3580. Microplastics and climate crisis

By Sabrina Imbler, The New York Times, April 3, 2022

Plastic waste washing up on a beach in Bali, Indonesia. Surface surveys have accounted for only about 1 percent of the ocean’s estimated plastic.Credit...Agung Parameswara/Getty Images

As long as there has been marine life, there has been marine snow — a ceaseless drizzle of death and waste sinking from the surface into the depths of the sea.

The snow begins as motes, which aggregate into dense, flocculent flakes that gradually sink and drift past the mouths (and mouth-like apparatuses) of scavengers farther down. But even marine snow that is devoured will most likely be snowfall once more; a squid’s guts are just a rest stop on this long passage to the deep.

Although the term may suggest wintry whites, marine snow is mostly brownish or grayish, comprising mostly dead things. For eons, the debris has contained the same things — flecks from plant and animal carcasses, feces, mucus, dust, microbes, viruses — and transported the ocean’s carbon to be stored on the seafloor. Increasingly, however, marine snowfall is being infiltrated by microplastics: fibers and fragments of polyamide, polyethylene and polyethylene terephthalate. And this fauxfall appears to be altering our planet’s ancient cooling process.

Every year, tens of millions of tons of plastic enter Earth’s oceans. Scientists initially assumed that the material was destined to float in garbage patches and gyres, but surface surveys have accounted for only about one percent of the ocean’s estimated plastic. A recent model found that 99.8 percent of plastic that entered the ocean since 1950 had sunk below the first few hundred feet of the ocean. Scientists have found 10,000 times more microplastics on the seafloor than in contaminated surface waters.

Marine snow, one of the primary pathways connecting the surface and the deep, appears to be helping the plastics sink. And scientists have only begun to untangle how these materials interfere with deep-sea food webs and the ocean’s natural carbon cycles.

“It’s not just that marine snow transports plastics or aggregates with plastic,” Luisa Galgani, a researcher at Florida Atlantic University, said. “It’s that they can help each other get to the deep ocean.”

The sunlit surface of the sea blooms with phytoplankton, zooplankton, algae, bacteria and other minuscule life, all feeding on sunbeams or one another. As these microbes metabolize, some produce polysaccharides that can form a sticky gel that attracts the lifeless bodies of tiny organisms, small shreds of larger carcasses, shells from foraminifera and pteropods, sand and microplastics, which stick together to form larger flakes. “They are the glue that keeps together all the components of marine snow,” Dr. Galgani said.

Marine snowflakes fall at different rates. Smaller ones have a more languid descent — “as slow as a meter a day,” said Anela Choy, a biological oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Bigger particles, such as dense fecal pellets, can sink quicker. “It just skyrockets to the bottom of the ocean,” said Tracy Mincer, a researcher at Florida Atlantic University.

Plastic in the ocean is constantly being degraded; even something as big and buoyant as a milk jug will eventually shed and splinter into microplastics. These plastics develop biofilms of distinct microbial communities — the “plastisphere,” said Linda Amaral-Zettler, a scientist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, who coined the term. “We sort of think about plastic as being inert,” Dr. Amaral-Zettler said. “Once it enters the environment, it’s rapidly colonized by microbes.”

Microplastics can host so many microbial hitchhikers that they counteract the natural buoyancy of the plastic, causing their raft to sink. But if the biofilms then degrade on the way down, the plastic could float back up, potentially leading to a yo-yoing purgatory of microplastics in the water column. Marine snow is anything but stable; as flakes free-fall into the abyss, they are constantly congealing and falling apart, rent by waves or predators.

“It’s not as simple as: Everything’s falling all the time,” said Adam Porter, a marine ecologist at the University of Exeter in England. “It’s a black box in the middle of the ocean, because we can’t stay down there long enough to work out what’s going on.”

