September 3, 2008
Editorial
Mr. Bushs Blue Legacy
President Bush may be on the brink of doing something stunningly at odds with his record as one of the worst environmental stewards ever to inhabit the White House. He is considering setting aside three vast, remote corners of the Pacific Ocean for protection, an area larger than Alaska and Texas combined.
In a memo last month, Mr. Bush directed his administration to develop a plan for creating sanctuaries in the waters around the Northern Mariana Islands, including the Mariana Trench, the worlds deepest; Rose Atoll in American Samoa; and parts of a long, sprawling collection of reefs and atolls known as the Line Islands.
The waters are as isolated and pristine as any part of the globe can be these days, home to countless species of fish and plants, rare turtles and seabirds and glorious reefs. The Mariana Trench is a staggering place; it could swallow Everest. The islands are mostly coral flyspecks, but if the waters around them are protected to the fullest extent possible to the 200-mile territorial limit the sanctuaries would total nearly 900,000 square miles. That is bigger than all of Mexico.
Mr. Bush has done something nearly as spectacular once before. In June 2006, he created the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. Over the strident objections of some commercial-fishing interests, Mr. Bush created a no-fishing sanctuary covering 140,000 square miles, an area larger than all of the countrys national parks combined.
Mr. Bush used the Antiquities Act of 1906, a little-known statute that allows presidents, by executive order, to protect public lands by designating them as national monuments.
His decision won wide praise, except from the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, known as Wespac, one of eight federal agencies assigned to protect fish and fishing in United States waters. Wespac is notorious among environmental groups as a chronic enabler of reckless commercial fishing.
Wespacs executive director, Kitty Simonds, is condemning this new idea as punishment of the brown and yellow people of American Samoa and the Northern Marianas. In fact, her agencys customary attitude fish here, fish now ignores the strong local support across the Pacific for farsighted stewardship of imperiled oceans, a resource that belongs to future generations as much as it does to all of us.
Mr. Bushs proposal could shrink in scale as details are hammered out and compromises made. He has the power to make the sanctuaries absolute no-fishing, no-mining zones the best option. His memo also left open the possibility of allowing some fishing and mineral extraction in the sanctuaries. We hope he resists the forces of exploitation, and closes as much as possible of those stretches of the vast blue Pacific to human meddling.
That would be an achievement for the ages. All we can say is: Go for it, Mr. President.
