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  PlanetSave 19 Jun 06
Newest national monument a scenic wonder, but few can visit
Written by Tara Godvin

BBC 15 Jun 06
Bush creates new marine sanctuary

PlanetArk 16 Jun 06
NW Hawaii Becomes World's Biggest Marine Reserve
Story by By Deborah Zabarenko

WASHINGTON - The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands -- a coral-fringed swath of the Pacific -- came under US environmental protection on Thursday, becoming the world's biggest protected marine reserve.

"We will protect a precious natural resource," President George W. Bush said at a White House ceremony where he declared a string of Pacific islands and submerged volcanoes a national monument. "We will show our respect for the cultural and historical importance of this area. And we will create an important place for research and learning about how we can be good stewards of our oceans and our environment," Bush said.

With a stroke of a pen, Bush gave immediate protection to an area that stretches across 1,400 miles (2,250 km), covering nearly 140,000 square miles (362,600 sq km), edging out in size Australia's Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

The monument designation, Bush's first, means a marine area greater in size than 46 of the 50 US states will be sheltered from overfishing, while allowing Hawaiians to use the area for traditional purposes. The protected area starts about 160 miles (260 km) west of the inhabited Hawaiian island of Kauai and stretches nearly 1,200 miles (1,900 km) from Nihoa Island in the east to Kure Atoll in the west. That is roughly equivalent to the distance between Chicago and Miami.

The area includes the world's most remote and relatively undisturbed coral reef ecosystem and supports more than 7,000 species, including more than 100 species unique to those islands, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts' Environment Division, which praised the White House decision. Important species include the green sea turtle and the endangered Hawaiian monk seal, the only surviving marine mammal wholly dependent on coral reefs.

KUDOS FROM ENVIRONMENTALISTS

Even before Bush made it official, ecology watchdog groups were quick to offer kudos, while acknowledging the Bush administration had not previously been noted for its environmental stewardship.

"The administration will have created the world's largest marine protected area and set aside one of the most pristine regions for generations to enjoy and to study," David Festa, director of the oceans program at Environmental Defense, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

Unlike the Washington Monument that stands within view of the White House, the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Area is remote, uninhabited and difficult for ordinary citizens to visit, but Festa did not consider that a drawback.

"The technology of the 21st century is bringing the opportunity to use remote cameras and other audio-visual technology to really bring these areas into the living rooms of average Americans," Festa said.

An administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the plan before Bush's announcement, confirmed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration planned to help people enjoy the reserve from afar through technology.

While largely uninhabited, the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands include Midway, a strategic point in World War Two that has retained its airfield and could be a place for research, education and limited ecotourism, the official said.

(Additional reporting by Caren Bohan and Tabassum Zakaria)

BBC 15 Jun 06
Bush creates new marine sanctuary

US President George W Bush has designated a swathe of Hawaiian islands as a US national monument, making them the world's largest marine sanctuary. He signed a law on Thursday which will give the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands the highest protected status in US law. The area, nearly as big as California, supports more than 7,000 species, a quarter of which occur nowhere else.

Environmental groups welcomed the decision, although fishing industry bodies have raised concerns.

Endangered species

The designated site - more than 140,000 square miles (362,000 square kilometres) of reefs, atolls and shallow seas - is just larger than the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in Australia, previously the world's largest protected marine area.

The remote and uninhabited islands and surrounding seas are important breeding grounds for sea turtles, and are home to the only remaining population of the endangered Hawaiian monk seal.

The new restrictions will mean all fishing is phased out within five years and visitors will need permits to snorkel or dive in the area. The islands were already being considered for designation as a national marine sanctuary.

But Mr Bush has used his powers under the 1906 National Antiquities Act, which allows the president to give instant protection to important sites, in a decision which will bypass a year-long process of consultation and afford a greater level of protection.

"This is really for the first time saying the primary purpose of this area of the ocean is to be a pristine, or nearly pristine, kind of place," David Festa, director the ocean programme at Environmental Defense, told the New York Times. "It would take it off the books as a fishing ground. That's really the first time we'll have done that in any kind of sizeable area," he said.

