Rare grass granted shelter on Kaua'i
By Derrick DePledge
Advertiser Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — In the sand dunes and coastal shrubs of Polihale State Park on Kaua'i, the only known population of lau 'ehu, an endangered bunchgrass, is making what could be its final stand.
Vulnerable to human and natural hazards, only 23 of the rare plants remain, a thin margin between survival and extinction. Some of the best habitat for the species, federal botanists believe, is just south of the park, on the Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility at Barking Sands.
Over the Navy's objections, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has designated 177 acres of the missile range as critical habitat for lau 'ehu, forcing the Navy to consider the plant's survival even though no plants now exist on the range.
Such conflicts between the environment and the military are nothing new, especially in Hawai'i. But the Pentagon, frustrated by what it sees as unnecessary restrictions on training, wants greater protection from Congress.
The Bush administration and the Pentagon are pushing for broader military exceptions to the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Clean Air Act and other federal environmental laws.
Adm. Thomas Fargo, who leads the U.S. Pacific Command at Camp H.M. Smith, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month that federal environmental laws and lawsuits from environmental groups are restricting the military's ability to conduct training exercises.
"The military's answer to encroachment challenges has been to work around the problems while seeking to minimize the impact on the quality and quantity of training," Fargo testified. "But maneuver space is less, training lanes have become narrow and artificially tunneled, and our individual maneuvers have become too predictable or repetitive."
Environmentalists counter that the Bush administration and the Pentagon are using the military's wartime popularity to carve substantial loopholes into environmental law. Lawmakers rejected a similar request from the Pentagon last year. The military already can get exceptions to environmental laws during wartime or for national security reasons, as well as waivers for certain training activities that may conflict with the environment or protected plants and animals.
"The Defense Department is taking advantage of the time we're in to seek exceptions to popular laws," said Michael Jasny, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group based in New York. "It's hard to fight such a thing when the country is at war."
Last year, Congress approved a military exemption to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act after a federal judge temporarily suspended the Navy's live-fire exercises at Farallon de Medinilla near Saipan as part of a lawsuit that claimed the training threatened birds. The training has since resumed.
But next month, the Navy will abandon a bombing range at Vieques, in Puerto Rico, that it has used for training in the Atlantic since the 1940s. Protesters denounced military training on Vieques for damaging the environment and allegedly risking public health.
A federal judge also has limited the Navy's peacetime testing of low-frequency active sonar to the western Pacific because of the potential impact on whales and other marine life. A lawsuit challenging the Navy's sonar, which is used to detect silent enemy submarines, is pending in federal court.
In Hawai'i, environmental lawsuits compelled the Fish and Wildlife Service to establish critical habitat for hundreds of endangered and threatened species in Hawai'i.
Initially, the service had marked more than 500 acres of the Pacific Missile Range Facility as critical habitat for lau 'ehu and two other plants. But after site visits and consultations with the Navy, the service selected four sections of the range covering 177 acres as critical habitat for lau 'ehu only.
Paul Henson, field supervisor for the service's Pacific Islands office, said the coastal dunes from Polihale down through the range are prime habitat for lau 'ehu — or Panicum niihauense — and could lead to its recovery.
"This species is essentially hanging on by its fingernails," Henson said.
The final rule by the Fish and Wildlife Service designated 52,549 acres on Kaua'i and 357 acres on Ni'ihau as critical habitat for 83 endangered or threatened plants. Overall, the critical habitat was reduced by nearly half from the service's original proposal. Henson said the service avoided portions of the missile range that the Navy uses for amphibious or missile training.
Lt. Cmdr. Jane Campbell said the Navy's own natural resource management plan for the range offers better protection for species than a "very narrow, species-by-species analysis."
Campbell said the critical habitat designation could constrain future military uses at the range, which has been mentioned for an expanded role in the Pentagon's national missile defense program.
"The Navy formally objected to this designation because it could have a negative impact on the national security missions conducted on the range," Campbell said.
The Fish and Wildlife Service, meanwhile, is in the last stages of developing new critical habitat plans for the Big Island, O'ahu and Guam, where the military's presence is much larger than on Kaua'i and where potential conflicts with the environmental are much more complicated.
"Those issues dwarf Barking Sands," Henson said.