To explore how marine snow and plastics are distributed in the water column, Dr. Mincer has begun to sample deeper waters with a dishwasher-size pump full of filters that dangles on a wire from a research boat. The filters are arranged from big mesh to small to filter out fish and plankton. Running these pumps for 10 hours at a stretch has revealed nylon fibers and other microplastics distributed throughout the water column below the South Atlantic subtropical gyre.

But even with a research boat and its expensive and unwieldy equipment, an individual piece of marine snow is not easily retrieved from deep water in the actual ocean. The pumps often disturb the snow and scatter fecal pellets. And the flakes alone offer little insight into how fast some snows are sinking, which is vital to understanding how long the plastics linger, yo-yo or sink in the water column before settling on the seafloor.

“Is it decades?” Dr. Mincer asked. “Is it hundreds of years? Then we can understand what we’re in here for, and what kind of problem this really is.”

To answer these questions, and work within a budget, some scientists have made and manipulated their own marine snow in the lab.

In Exeter, Dr. Porter collected buckets of seawater from a nearby estuary and loaded the water into continuously rolling bottles. He then sprinkled in microplastics, including polyethylene beads and polypropylene fibers. The constant churning, and a squirt of sticky hyaluronic acid, encouraged particles to collide and stick together into snow.

“We obviously don’t have 300 meters of a tube to make it sink,” Dr. Porter said. “By rolling it, what you’re doing is you’re creating a never-ending water column for the particles to fall through.”

After the bottles rolled for three days, he pipetted out the snow and analyzed the number of microplastics in each flake. His team found that every type of microplastic they tested aggregated into marine snow, and that microplastics such as polypropylene and polyethylene — normally too buoyant to sink on their own — readily sank once incorporated into marine snow. And all the marine snow contaminated with microplastics sank significantly faster than the natural marine snow.

Dr. Porter suggested that this potential change of the speed of the snow could have vast implications for how the ocean captures and stores carbon: Faster snowfalls could store more microplastics in the deep ocean, whereas slower snowfalls could make the plastic-laden particles more available to predators, potentially starving food webs deeper down. “The plastics are a diet pill for these animals,” said Karin Kvale, a carbon cycle scientist at GNS Science in New Zealand.

In experiments in Crete, with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research program, Dr. Galgani has tried mimicking marine snow on a larger scale. She dropped six mesocosms — huge bags that each contained nearly 800 gallons of seawater and recreated natural water movement — in a large pool. Under these conditions, marine snow formed. “In the field, you mostly make observations,” Dr. Galgani said. “You have so little space and a limited system. In the mesocosm, you are manipulating a natural system.”

Dr. Galgani mixed microplastics into three mesocosms in an attempt to “recreate a sea and maybe a future ocean where you can have a high concentration of plastic,” she said. The mesocosms laden with microplastics produced not just more marine snow but also more organic carbon, as the plastics offered more surfaces for microbes to colonize. All this could seed the deep ocean with even more carbon and alter the ocean’s biological pump, which helps regulate the climate.

“Of course, it’s a very, very big picture,” Dr. Galgani said. “But we have some signals that it can have an effect. Of course, it depends on how much plastic there is.”

To understand how microplastics might travel through deep-sea food webs, some scientists have turned to creatures for clues.

Every 24 hours, many species of marine organism embark on a synchronized migration up and down in the water column. “They do the equivalent of a marathon every day and night,” Dr. Choy said. Guilherme V.B. Ferreira, a researcher at the Rural Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil, wondered: “Is it possible they are transporting the plastics up and down?”

Dr. Ferreira and Anne Justino, a doctoral student at the same university, collected vampire squids and midwater squids from a patch of the tropical Atlantic. They found a plethora of plastics in both species: mostly fibers, but also fragments and beads.

This made sense for midwater squids, which migrate toward the surface at night to feed on fish and copepods that eat microplastics directly. But vampire squids, which live in deeper waters with fewer microplastics, had even higher levels of plastic, as well as foam, in their stomachs. The researchers hypothesize that the vampire squids’ primary diet of marine snow, especially meatier fecal pellets, may be funneling plastics into their bellies.

