President Bush will create three national monuments in the Pacific Ocean today, protecting waters near U.S.-controlled islands that contain some of the world's richest diversity of corals, fish and other sea life as well as unusual geological formations in the deepest undersea trench.
With the stroke of a pen this afternoon, Bush will have set aside more square miles of ocean for protection than any other political leader in history.
The three new monuments, surrounding far-flung islands, reefs and atolls scattered across the Pacific, will add 195,000 square miles of protected waters to the nearly 140,000 square miles around the Northwest Hawaiian Islands that Bush protected in 2006.
The designations announced today will ban most commercial fishing and would vastly limit recreational fishing, and fishing by indigenous people or researchers. In all of the protected areas, seafloor mining will be prohibited.
The new areas include the waters surrounding Howland, Baker, Jarvis and Wake islands; Rose, Palmyra and Johnston atolls; Kingman Reef; the three northernmost Mariana Islands; and the deep seafloor of the Mariana Trench.
"This is a huge day for marine conservation," said James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. "It's going to set yet another great mark for America as we inspire marine conservation activities all around the world."
It's also an act of conservation that departs sharply from the administration's pattern of rolling back environmental safeguards and pushing for unencumbered industrial exploitation of forests, minerals and other natural resources.
Bush will make the designations under executive authority granted by the Antiquities Act. It cannot be altered by Congress.
Marine conservation groups have long lobbied Bush to burnish his environmental record by leaving a legacy of ocean protection. They pointed out that such moves would not alienate administration allies in the oil and gas industry, ranching, mining or forestry.
Connaughton and First Lady Laura Bush became early converts and worked to persuade Bush to turn the Northwest Hawaiian islands into the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument.
Connaughton was ebullient Monday, discussing how federal officials were able to sweep away concerns from commercial fishermen and seafloor mining companies by showing the areas had few harvestable fish or lucrative minerals.
