6/3/2010

Japan’s seacow, the Okinawan dugong have filed the funnest sounding federal legal case that I have heard in years, “Dug0ng et al vs. R0bert Gates.”*
More succinctly, the Okinawan dugong declare: ‘All your base are belong to us!’†

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Since the Financia1 Time$ website keeps refusing my access, I thought would post the salient parts of the FTarticle that was quoted on the academic NBR forum. Sorry about the munging of the following text but since Financia1 Time$ does not want to play nice, neither do we dugong.

DUGONG TAKE ON DEFENCE DEPARTMENT
The Financial Times -- May 28 2010 19:20
http://ta.gd/dugong

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.
...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.
...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.
...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.

More...via http://ta.gd/dugong
Alternatively, try the cockblocked FTarticle directly.

*See a full explanation of the case: U.S. COURT RULES IN THE ‘OKINAWA DUGONG’

†More all-your-base-are-belong-to-us info at knowyourmeme.com.