“It’s very concerning,” Ms. Justino said. Dr. Ferreira said: “They are one of the most vulnerable species for this anthropogenic influence.”

Ms. Justino has excavated fibers and beads from the digestive tracts of lanternfish, hatchetfish and other fish that migrate up and down in the mesopelagic, 650 to 3,300 feet down. Some microbial communities that settle on microplastics can bioluminesce, drawing in fish like a lure, said Dr. Mincer.

In the Monterey Bay Canyon, Dr. Choy wanted to understand if certain species of filter feeders were ingesting microplastics and transporting them into food webs in deeper water. “Marine snow is one of the major things that connects food webs across the ocean,” she said.

Dr. Choy zeroed in on the giant larvacean Bathochordaeus stygius. The larvacean resembles a tiny tadpole and lives inside a palatial bubble of mucus that can reach up to a meter long. “It’s worse than the grossest booger you’ve ever seen,” Dr. Choy said. When their snot-houses become clogged from feeding, the larvaceans move out and the heavy bubbles sink. Dr. Choy found that these palaces of mucus are crowded with microplastics, which are funneled to the deep along with all their carbon.

Giant larvaceans are found across the world’s oceans, but Dr. Choy emphasized that her work was focused on the Monterey Bay Canyon, which belongs to a network of marine protected areas and is not representative of other, more polluted seas. “It’s one deep bay on one coast of one country,” Dr. Choy said. “Scale up and think about how vast the ocean is, especially the deep water.”

Individual flakes of marine snow are small, but they add up. A model created by Dr. Kvale estimated that in 2010, the world’s oceans produced 340 quadrillion aggregates of marine snow, which could transport as many as 463,000 tons of microplastics to the seafloor each year.

Scientists are still exploring exactly how this plastic snow is sinking, but they do know for sure, Dr. Porter said, that “everything eventually sinks in the ocean.” Vampire squids will live and die and eventually become marine snow. But the microplastics that pass through them will remain, eventually settling on the seafloor in a stratigraphic layer that will mark our time on the planet long after humans are gone.

3158. How Plastic Bags Came to Pollute Oceans

By Christopher Joyce, NPR, January 16, 2019

To listen click here. 

Transcript

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: 

For years, the oceans were filling up with plastic waste, but people couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Then research in 2015 showed that over half the waste was from a handful of Asian nations. NPR's Christopher Joyce went to one of these countries, the Philippines, and found that a big culprit is a small plastic package used to sell consumer goods. It's called a sachet.

CHRISTOPHER JOYCE, BYLINE: To see how sachets worked their way into the fabric of Filipino life, I visit the neighborhood of Maysilo in the capital city of Manila. It's next to a swamp. Kids run between tin-roof shanties that hover a few feet above ankle-deep water.

NIMFA MANLABE: Hi, welcome my sari-sari store. I'm Nimfa Manlabe.

JOYCE: Nimfa Manlabe is a middle-aged woman who sells sachets from a sari-sari store, a tiny storefront in her tiny home. Think of it like a neighborhood pantry filled with shiny little packages, like the ones ketchup comes in at the fast-food restaurant.

MANLABE: Detergent powder, candies, milk, shampoo.

JOYCE: Stuff people use every day.

MANLABE: Sunsilk, Palmolive and conditioner.

JOYCE: There are more than a million sari-sari stores across the Philippines. Manlabe says this is how everyone here shops.

MANLABE: (Through interpreter) I sell sachets to people. They come back here every day and buy these small amounts because that's what they can afford.

JOYCE: But once it's empty, the sachet never goes away. You can see that by looking down underneath this elevated shantytown. You can't tell where the water ends and the land begins because it's all covered in shiny plastic. And it drives Nimfa Manlabe crazy.

MANLABE: (Through interpreter) I keep sweeping every day, but then the next day, I see the trash is back, just thrown on the ground again.

