Grey whales are among the creatures threatened by sonar testing.

Environmental groups and some Indian tribes, represented by Earthjustice, have gone to court to get the U.S. Navy to change the way it trains off the West Coast to avoid harming whales, dolphins and porpoises.

The Navy currently has a permit from the National Marine Fisheries Service, allowing it to train from Northern California to the Canadian border. In its training, the Navy uses all kinds of weapon and surveillance tools, including mid-frequency sonar. This is super high-powered sonar blasts used to “see” underwater. The sound waves bounce off objects like the seafloor or enemy subs and the echo is picked up and read by the Navy ships.

The problem is that the high-powered underwater sound blasts can harass, injure or kill whales, dolphins and porpoises, which are already extremely sensitive to sound. These animals send and receive sound waves to “see” and communicate underwater. Their ability to pick up sound is so good that some whales can hear each other under water hundreds of miles apart.

Currently, America's transmission grid—the power lines and electrical equipment that bring us electricity—has very few devices that store power from renewable clean energy sources such as solar and wind. This is hindering the deployment of these energy sources and limits their usefulness.

Consider solar … the sun shines during the day, lots of electricity is produced on rooftops with solar photovoltaic panels, yet there’s almost no ability on the grid to store excess power to be used at night.

This shortcoming also hampers wind generators. This past spring for the first time ever, we saw a situation in the Columbia River Basin in Oregon and Washington where wind generators were told, 'No thanks, we don’t need your power.' Why? Because there was so much snowmelt coursing down from the Rocky Mountains generating surplus electricity in the Columbia and Snake River hydro dams. The giant utility running the dams, the Bonneville Power Administration, told the wind generators no thanks. The wind was howling at the same time and a lot of electrical potential was lost.

With the thousands of acres of dead whitebark pine trees, every year will be a bad cone year for grizzlies. It’s clear they will need help over the long term to survive. (Condon / NPS)

Yellowstone grizzly bears warrant protection under the Endangered Species Act. So says the federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals which recently upheld a lower-court ruling that rejected a federal government effort to strip the bears of their protections.

When the government “delisted” the bears in 2007, which stripped them of protections under the Endangered Species Act, Earthjustice attorneys went to court to get the protections reinstated. The federal government failed to explain how grizzlies are supposed to make a living now that one of their key foods, whitebark pine seeds, are disappearing. The seeds are disappearing because the trees that produce them are being killed by beetles which are ravaging the high alpine habitat where the trees grow. The beetles are surviving what used to be harsh winters due to global warming.

One of the untold stories behind the successful effort to reinstate protections for the bears is the efforts of Earthjustice Attorney Doug Honnold and NRDC’s Louisa Willcox that largely put the whitebark pine issue on the map. Few in officialdom, or elsewhere, were talking about the decline of whitebark pines before these two went to work on it. Most people had never heard of these trees nor of their value as a food source to grizzly bears.

The Delta

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court handed conservationists a victory and some good news for endangered wildlife. The court denied a request by an anti-wildlife right-wing group to strip federal Endangered Species Act protections from a rare species – a California fish called the delta smelt.

The right-wing Pacific Legal Foundation, has tried repeatedly to get any federal court to rule that the federal government has no power to extend ESA protection to species that exist only in a single state and have no current commercial value. The smelt just happens to be a species of convenience that fit those terms. PLF has been rebuffed by five different federal courts of appeals and now the Supreme Court.

Earthjustice attorney Trent Orr was involved in the big rebuff of PLF, pointing out to the courts that the anti-wildlife group simply didn’t understand established law. The Supreme Court hardly needed to hear it, having upheld the ESA by rejecting review of five earlier challenges from other corners of the nation.

Air pollution

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively upheld a unique air pollution rule that requires developers in California’s polluted San Joaquin Valley to mitigate for the added air pollution their new development brings.The rule was created by the San Joaquin Valley air district in a desperate move to do something about the out-of-control air pollution in the region.

