Deadly Sonar

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There's an aspect of navy marine-mammal research, moreover, that's closer to engineering than to pure science. A navy spokesman characterized the work funded by Robert Gisiner as "figuring out how to make sonar work." (Gisiner wouldn't comment for this article.) Sara Wan, a member of both the California Coastal Commission and the federal advisory committee on acoustic impacts on marine mammals, observed to me that navy research grants are project driven. In this kind of situation, she said, the questions you ask are going to determine the answers you get. "The navy is driven to look at the effects of its sonar because it wants to use its sonar."

Any argument that the navy took a disinterested approach to the outcome of its research became harder to make in 2002, when NRDC, in the course of filing suit against a proposed deployment of low-frequency sonar, discovered a series of e-mails between Gisiner and Joseph Johnson, the navy's environmental manager for its low-frequency sonar system. The exchange concerned a negative appraisal filed in a publicly accessible environmental-impact statement by a group of scientists. Johnson e-mailed Gisiner to ask if they were navy-funded. When Gisiner said they were, Johnson responded that their comments were "negative and...out of the box. If they are funded by the navy, the proper way to bitch is via the sponsor (you)." To which Gisiner replied, "I pretty much told them as much in a scorching phone call. I think they had some inkling that they might be about to take our money and make themselves look good to the enviros too."

As we spoke on these matters, Whitehead nodded toward my coffee mug, which was purple with bold gold script spelling out the acronym ECOUS. "That's Environmental Consequences of Underwater Sound," he said, "a May 2003 conference in San Antonio at which I gave a paper on the funding issue written by Lindy, Luke Rendell, and myself. The conference seemed to be in honor of Bob Gisiner. Speech after speech toasted him for his years of work as head of the marine-mammal section of the Office of Naval Research until, toward the end of the final day, I stood up and blasted his office for the ways in which it distorted marine-mammal research. Among other things, we accused them of being narrow-minded and focused on hearing damage and asked why it was that the gas and fat emboli thesis had been developed without navy funding. When I finished, you could have heard a pin drop."

Whitehead later gave me a copy of the speech, and it was indeed brutal. In their paper, he, Rendell, and Weilgart argued that ONR-funded marine-mammal research was not just "narrow-minded" but also "arrogant" ("only we [the navy] can understand the complexities") and "frequently wrong." They pointed out that dissent was regularly squelched and that as a result of "direct ONR funding of most major U.S. marine-mammal bioacoustics labs," marine-mammal science was suffering from a credibility gap as well as a "massive and archetypal case of conflict of interest."

While Whitehead and I were speaking, Weilgart returned with the youngest of their three children, 12-year-old Sonja. After lunch the four of us took Balaena out for a sail. Weilgart took the helm as Whitehead raised the sails. Weilgart is a tall, slim woman with long, dark hair. As she steered us out of their cove, she told me that her parents were Austrian-German refugees, and that in Vienna her uncle's family had picnicked with the Freuds. Her father had fled Vienna just before World War II and she herself had grown up in Iowa, where her father taught psychology and her mother German at Luther College in Decorah. Her father spoke 14 languages but had spent much of his career developing a single international lingua franca made of 20 symbols that he hoped would be less open to political manipulation than the German of his youth.

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