JOYCE: Self-employed waste pickers do collect and sell stuff that can be recycled. Sachets cannot, so no one picks them up. Manlabe says her neighbors resort to burning them to cook their meals or just to get rid of them.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Singing in foreign language).

JOYCE: It wasn't always this way. Sherma Benosa is with an environmental group called GAIA, and she says it used to be that people brought refillable glass or ceramic containers to the sari-sari store.

SHERMA BENOSA: I remember when I was a kid that when you go to the store and you cannot afford the one bottle vinegar, you have a container with you and give them to the saleslady, and they put whatever amount you're asking to buy. So there's no problem. Only when we had plastic things became problematic.

JOYCE: So where did all this plastic come from? Well, let's go back to the 1940s.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: This is Tupperware - the airtight plastic containers that keep good foods fresher longer.

JOYCE: Plastic for consumers was growing in popularity. Manufacturers raced to find ways to fashion it into things people would buy. Plastic was lightweight, inexpensive, flexible.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Food stored in Baggies plastic bags always have the sound of freshness, and they always taste as fresh as they sound.

JOYCE: But much of it could not be recycled, and people in the industry knew that. At the first National Conference on Packaging Waste held in San Francisco in 1969, some executives wondered, where is all this plastic going to end up? One marketing consultant said that wasn't their problem. Difficulties with plastic waste, quote, "are not the responsibility of those who produce materials, fabricate packages or package goods" - unquote. Rather, he said, it's the consumer's responsibility. So manufacturers just urged people not to litter and kept pumping out new kinds of plastic with yet more uses.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

JOYCE: Then in the 1980s, an Indian businessman started marketing products in single-use sachets - a day's worth of shampoo for people who couldn't afford big bottles of it. Sachets were aimed at the poor, but eventually, they became a symbol for a middle-class lifestyle.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Chik jasmine shampoo (foreign language spoken) active double conditioners (foreign language spoken).

JOYCE: Global companies followed suit. It was also great marketing, all those single-use packets, each with a brand and a logo. Sachets did offer some advantages for consumers.

CRISPIAN LAO: You have the health issue.

JOYCE: Crispian Lao is a former plastics executive. He now leads the Philippine Alliance for Recycling and Material Sustainability. It includes companies that make and package consumer goods, such as Nestle, Coca-Cola and Unilever.

LAO: The market needed something to deliver those products to the consumer safely, and that is where single-use packaging came in. You now have disposable cups, disposable bowls, disposable plates.

JOYCE: Lao says sachets offered quality control. You knew what you were getting. You didn't have to wash reusable containers, which could be risky in poorer neighborhoods where water quality is often suspect.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: (Foreign language spoken).

JOYCE: Today, sachets are everywhere, in poor neighborhoods like Maysilo but also in places like this - San Fernando, a thriving business community north of Manila.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: (Foreign language spoken).

JOYCE: In a gated suburb, a private team of workers wheels carts through the city every day calling for trash.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: (Foreign language spoken).

JOYCE: San Fernando has lots of money for trash collection, but it's still stuck with sachets of the plastic that cannot be recycled. Froilan Grate is with the environmental group Mother Earth Foundation. He shows me a pile of this stuff in a damp concrete room in the center of town.

FROILAN GRATE: This one, the next one, is like the soda cup that you typically get from fast-food chains like McDonald's.

JOYCE: The cup looks like it's made from paper.

GRATE: The problem with this one is that it's promoted as a better alternative because it's paper cup, but it has a plastic liner inside.

JOYCE: Recycling something like this, mixed paper and plastic, is expensive. It requires technology they don't have in the Philippines.

GRATE: So this entire thing, including the straw that they use, goes into the landfill.

JOYCE: So if people in the Philippines can't get rid of this stuff, who should? Grate says the companies that make it.

