Bush making Hawaiian archipelago world's largest marine sanctuary

WASHINGTON — President Bush plans today to designate an island chain spanning nearly 1,400 miles of the Pacific northwest of Hawaii as a national monument, creating the largest protected marine reserve in the world, according to sources familiar with the plan.

Establishing the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands as a strictly protected marine reserve 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 proposed reserve would just surpass Australia's Great Barrier Reef Marine Park as the largest marine protected area in the world. However, it would also be one of the least accessible.

"This is a landmark conservation event," said Joshua Reichert, who heads the Pew Charitable Trusts' environment programs, who had pushed to have the area designated 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."

Rep. Ed Case, D-Hawaii, who has lobbied for the designation since he was elected in 2002, said: "The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands represent an incredible opportunity to preserve nature much as it ... 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."

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

The United States has 13 marine sanctuaries scattered from the Florida Keys to the Channel Islands off the California coast, which provide varying levels of protection and have had mixed success in preserving sensitive ecosystems. In areas where fishing was banned outright, scientists have charted a resurgence of larger fish and coral reefs, but in areas that allow commercial and recreational fishing, damaged ecosystems have struggled to rebound.

Administration officials declined to comment on the record, but one senior official said the plan would end fishing in the area within five years. It would allow Hawaiians to have access to the area for other traditional activities and would include the Midway World War II memorial, a facility that is open for research, education and ecotourism. Visitors wishing to snorkel, dive or take photographs in the area would have to obtain a permit, and no one could take fish, wildlife, corals or minerals from the region.

President Theodore Roosevelt established a bird sanctuary on some of the islands in 1909. President Clinton created a coral reef ecosystem reserve in the area by executive orders in late 2000 and early 2001, but he stopped short of designating a permanent sanctuary.

The proposal has had a cooler reception from Democratic Sens. Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka, who have traditionally been protective of local fishermen, but the administration is relying on a coalition of environmental groups — headed by the Pew Charitable Trusts — to raise the money for buying out the fishermen.

By declaring the islands a national monument, Bush circumvents a yearlong approval process required to designate the area as a marine sanctuary and is affording the area the highest regulatory protection possible under law.

"Declaring the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands a national monument will mean immediate protection, immediate implementation of the management measures included in the plan that was developed in the Marine Sanctuary process," the senior official said Wednesday night.

Advocacy groups, activists and Democrats hailed Bush's work on this matter. Case, the Hawaii congressman, said the president "deserves credit" for undertaking "the most revolutionary act by any president, any administration, in terms of marine resources."