Fisheries fears

In an interview with the Washington Post, local Democrat representative Ed Case lauded the president for undertaking "the most revolutionary act by any president, any administration, in terms of marine resources".

Although only eight fishing boats are licensed to fish in the area, a local fisheries body says it plans to fight a complete ban on fishing. "We supported the sanctuary concept but wanted the continuation of our healthy bottom fisheries up there," Kittie Simonds of the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council, told the New York Times.

According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, lobster populations in the area have not recovered from aggressive exploitation in the 1980s and 1990s, although this is now banned. Recent research also shows signs of over fishing in the islands' remaining fisheries, the organisation says.

Although environmental groups welcomed the news, many remain strongly opposed to other Republican policies on the environment, including a push to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas exploration.

PlanetSave 19 Jun 06
Newest national monument a scenic wonder, but few can visit
Written by Tara Godvin

HONOLULU (AP) _ The newest national monument boasts crystalline blue water, unspoiled islands with white sand beaches and vast reefs teeming with marine life, including 7,000 species found nowhere else on Earth.

But unlike Mount Rushmore or the Statue of Liberty, the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands will never be a place visitors can see by just packing the kids into the car for a week. And Hawaiians themselves are unsure how much access they will have.

Remoteness is one factor, as the islands are scattered across 1,400 miles of the Pacific. No public flights have landed at the sole airport, on Midway Atoll, since 2002, and cruise ships make only occasional stops. Federal authorities also have long put strict limits on who can set foot in the area to protect its endangered monk seals, nesting green sea turtles and other rare species, along with some 14 million nesting seabirds.

President Bush created the vast marine sanctuary last week.

"It is a place to maintain biodiversity and to maintain basically the nurseries of the Pacific," said Conrad C. Lautenbacher, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which will manage nearly all of the protected area.

The few people familiar with the riches held by the string of islands--Hawaiians who revere the area, researchers and a handful of fishermen--are waiting to find out how the area's new status will affect their access to the area.

William Aila, who has been fighting to protect the area since 1986, was pleased the president provided the maximum protection for the area. "For Hawaiians, it's really a reconnection and taking responsibility for these islands to the north of us, what we consider our elder islands," he said. Aila is a Hawaiian activist, fisherman and Democratic candidate for governor, as well as a member of the Coral Reef Ecosystem Reserve Council, which had been advising federal authorities in what had been a multiyear process to make the islands a marine sanctuary.

He said commercial fishing doesn't belong in the islands and the president was right to put a five-year phase-out on the eight or nine permits in effect for the area. But Aila said he is concerned about what traditional Hawaiian fishermen will be allowed to do in the area.

According to the president's proclamation: "Any monument resource harvested from the monument will be consumed in the monument." Hawaiian oral histories tell of a long tradition of bringing fish back from the islands to share with family, he said, and feathers molted annually by the red-tailed tropicbird are needed to restore historic Hawaiian capes held in the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.

Kitty Simonds, executive director of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, said her organization is concerned about the commercial fishing phase-out. "It looks good to the rest of the world. But as far as I'm concerned, it was an easy declaration because no one lives there," she said. "So all you have are the few fishermen who would like to continue their livelihoods there. "What happened to the American dream?" Simonds said.

Scientists also want to know more about the declaration's effects. "We don't know the details of what this designation will mean for the research. But we're hopeful that we'll be able to continue a robust research project up there," said Malia Rivera, just returned last weekend from a three-week research trip to the islands with the University of Hawaii's Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology.

Rivera is research and outreach coordinator for a project that is in its second year of studying issues such as coral disease and species migration. The area is one of the few places in the world where researchers can experience such an untouched marine environment, she said.

That is how the monument should stay, said Dennis Heinemann, senior scientist with The Ocean Conservancy. "As a people, for cultural reasons and spiritual reasons, it's important to have a few places in the world that are as untouched as we can make them," he said. Heinemann said the president "understood that ... and saw how important it was to create a place, in the oceans, that could show us what the oceans used to be like and what they could be like in the future."
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