GRATE: I'm angry because those who have the power, those who have the resources and I'm talking about companies earning billions of dollars to actually do the right thing are washing their hands and saying you use it, that's your problem. So that is where the frustration is coming from.

JOYCE: Numerous companies - Unilever, Coca-Cola, Nestle and others - have pledged that by 2025 they'll use only plastic packaging that can be reused, recycled or composted. In fact, Unilever has a new chemical process to recycle sachets and a pilot plant in Indonesia to test it. In the Philippines, Crispian Lao's industry group is planning a research effort to make more plastic recyclable.

LAO: The idea right now is that how can we now, you know, together with the global partnership, redesign the product so it becomes more recyclable, look at recycling the existing products that are there? Because it's not going to disappear overnight.

JOYCE: Von Hernandez is skeptical. Hernandez is the global coordinator for a group called Break Free From Plastic working in an office here in Manila. His view is consumers shouldn't have to recycle their way out of this mess.

VON HERNANDEZ: If we cannot recycle or compost this material, then you should not be producing them in the first place. You should not be deploying them into commerce.

JOYCE: Both activists and the brands say they want the same thing - less plastic trash. But they're still far apart on how and when to make that happen. Christopher Joyce, NPR News.

3147. Thousands of Predominantly Female Penguins are Stranded or Mysteriously Disappear Each Year

By Brandon Specktor, Live Science, January 8, 2019

Female Magellanic penguins, shown here, have been stranding on the coasts of South America, and researchers aren't sure why.

Credit: Takashi Yamamoto
Near the southern tip of South America, thousands of ladies — wives, mothers, anchovy enthusiasts — are vanishing from their nests.The females in question are Magellanic penguins — a mid-size species of black-and-white bird native to South America's Patagonia region. When not breeding in the latter part of the year, both male and female members of the species migrate north toward Uruguay and Brazil to hunt for the tasty anchovies that call those waters home. Over the last decade, however, scientists have observed an upsetting trend: some penguins are swimming too far north — sometimes hundreds of miles away from their breeding grounds — and getting stuck there.According to a new study published today (Jan. 7) in the journal Current Biology, every year, thousands of Magellanic penguins fail to return home from their migrations. Some become stranded on the shores of Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. Others wash up already dead, their stomachs empty or polluted with plastic waste. Strangely, about two-thirds of the stranded birds are female. Takashi Yamamoto, lead author of the new study and a researcher at the Institute of Statistical Mathematics in Tokyo, wanted to find out what was happening, and why female penguins were disproportionately afflicted. So, he and several colleagues tagged a small group of 14 Magellanic penguins (eight males and six females) with GPS ankle monitors, then watched where the birds strayed after their breeding period ended in early 2017. After several months of observations, the team saw a clear pattern. During their spring and summer migrations, male penguins tended to dive deeper and stay closer to their Patagonian breeding grounds; female penguins swam closer to the water's surface, but migrated significantly farther north than their male counterparts.There, in the waters near Uruguay and southern Brazil, the penguins approached known penguin-stranding hotspots. According to the researchers, these stranding sites — such as the riverfront near the city of Buenos Aires, in northern Argentina — likely trap the penguins through a mixture of strong currents that prevent smaller-bodied birds from swimming home and man-made threats"These [threats] include water pollution caused by oil development and marine transport as well as fishery-associated hazards, such as bycatch and depletion of prey species," Yamamoto said in a statement.The reason that female penguins seem to be disproportionately stranded compared to males might be as simple as body size. According to the researchers, female Magellanic penguins are smaller than males, which could make it harder for them to compete for food in crowded southern waters, or to fight against strong currents in the north. A smaller body also means a greater sensitivity to ocean temperatures, Yamamoto noted. This could give the smaller-bodied females a preference for chasing warmer waters northward toward the equator, and for avoiding deep dives into the cold, dark ocean.This small study is just to first step toward understand the cause and scale of the mysterious bird strandings. But, according to Yamamoto, this much is clear: if fewer and fewer females return to their breeding grounds every year, the viability of the entire Magellanic penguin population could soon be at risk.

