean you as an expert witness some day and These scientists number one didn't want to get involved in a lawsuit Surprise surprise and and secondly they're in the pay of the Navy. I mean the Navy still Was the only major sponsor national science foundation got involved by the late 90s, but really most marine mammal biologists of any stripe and Acousticians bioacousticians Either were directly or indirectly employed by the Navy. So they just wanted to hang out with the whales and you can see why it's a good It's good work if you can get it so So this so so things kind of tilted back the Navy was still working They were about to to apply for their permits. They completed their EIS and in the March for 2000 the George Washington battle group was Scheduled to have it's come to X exercises in vieques and as you may know Vieques at that point is when the Navy can no longer operate in vieques because of environmental damage and Protests by the islanders and so they were looking for a new place to operate and they decided to go to the deepest underwater Canyon in the world They had a lab down there and autech in the Bahamas and they were somewhat familiar they had mapped the waters unfortunately they didn't do a marine mammal survey and If they had they would have known that there was a well studied population of beaked whales that had been there for 20 to 25 million years depending on the aging Method used and they also would have found out that a former Navy pilot and sonar officer Tim Balcom who worked who was in the two tours in the Navy in the 60s in the early 70s was in Vietnam and Japan Had become a whale scientist and was a field researcher there and had been there every winter for ten years studying this This population of whales so this is from a writer's point of view why you love this story It's too good to be true. So it was a nightmare for the for the Navy, but for a writer is a gift So he's out there He's bad. He's about to go out and study the whales on his little boat He goes and he videotapes them and identifies their whatever observes their behavior and a Whale comes ashore Alive that's strange. These are volunteers who helped him in his research from Earth watch and then another whale came ashore up the beach and another one and another one and For anyone has a copy of the book if you look on the back cover You can see where the whales all stranded, but there were 17 whales stranded three different species of beaked whales and I'll I'll spare you so so he's probably the only person in the world who would have known Number one to suspect an acoustic event number two to know how to cut off the head of a beaked whale Which is actually difficult because they have no necks You have to know exactly where the few I had to cut right between the fuse spine They have seven vertebrae like all mammals except they're fused into one bony knob And he also had the presence of mind to drag the heads into a deep freeze of a Contruder shack down the street with a friend of his Grand and so he had a an evidence trail and he also knew the guys in the marine mammal division at on our because they'd all Gone to marine biology school together at UC Santa Cruz back in the 70s so He called me said listen You got a something big is going on here and you went out on a plane and in addition to finding a lots of other whales on Different beaches on all filings. He also saw some Navy destroyers and frigates and so They sent down Darlene ketten the Navy sent down their top their ace whale pathologists and hearing specialists who worked at Had dual appointments at Woods Hole and Harvard Medical School and she CT scanned these heads and I don't have a I don't think I have a oh, yeah, I do so this is blood They found pooling on bilaterally on both sides of the brain and there on all the specimens had the same evidence of what was clearly Acoustic trauma wasn't clear. What could have been an earthquake could have been dynamite Those were subsequently investigated and found not to be the case. So the Navy needed to Investigate it. They joined in a joint investigation with Noah. I mean, I'm not going to go into all the details They're in the book but suffice it to say they first denied they were there then they Admitted they were there But so they couldn't have been responsible because they were on that they were doing non-acoustic things In fact, they were doing you know war games where they were doing choke point exercises Which were you know what was on the menu and what they needed to do and this was a deep underwater canyon where they like to do those and Because it was a deep underwater canyon it filled with sound and the whales had no way to go except ashore and The ones who weren't eaten by sharks died on the beach. It's not a good scene So in any case and then Joel I'm Ken Balcom after he delivered the the whales to Woods Hole Got closed out of the investigation. He was didn't believe that they were going to investigate or at least share their investigation So they he went to a press conference and said, you know, basically became a whistleblower So they did have an investigation. They did conclude that sonar was in all likelihood the cause of the stranding and that gave NRDC a lot of ammunition to go to court against them and in 2003 which was not a good time to go to court against the Navy when we were at war in Iraq and Afghanistan by then and But he was able to prevail and got a what was called a permanent injunction It was a five-year injunction with was renewed five years later of low-frequency active sonar Which is what the Navy had been doing in the IS for for six years. So That led to a succession of other cases I won't go through them all but there were about five different lawsuits It became apparent that mid-frequency was really the problematic technology Tended to be in these closed environments tended to be with these deep diving animals And they continued to happen unfortunately and throughout the canaries the Spanish finally banned NATO from doing exercises there. So The Navy was in the habit of settling when they lost on lower circuits, but at a certain point the fleet commanders got tired of the the of the Attorneys at the Justice Department who were representing them losing on technicalities So they're mostly administrative technicalities, but they weren't technically in in compliance though I should say they were getting much more in compliance. I mean in 1995 they weren't even acknowledging there were their regulations now