The court ruled that the Navy essentially has no obligation to mitigate any damage or harm. This seems so scary to me.

I remember this funny (but also kind of scary) part of the oral arguments:

JUSTICE BREYER: How does the basic thing
work? Because to a layperson, when I think of the armed
forces preparing an environmental impact statement, I
think, the whole point of the armed forces is to hurt
the environment. I mean --
(Laughter.)
JUSTICE BREYER: I don't under -- I don't
understand how it's supposed to work. Of course they
are going to do something that is harmful.

That's very strange. When I was stationed on Diego Garcia we weren't allowed to go in the water on a whole half of the island so that we wouldn't upset the coral reefs. The Navy normally tries to conserve as much as possible.

This is disturbing. It is obvious that our current government has no respect or appreciation for the long term effects our actions have on the environment. All they can see are the short term goals of military training.

"They think the sonar signals may cause bubbles in the animals' tissue, in much the same way as divers can suffer decompression sickness known as "the bends"."

Lord only know what horrible chain of events will start if a large amount of whale deaths occur in the middle of their migratory path.

This is saddening.

Not a happy distraction from the gay marriage debate.
TS: I worked with Tottenberg for a year - she had a scary temper; knew her stuff, but oy, did she yell.

Jealous, steph. I have heard not nice things about the Totes as well, but I still love her. SCOTUS reader's theater is my favorite thing on NPR.