1. OCEANS: Bush considers scaling back plans for marine monuments (Greenwire, 12/15/2008)

Allison Winter, Greenwire reporter

An ambitious Bush administration plan for designating vast new marine conservation areas in the Pacific Ocean -- the president's bid for a positive environmental legacy -- is likely to be scaled back in size and scope, according to administration officials and conservationists who have been briefed on the proposal.

Environmentalists have been urging President George W. Bush to use his executive power to protect large areas of the Pacific from fishing, oil exploration and other commercial development -- just as he did in 2006 when he established the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

But sportfishing groups and the government of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands are opposing the plan, forcing the administration to reconsider.

The Bush administration is considering protections for areas of the Pacific Ocean.

Representatives of the Pew Environment Group -- the conservation group most actively promoting the proposal -- said after a recent meeting with administration officials that the White House is scaling back the plan to focus on protecting smaller, more specific areas, such as certain geologic features on the ocean floor. Further, the environmentalists said, the administration might not fully protect any areas it does designate from fishing or other extractive activity.

"Protecting an ecosystem is what the president did in Papahanaumokuakea; he took a bold step in protecting a whole ecosystem," said Pew's Matt Rand in an interview. "Protecting parts of an ecosystem is not the same."

James Connaughton, the chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and the coordinator of the marine-reserve plan, said he expects to make a recommendation to Bush on the plan by the end of the month. The administration, he said, is still wrestling with questions about what marine "objects" to protect and how to manage them.

"We have not settled on a set of recommendations. We are getting input and suggesting options," Connaughton said. "There are still lots of different ideas kicking around."

He added, "We want to focus on what requires protection and focus on zones for good management."

The proposals encompass vast swaths of the Pacific Ocean near three U.S. territories -- Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands. Bush issued a directive to federal agencies last summer asking them to weigh in on how best to protect the the unique areas in the Pacific. The areas include coral reefs and undersea mountains within 200 miles of the islands -- areas controlled by the federal government.

The president and First Lady Laura Bush took a keen interest in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands after they saw a 2006 PBS documentary series on the islands by explorer Jean-Michel Cousteau, said James Greenwood, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania with close ties to the Bush White House.

"What I told the president and [his chief political strategist] Karl Rove is there is very little political downside to standing up for and trying to maintain fisheries and coral reefs, all political upside," said Greenwood, who now heads the Biotechnology Industry Association.

'Teddy Roosevelt for the oceans'

Bush's designation of the Hawaii monument in June 2006 got him some of the most favorable environmental notices of his administration. So the White House asked environmental groups to recommend other conservation areas.

The groups pitched the notion of Bush having a "real ocean legacy." If Bush designated vast areas of the Pacific as monuments, they said, he could create the largest marine conservation area in the world and protect more surface area of the globe than any other president.

"If the president is going to have a real ocean legacy, it can be done only through establishing these kinds of areas with very clear protections, bright lines and absolute enforcement," said Dave Allison of Oceana, an advocacy group. "Then ... he'll go down in history. He'll be the equivalent of Teddy Roosevelt for the oceans."

A working group that included marine conservation groups compiled the original list of potential marine reserves, and the White House chose to focus on areas near U.S. territories in the Pacific. Those recommendations would protect areas around the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa and the largely uninhabited Line Islands -- Johnson Atoll, Kingman Reef and Palmyra, Baker, Wake, Jarvis and Howland Islands.

The groups -- Pew, Oceana, the Marine Conservation Biology Institute and the Environmental Defense Fund -- have been pushing for the protection of large ocean ecosystems in the Pacific.

The groups have proposed establishing 500 square miles of no-take marine reserves around the smallest area, Rose Atoll, near American Samoa. The other two, more ambitious, proposals are intended to appeal to Bush's desire for a legacy. They involve protections nearly the size of Alaska around the Line Islands and a proposal to protect more than 100,000 square miles around the Northern Mariana Islands.

Each area has unique marine life. Rose Atoll, the smallest atoll in the world, has coral reefs and a lagoon that are home to the region's largest concentration of nesting sea turtles, birds and giant clams.

The Line Islands are surrounded by coral reefs and serve as feeding stations for migratory fish and seabirds. Scientists have studied the area for clues to how reefs functioned in the past and have discovered a unique system with an inverted food pyramid -- with more large species than small. The small organisms are thought to reproduce more quickly to sustain the system.

The Pew Environment Group proposed a large-scale protected area spanning more than 115,000 square miles. Click the map for a larger version. Image courtesy of Pew Environment Group.

The Mariana Islands have unique geology that marine groups liken to an underwater Yellowstone and Grand Canyon combined. Marine life thrives around hydrothermal vents, mud volcanoes and pools of boiling sulfur. The area hosts 19 species of whales and dolphins and abundant shark populations. The deepest spot on the sea floor is in the Marianas Trench: Mount Everest could sit on its bottom and still be covered by more than 7,000 feet of water.