They are the Navy is essentially in a compliance in the this is my point You know the debates what you're in court in now is really around the edges and I'll talk about what that is but in any case they decided to Appeal it up through the circuits. They lost at every circuit appeals Etc. And then they they asked the Supreme Court to hear the case. They agreed to hear the case and they prevailed the Navy prevailed John Roberts wrote the decision and The the admirals expressed to me a hope that this marked the end of death by injunction But it wasn't because the strandings continued as unfortunately this is worker in the Northwest to cross paths with a Some kind of mind-sweeping or a mind exercise impuget sound this is in just exactly a year ago in Crete during joint US and Greek US and Israeli navies and I'm you know I'm I'm showing you these because these are the images that are being associated with the Navy and they're widely distributed so Let me so where do you go from here? And that's and and and that's what I just want to address and I want to share some ideas that mostly Navy people some Scientists have come to me with and I'd like to hear your thoughts because I'm I'm very interested in seeing if there's some place for this traction either on the sonar issue on these other issues with the Navy can can can Get out of this box. So in terms of sonar The main issue is seasonal and and geographic exclusion So just by way this is really like the crux of the matter So blue whales have made a big comeback And if you've heard and they're coming into the northern waters for the blue whales This is just off the coast of Southern California where the lawsuit is and this is essentially the blue whales are here in the summer So the Navy I Don't think is actually doing exercises in the summer But they want the right to do them whenever they want and they won't concede that so the basic I think sticking point with the environmental groups. It's this one lawyer really and is that you know, they want to agree on some geographic exclusions and the Navy doesn't and they seem common sense, but I'm not sure why the Navy doesn't want to but I think that would get the Navy out of court They could reach a really comprehensive settlement because there's really only one group and one lawyer They have to deal with and he's totally autonomous at NRDC He doesn't have to get his board's approval and and I've heard a sentiment from some Navy admirals who I've spoken to saying Oh, they're never they don't want this to be settled. They want this to go on on They make money off of it. They listen that and and I don't think that's the case I think they would be delighted to come to a compromise. You could both declare victory and move on to other things They have other fights to fight such as the oil and gas exploration on the East Coast Some Acousticians and and a couple of senior fleet retired fleet officers said that there's really a role for more simulations They use simulations, of course for sonar training and they can't totally replace sonar trainings with simulations, but They could be doing more and that would also reduce energy costs and at sea costs and would spare the habitats some of the noise And they could use do more with their installed acoustic arrays I mean the Navy is has has made a great success on the East Coast of reviving the the right whale the Atlantic right whale is down It's the most endangered species of whale in the world. They're only 500 of them 10 years ago They're only 300 and the reason they've made a recovery is because the Navy came up with a very cool acoustic passive acoustic monitoring program that prevents ship strikes including their own ships, but not just their ships They shared it with commercial ships and lo and behold. They're not they're not dying from ship strikes anymore So if they could bring that to bear I Would create a lot of goodwill and they have a lot of installed sensors passive sensors still even though so says has been largely deactivated and finally Shipping, you know, I know this is a sensitive topic The idea of sharing technology With industry that that that your adversaries might have access to and and what I don't know and you know What I would suggest is, you know, my understanding is that there's always sort of a penumbra Penumbra of Classified material that's sort of on its way to declassification But nobody's in a big hurry to do it and there might be some technology worth sharing with shipping that could really bring down the noise level that would be huge and Or translate declassified technology into practice really get involved actively with shipping to do that and and and this particularly where there are overlaps between Noise reduction and energy conservation would be great. That would be an incentive to the shippers And then in terms of seismic as I mentioned they're doing this great satellite telemetry So if they can continue to do that keep that a priority rather I mean they're doing the Navy's doing it because they want to map the oceans And it's much more efficient than Chris crossing them with a ship doing side-scan sonar or air guns, but As I said Phillips conicos and businesses them on this so I'm sure You know it would reduce the seismic and allow you to operate on your east coast ranges for instance, and so you know I know that I've heard from Navy people that the Navy is Lobbying they're not getting out front on this issue, but they are letting their feelings be known about it So we'll be interested to see how that plays out in terms of these oil and gas permits on the east coast and Finally, I just want to close with the best news The reason one of the reasons it's worth getting involved in this effort is that unlike other forms of noise pollution when you make sound Sources of noise pollution other you know unlike plastics that last for Hundreds of thousands of years and toxins that take a long time the pollution that the effects of the sound Pollution go away as soon as you turn off the sound So it's a it's a pretty clean. It's a pretty nifty cleanup if you can do it even if it's just reductions So Anyway, thank you for your patience, and I'd really love to hear any well questions, but also any thoughts you might have about it any of those Any of those feasible that's you know, is there any feasible way the Navy could be You know get rid of the black eye and put on a white hat on this issue You know for its own self-interest and secondary early for the marine mammals