2842. The Pentagon Is Using an Environmental Law Meant to Protect Us, Against Us

By Dahr Jamail, Truthout, February 20, 2018

The U.S. military is a major polluter

While it has long been known the US military is one of the biggest polluters in the world, the egregious and intentional nature of its actions is less well known.

Canadian researchers recently revealed how an extremely toxic chemical used in US military explosives that the Pentagon has been downplaying for decades has been seeping into surrounding communities for years.

Meanwhile, as Truthout has reported extensively, US Naval warplanes are producing deadly levels of jet noise around airstrips in the Pacific Northwest, despite the widespread public outcry.

For years, the Department of Defense has been using the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a 1970 law designed to protect people from harmful environmental actions by federal agencies, to allow military entities to engage in operations harmful to millions of civilians.

"NEPA requires federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of their proposed actions prior to making decisions," the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) website states about the law.

But experts are calling out the Department of Defense for repeatedly violating the spirit, intent, and often even the letter of this federal law.

Whether by dumping toxic waste in areas where people are exposed to it, or by conducting training exercises that subject people to harmful levels of noise, instead of protecting civilians, the military is willfully harming them.

The Military's Playbook

Using the NEPA process, the US military is required to evaluate the environmental and related social and economic effects of their proposed actions. The military is also required by NEPA to provide opportunities for public review and comment on those evaluations.

But critics say the military has stacked the deck in its own favor in order to get what it wants, oftentimes even doing so illegally.

Karen Sullivan, a retired endangered species biologist, co-founded the West Coast Action Alliance, which acts as a watchdog of naval activities in the Pacific Northwest.

Sullivan has compiled a document that she believes to be akin to a DOD "NEPA Playbook," which she shared with Truthout.

The pattern Sullivan sees the DOD use to insure its operations or trainings are never held up or denied by NEPA begins with the military always finding, in its environmental assessments, that its activities will have "no significant impact" on the environment or civilians.

Sullivan explained how in October 2017, she asked the Navy to provide examples within the last 10 years in the Pacific Northwest region where, during an environmental assessment (EA) process for any of their requests, impacts were determined to be significant. In such a case, the Navy would need to begin an environmental impact statement (EIS) process. Sullivan told Truthout that a Navy spokesperson told her, "There have been no regional Navy projects over the past 10 years that stopped an EA process, and elevated it to become an EIS process."

How is this possible? Sullivan pointed out that if impacts from the military's activities are likely to be significant for a particular project, the military segments that project into multiple pieces, so that several EAs (rather than one comprehensive EIS) can be prepared. This strategy allows it to portray the impacts described in each EA as below the threshold of significance. This is illegal. It is called "impermissible segmentation" under NEPA (40 CFR 1500-1508), which prohibits the breaking up of a larger project into smaller components that separately might have negligible impacts, but would, if considered together, likely be significant. It's illegal for an agency to do this. 

Sullivan pointed out that the Navy has "piecemealed" its aircraft testing and training activities in the Pacific Northwest, thereby hiding broader cumulative impacts of all of their war planes. "As a result of this piecemealing and not examining cumulative impacts, the Navy stated in its latest Growler [war plane] EIS that it could not promise that regional air quality would not fall below [federal] standards," Sullivan said. "This would render our [Puget Sound] air quality closer to that of big cities like Chicago or New York."

Another part of the "playbook" includes splitting larger EIS projects into "phases" and rolling them out in rapid succession. This tactic makes it nearly impossible for people to keep up with what the Navy is doing and functions as sort of an informational "shock and awe" tactic on the public, which is often left with thousands of pages of documentation to read and comprehend in an extremely short amount of time. Another entails the military citing an absence of controversy or public opposition to their plans as a justification to stay beneath "threshold triggers" for an EIS. Sullivan pointed out that this ignores the fact that actual environmental impacts from the Navy's actions are what triggers the necessity of an EIS to be carried out.

