In 2002-03, various U.S. federal courts considered the extraterritorial application of a key U.S. environmental statute, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). In Natural Res. Def. Council v. Dep't of the Navy, a federal district court considered the U.S. Navy's Littoral Warfare Advanced Development (LWAD) program, whose goal is to develop technologies that protect vessels from enemy submarines in the relatively shallow shelf areas (littoral areas) extending as close as a few miles, to as far as hundreds of miles, offshore. Among other things, in order to detect increasingly quiet enemy submarines, the program is conducting research using intense sonar pulses at low frequencies that travel hundreds of miles. In 2002, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed suit to enjoin such active sonar tests until the Navy complied with several U.S. environmental laws, including the environmental reviews required by NEPA. According to the NRDC, active sonar can adversely affect a variety of ocean species, including marine mammals. In its pleadings, the NRDC relied, in part, on the 1993 decision of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in Envtl.Def. Fund v. Massey. In that case, the court found that NEPA required an environmental impact statement for major federal actions affecting the quality of the human environment in the Antarctic.
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