By Jonathan Soble in Tokyo
Published: May 28 2010 19:20 |
Last updated: May 28 2010 19:20
Fat, gentle and rarely seen, ocean-dwelling dugong were once mistaken for mermaids or revered as storm-warning messengers from the gods.
Now, a handful of the endangered marine mammals are, at least in the eyes of the law, taking on the US defence department, in a case that has complicated the fraught effort to relocate a US military base on the Japanese island of Okinawa.
Dugong et al v Robert Gates, a lawsuit that has been playing out in a San Francisco court since 2003, gained fresh importance yesterday after Japan’s government agreed to build a replacement for the Futenma marine air station in Henoko bay, a pristine dugong feeding ground.
The lawsuit, brought by a coalition of Japanese and American environmental groups, alleges the Pentagon violated the US National Historic Preservation Act by failing to consider the effect of the Henoko base on the dugong.
Yukio Hatoyama, Japan’s left-leaning prime minister, had earlier opposed the relocation plan – agreed by a previous government – and promised to try to find another site off Okinawa.
His reversal under US pressure angered environmentalists, who are seeking to revive public concern over the dugong, revered in Okinawan culture.
The Save the Dugong Campaign Centre, a pressure group, yesterday submitted a 30,000-signature anti-base petition to the Japanese foreign and environment ministries. “We want to expand this issue from an environmental one to a form of political pressure,” said Yoshiaki Ninagawa, director of the group.
As many as 50 of the grey-skinned, sumo-wrestler-sized creatures are thought to frequent the bay. Ironically, some naturalists thought Okinawa’s dugong population extinct until military surveyors examining Henoko’s suitability as a base in the 1990s spotted some.
The base’s most controversial element is a proposal for two 1,800-metre runways. Environmentalists say these would destroy coral reefs and the seagrasses on which dugong feed, and have been unswayed by the idea that they could be made less damaging by building them on pilings, not landfill.
The NHPA requires US government agencies to apply the law’s protections of registered cultural assets to projects carried out under their jurisdiction overseas as well as within the US. In Japan, the dugong – closely related to the manatee – are protected as “natural monuments”.
So far the dugong have come out ahead in the case. In January 2008, the San Francisco court ruled that the defence department had not met the NHPA’s standard for protecting foreign cultural assets and ordered it “to actively participate and co-ordinate with Japan” in assessing the planned base’s environmental effect.
The Pentagon said it had been co-operating in Japan’s own three-year environmental assessment, whose preliminary conclusions have been favourable to the base. But whether that will satisfy its NHPA obligations is a question the US court will likely have to decide, lawyers said.
Experts said the case was more likely to delay construction at Henoko than to scuttle it. “The law isn’t intended to stop any project that affects a historic property. Most projects eventually go ahead after some kind of adjustment,” said a US lawyer who has studied the dugong case.
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