Another play the military uses: It makes its public notifications of the meetings about proposed activities as cryptic as possible. It even removes the names and email addresses of vocal opponents from their mailing lists, according to Sullivan, who said she has been removed from Navy email lists for notifications at least three times.

The military also makes it difficult for the public to participate in its meetings and speak on the record, according to Sullivan. This is accomplished by limiting online public comments on complex issues to a low word count, and abbreviating and/or limiting some public comment periods. This is illegal according to NEPA policy.

In fact, the military often makes decisions on plans and commits funding for them before even initiating the public process, according to Sullivan. This, too, is against the law: Obviously, the NEPA process must be followed, in a correct order; hence, carrying forward on making plans and commitments of funding before the public process has been completed is yet another violation of the NEPA process..

Moreover, Sullivan said the military never proposes or considers any "preferred alternatives" to its plans that would actually reduce environmental or human impacts.

Sullivan explains that in evaluating potential impacts, the military also selectively ignores recent peer-reviewed scientific literature. "They cherry-pick statements from scientific papers and use them ambiguously and out of context, even if those papers concluded the opposite," Sullivan, who has written at length about this tactic and its illegality, said.

The Military's "Guidelines for Success" for Training on Public Lands

Carol Miller is a researcher and member of New Mexico's Peaceful Skies Coalition, a coalition of groups working to hold unbridled and unchecked military expansionism in check in the state.

Miller pointed out to Truthout that, in response to the creation of Earth Day in 1970, the US Army War College hired a retired US Forest Service employee to create a guide for enabling more military operations on public lands.

"That darn Earth Day movement had created all the pesky environmentalists who felt they had an obligation to protect the land," Miller said. "This document ["Military Training on Public Lands: Guidelines for Success"] is still the Bible of military land grabs for the public lands."

The document contains a whole section on NEPA. Altogether, "Military Training on Public Lands: Guidelines for Success" is essentially a step-by-step guide instructing the military on how to get what it wants.

"Because many Americans have an increased awareness of environmental, social, and economic issues related to natural resource management, the military often faces adverse public reaction to conducting training on these lands," reads page one of the report, which was authored by former US Forest Service employee Michael King. "My purpose here is to discuss the issue of military training on public lands and to identify guidelines that military decision makers can apply to meet their training objectives within the strictures that Americans expect of proper public land management."

Page four of the document discusses an "Interdepartmental Agreement" between the DOD and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) that requires the USDA to include making allowances for military "needs."

"This Agreement updates earlier policy statements and identifies the procedure for planning, scheduling, and conducting military activities on National Forest Lands," the document reads on pages 4-5. "It also affirms the long-standing policy that national forests can provide a variety of settings to conduct military training exercises." In a section titled "Trends in Society," the document discuss how the US "underwent a transformation toward an increased awareness and appreciation for natural resource lands and improved environmental laws. Legislation in Congress produced the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Wilderness Act, the National Trails Act, and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act."

"In 1970, America experienced its first 'Earth Day' -- April 22, 1970," it reads. "The words 'ecology,' 'environmentalist,' 'environmental analysis' and 'special interest group' became the buzz words of the natural resource community."

Then on page 7, the report discusses how "segments of the population feel that the bases and training centers scattered around the United States are the proper places to train" because "people are sensitized through television news, movies, and personal experience to equate training with destruction."

"The idea of training on natural resource lands also violates a widespread belief that military training is not an appropriate use of these lands," the report adds. "Wildlands are essentially 'zoned' for recreational enjoyment, wildlife, grazing, timber, and minerals management. Many people think military use violates the 'psychological experience' one comes to expect from public lands."

Outlining a long-time part of the military's strategy, page 11 states, "The congressional delegations and their staffs should be consulted and informed of the proposals to enter into agreements with public land or large private landowners." This is because, as the report goes on to state, "Often the first place a concerned citizen or group turns to is their senators or representatives in Washington, D.C."

