Bush Creates Largest Marine Sanctuary In World

So what are environmentalists supposed to do with this story, except bury it? President Bush circumvented a prolonged fight over regulations in classifying more than 140,000 square miles of waters northwest of the big island of Hawaii a marine sanctuary and instead declared it a national monument under a 100-year-old law.

The national monument would create the worlds largest protected marine habitat - surpassing even Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

Establishing the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands as a strictly protected marine reserve, which Bush is slated to announce this afternoon, could prove to be the administration's most enduring environmental legacy. The roughly 100-mile-wide area encompasses a string of uninhabited islands that support more than 7,000 marine species, at least a fourth of which are found nowhere else on Earth.

The islands include almost 70 percent of the nation's tropical, shallow-water coral reefs, a rookery for 14 million seabirds, and the last refuge for the endangered Hawaiian monk seal and the threatened green sea turtle. The area also has an abundance of large predatory fish at a time when 90 percent of such species have disappeared from the world's oceans.

Encompassing nearly 140,000 square miles, an area nearly the size of Montana and larger than all the national parks combined, the reserve will just surpass Australia's Great Barrier Reef Marine Park as the largest protected marine area in the world. It will also, however, be one of the least accessible.

"This is a landmark conservation event," said Joshua Reichert, who heads the Pew Charitable Trusts' environment programs and had pushed to have the area designated as a marine sanctuary. "The government is saying in certain places, for certain reasons, it is important to restrict activities that have the potential to damage the marine environment, of which fishing is a big one."

"The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands represent an incredible opportunity to preserve nature much as it was, or has been, for millions of years, because the hand of man has not wreaked the same kind of havoc as we have elsewhere in the world," said Rep. Ed Case (D-Hawaii), who has lobbied for the designation since he was elected in 2002.

The plan had been resisted by local Hawaiian fishing interests that feared losing access to traditional fishing grounds.

So how can this be spun as a negative? Simple: Women and minorities worst affect - after all, eight Hawaiian fishermen with rights to ply those waters will need to be bought out. The Senators from Hawaii have been lobbying against any such designation because they were protecting those same fishermen. Instead, the country and the world get a protected ecological area. Good on Bush.