"These are places that virtually nobody knows about except a few specialists in Interior and NOAA, mainly scientists. But these islands have suddenly risen to the top as interesting ecosystems worth public attention," said Bill Chandler of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute. "By doing that, we say, 'If these are important, we have to do a better job of protecting them.'"

Antiquities Act

Bush could use the 1906 Antiquities Act to create the marine monuments without congressional approval. The law gives the president broad power to protect "objects of historic or scientific interest."

Conservation groups say "objects" could mean entire marine ecosystems, but the administration favors a more limited definition. Federal officials are trying to determine how best to draw lines around coral reefs and other unique features.

"We are talking about protecting the localized area that has incredibly rich ecological value -- once you go way out, more than a dozen miles, at that point it is not clear there is a conservation benefit for the local environment or the deep sea area," Connaughton said in an interview last week. "That is one of the things we are looking at."

Federal officials are trying to determine the most important "objects" for protection and how to manage them. It could mean special protection for a sea mountain on the ocean floor, for example, but not for the water or fish near the surface, Connaughton said.

So instead of a vast monument in the central Pacific Ocean and a no-take marine reserve the size of Arizona in the Marianas, the administration could end up protecting a checkerboard of marine resources -- part of the Marianas trench, a thermal vent, a mud volcano -- and leave fishery management under current law.

Environmentalists say such an approach would dramatically weaken the designation.

"Imagine if they did that at Yellowstone ... imagine if they just did the geysers instead of the whole picture," said Angelo Villagomez, part of the Friends of the Monument group in the Marianas. "It's not what we wanted. A big part of this is we want the world to take notice. We would be really disappointed if Bush would do a postage-stamp approach, with a series of postage stamps on a map."

Connaughton sees the Yellowstone analogy differently. If the Marianas are Yellowstone, then the ocean is comparable to the national park's air and the fish are comparable to its birds. Birds flying over Yellowstone are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and fish swimming over the Marianas trench are governed under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, he said. And unlike Yellowstone, which is surrounded by mountains and forests, Connaughton said it is questionable whether some of the areas around the thermal features in the Marianas have conservation benefits.

"You have these really wonderful localized features, and then the floor of the ocean drops off really rapidly into the abyss," Connaughton said. "We have two different sets of areas we are looking at -- what are we protecting and is it actually accomplishing something? That is what the assessment is taking a look at."

Sportfishing groups

The administration is also trying not to be seen as heavy-handed in dealing with the territories' local governments and fishing groups.

While thousands of Mariana citizens signed a petition supporting the monument, the islands' government is against it. Commonwealth politicians -- still stinging from the federal government's recent interference in their labor and immigration laws -- have objected to what they see as another chance for a federal usurpation of their sovereignty. Connaughton traveled to the islands this fall to try to assuage some of their concerns.

U.S. sportfishing groups also want to make sure they have access at any new monuments. It did not sit well with them when the Hawaiian monument barred all fishing. The Pacific areas currently under consideration are so remote there is essentially no fishing there now, but the groups want to make sure that option is reserved for the future.

Gordon Robertson, vice president of the American Sportfishing Association, said he had a three-hour meeting with White House officials in which they made a case for continued fishing. Robertson said there is no compelling reason to shut out recreational fishing when it is doing no harm. The group -- which has close ties with the White House -- also favors smaller areas of protection.

"Certainly our preference is toward small, discrete areas with a very focused purpose," Robertson said. "I'm not sure what a large area with tens of thousands of miles accomplishes; we've got one now in the northwest Hawaiian Islands that is rather onerous, because you have to have a permit even to enter the area."

Sportfishing groups have won Bush's support for other executive orders. He has signed orders to protect recreational fishing in U.S. waters and to designate the redfish and striped bass as game fish.

'Way out there'

Marine groups' original list of monument recommendations included areas closer to home, as well as the Pacific territories. They also proposed special protection for corals in the Gulf of Mexico, deep-sea corals off the Southeast coast and a string of reserves from Florida to Belize. Political considerations quickly shoved those off the table.

The administration settled on Pacific Ocean areas that seemed relatively easy to protect, since they are remote and have limited fishing or commercial activity. A monument designation would do more to guard against future threats than to alter any current use.

But halfway around the world is still not far enough to avoid controversy. Connaughton said the recommendations could be pulled into a package for Bush to announce in January or handed off to the incoming Obama administration.

Connaughton is proud of the Bush administration's efforts on marine conservation, which include not only the Hawaiian monument but also work on a revised fishery management law.

"The United States has earned and enjoyed a century of land-based conservation, and for our part, we started out in this administration seeing if we could create the opportunity for a century of marine conservation," Connaughton said. "We've tried to cover the entire suite of issues in two terms of this administration that it took the nation almost a century to work through on land, and we're very proud of that."

For their part, environmentalists still see Bush as their best chance for marine reserves in the near term. They are fighting to keep their vision of vast marine reserves from washing away.

"This place is out, way out in the middle of nowhere, there would be no jobs lost and no negative economic impact, just positive," said Pew's Rand. "There are not many places left in the ocean where we can protect complete ecosystems ... and time's getting short for protecting these places."

Back to Public index page