One example of the effectiveness of this tactic comes in the form of the Washington Military Alliance (WMA), which works directly with Washington State's Department of Commerce to assist in making all of the state "more compatible" with military activities, according to the WMA website. The WMA was convened and supported by Washington's "green governor" Jay Inslee, and uses taxpayer money to fund studies supportive of bringing more military jobs to the state.

It is a perfect example of how a state bends over backwards to not only give the military everything it wants, but even more, to bring military money into the state economy, regardless of negative impacts on the environment or civilian populations.

Ignoring the Impacts

Glen Milner is a researcher and member of the activist group Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, which has been involved in two NEPA lawsuits against the Navy.

Milner told Truthout that the Navy consistently avoids conducting environmental impact statements, using the segmentation strategy Sullivan mentioned. One example of many he provided entailed the Navy ignoring impacts from vessel operations in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound in compiling an environmental assessment regarding Coast Guard vessels escorting naval submarines into the Sound. Milner filed a comment in the Navy's EA on the issue last January.

"This type of segmenting is like building a bridge across a river, in which the agency obtains an EA for one side of the river, and [builds] half of the bridge before conducting an environmental review for the other side of the river," he said. "By then, half the project is built and the full impacts of the project are never addressed."

Given the vast scale of munitions and nuclear weapons stored by the Navy in the Puget Sound region, Milner warned that Washington State's Hood Canal is "becoming an industrial corridor. An accident at the second Explosives Handling Wharf could cause a catastrophic explosion and spread plutonium across our region."

Milner noted that the courts nearly always defer to the military when they are challenged by a lawsuit about the impacts of their plans.

Carol Miller said she has yet to see one example of the Department of Defense following the law when it comes to NEPA. She believes everyone should be concerned about how the Pentagon is handling its NEPA obligations.

"Anyone who cares about their health needs to get informed about military operations," she said. "Anyone who cares about the environment needs to understand that the Pentagon is the biggest environmental threat to Planet Earth. The military does not care about the environment, whether human or natural; it's all just terrain to them."

Several examples she provided of the military contaminating water near their bases included Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and in Hawaii. Miller also cited those living downwind from nuclear weapons testing sites and the prevalence of thyroid cancer among them. In fact, nuclear waste has a legacy that is popping up everywhere, even in the suburbs of St. Louis, where the Pentagon did not bother doing anything to protect human health or the environment. Soil near a local creek in a St. Louis suburb was contaminated by nuclear weapons waste stored there during the 1960s and '70s, and led to people living there now getting sick.

The military's practice of ignoring civilians' needs and interests is widespread. Sullivan pointed out how, in 2014, the Navy failed to notify affected communities of the creation of an electronic warfare range over Olympic National Park, Olympic National Forest and the west end of the Olympic Peninsula, including tribal lands. As a result, nobody knew about the EA and nobody was able to comment.

"Immediately after the short comment period closed, the Navy issued a 'Finding of No Significant Impact' that basically said nobody was concerned about it, therefore the impacts are minimal," Miller said. "They then slammed the door and refused to accept any public comments after these communities found out about it."

Karen Sullivan also mentioned that the Navy's NEPA coordinator, John Mosher, told her there had been no Navy projects in the Puget Sound region over the last decade that had been stopped by an EA or EIS, which according to Sullivan, "means the outcomes were predetermined."

Sullivan has spent the last several years of her retirement tracking the Navy's ongoing NEPA violations in her region, and expresses frustration at the Navy's lack of concern about the impacts of its activities.

"I don't know how to say this any plainer: The Navy deliberately, routinely and chronically violates the law in order to prevent public input from altering or mitigating actions it has long decided on before initiating NEPA," she said. "After studying the Navy's NEPA compliance for several years, I believe it's safe to say that our oldest environmental law has become the doormat on which they wipe their feet."