Opinion– Fort Bragg and the North Coast: Studied and Scoped

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Opinion– Fort Bragg and the North Coast: Studied and Scoped

by David Gurney

This past week, the backwater town of Fort Bragg, population 7,273, was the dog-and-pony-show epicenter of the universe. Tuesday night, we had the cheap, sullen fraudsters with “Horizon Water and Environment” for the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative, and last night it was twenty or so careerists with the United States Navy: cool, polished, friendly, and professional.

Why all the attention? It’s because we have, right in our backyard, a long stretch of one of the richest, most beautiful sections of wild Pacific anywhere on the planet.

Everyone, it seems, wants our ocean. If it’s not the one percent oil tycoons who want to suck the natural gas and oil from beneath one of the world’s richest upwellings, it’s the P.G.&E. charlatans who say they want to give us “alternative” energy by laying out huge, square-mile tracts of “wave energy farms.”

Then there’s the super-elite “environmental” community, who want to “save” our ocean, by taking it away from us - and giving themselves exclusive rights to “monitor,” “study” and “take” - from their new “Marine Protected Areas.” (That they sickeningly and self-righteously now refer to as their "Yosemites of the Sea.")

And last night it was the mighty U.S. Navy, with nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, jets, choppers, high tech drones and surveillance, bombs, mines, bullets, high energy physics, and implements of destruction you couldn’t, in your wildest dreams, begin to imagine, even if you wanted to.

The Navy wants our ocean too: to float upon, fly over, and dive beneath, all for the glorious art of making war, or as the Navy puts it, to project dominance.

A few stalwart local enviros came out with the idea of protecting the whales, that also inhabit the depths of ocean the Navy wants to probe for enemy submarines. The horrible, terror inducing sounds underwater sonar destroy the whales’ highly sensitive hearing and navigation senses. In short order, unable to escape the sounds, they are driven totally insane, and beach themselves in suicidal frenzy.

The Navy also wants to "test” new bombs and explosives, that will simply and crudely blow away their bodies, and explode the eardrums of marine mammals.

At some point, humanity will have to decide (if we haven’t made that choice already): Do we want to share this planet with Whales, Dolphins, Porpoises and other marine mammals? Or do we want to continue down the path of war, fear, violence and destruction?

In this writer’s opinion, it will take nothing less than a world-wide international treaty - to give up on the obsolete idea of conducting war, in and upon our oceans - for the whales to survive.

Will this happen in time? Doubtful. All I can say is (hopefully) - it’s never too late to do the right thing.