The rule requires developers to mitigate for the pollution created by both the construction equipment used to build the project as well as the new automobile traffic generated by the development. The National Association of Homebuilders fought the rule hard, seeing that if the rule stood here, other heavily polluted jurisdictions around California and across the nation might adopt similar measures. Earthjustice attorney Paul Cort, representing the Environmental Defense Fund and Sierra Club, intervened in the Homebuilders’ legal challenge to defend the rule.

Earlier this week, Earthjustice attorney Jenny Harbine went to court to argue that the state of Montana was legally required to consider steps to minimize the consequences of burning more than a half-a-billion tons of coal before leasing it to St. Louis-based Arch Coal, Inc. Earthjustice is representing the Montana Environmental Information Center and the Sierra Club in a lawsuit asking the court to cancel the lease so that the state may study options for minimizing or avoiding the environmental consequences of this massive strip mine.

Arch Coal also has leased coal on adjacent private lands, which combined with the state-leased coal, amount to 1.3 billion tons. If developed, the Otter Creek strip mine would be one of the largest coal mines in the country. Arch is making plans to ship at least a portion of this coal to Asia by way of west coast ports. Once burned, the coal will emit billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, not to mention mercury, lead and a host of other nasty byproducts.

Fish that would benefit from dams removal on Elwha

Next month, contractors will start removing two massive dams on the Elwha River which runs through Washington’s Olympic peninsula. It is expected to bring about the largest single increase of salmon habitat and population in the Northwest.

The dam removal caps efforts started more than 20 years ago by a local tribe and visionary activists with support from Earthjustice. The dams once provided power for a paper and pulp mill, but other sources will now provide the power.

As the river returns to its historical conditions, 392,000 fish will eventually reoccupy 70 miles of habitat now blocked by the dams. This compares to about 4,000 salmon the dammed river produces annually.

An issue that has cropped up as the country moves towards more renewable energy generation is how best to store excess energy generated, say by wind mills during windy periods or solar panels during sunny periods. Energy storage in the form of industrial strength batteries and other technologies is coming, but such things aren’t yet installed where they’re needed.

Wind generators were forced to shut down recently in the windy gap cut by the Columbia River between Washington and Oregon because there is so much water flowing down the Columbia River right now generating electricity in dams that wind generators were told their power wasn’t needed. If energy storage was in place, the wind power could be saved for when it’s needed and doing so could help salmon by replacing power from the four increasingly obsolete, salmon-killing dams on the lower Snake River.

Sacramento River salmon

It’s hard to view the recent actions of some big agricultural operations in California’s San Joaquin Valley as anything but hostile to the state’s wildlife. Some of the biggest growers are refusing to take an overflowing allotment of irrigation water as enough and are cluttering up the court system with lawsuits aimed at wringing every last drop of water for themselves, no matter what damage that causes native fish species. 

The big growers went to court last week trying to force state and federal operators of water diversion pumps in the Sacramento/Bay delta to crank up to the max even though thousands of juvenile fall run king salmon have been killed at the pumps over the last few weeks. The young fish are trying to migrate from the rivers where they were born to the sea. The carnage at the pumps lead pump operators to ratchet back pumping. This infuriated water users but the judge refused to order more salmon killing, agreeing that federal law requires pump operators to take steps to protect t salmon runs that traverse the Sacramento/ Bay delta.
 
As the judge was ruling, a respected policy center released a new study showing that although the big growers moaned and groaned during the recent three year drought, most also found a way to keep the water coming and earned near record profits.   This happened while wildlife that lives in or migrates through the Sacramento/Bay delta suffered sharp declines due to lower than usual water flows.

Let's face it, the U.S. is awash in pesticides and some are quite deadly to America's wildlife.

The Environmental Protection Agency is the government group responsible for signing off on pesticides before they are allowed for use and is supposed to stop the really bad ones. In going about this task, the EPA historically only looked at the pesticide's effects on people and have done a poor job.

They've also ignored each pesticide's effects on wildlife.