Islands Apart
EDITORIAL, NYTimes on
the Web, June 16, 2006
An unfamiliar but highly appealing
side of President Bush showed itself at the White House yesterday. It was
Mr. Bush the compassionate conservationist, friend of green sea turtles,
seabirds and Hawaiian monk seals, savior of coral reefs and spiny lobsters,
creator of the largest ocean sanctuary on the planet.
Mr. Bush has made the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands a national monument, putting
them under some of the strictest environmental protections the law provides.
It was an act of wilderness preservation that, acre for acre, instantly put him
into the same league as the conservation-minded presidents Theodore Roosevelt,
Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
If the state of Hawaii is a garland of flowers, the Northwestern Hawaiian
Islands are a spray of petals, an arc of tiny reefs and atolls extending 1,200
miles beyond the last bits of Hawaii any tourists see. They are strewn
across an area bigger than 100 Yosemites. They are among the remotest
islands in the world, and in many ways pristine. Some in Hawaii call them
the "kupuna islands," using the Hawaiian word for elders, since they teach
people what the Pacific was like before plundering and pollution. Sharks,
not fishing boats, are still at the top of the food chain. Ancient
colonies of living coral reach heights of 80 feet. A quarter of the 7,000
marine species there exist nowhere else.
These islands are distant, but not undisturbed. The monk seals are
endangered. Black-lipped pearl oysters were wiped out 75 years ago.
The lobster fishery crashed in the 1990's. The islands' bottom-dwelling
fish, snappers known on Hawaiian menus as opakapaka and onaga, are in serious
decline.
Mr. Bush created the sanctuary by fiat, but his decision reflects a long-held
consensus that the islands need protecting. Theodore Roosevelt created the
first refuge there in 1909. Governor Linda Lingle had already imposed
strict protections on her state's portion of the islands' waters. Mr.
Bush, who overturned many of Bill Clinton's executive orders soon after taking
office, spared two that had enabled the creation of a sanctuary there. His
action yesterday, which ends sportfishing immediately and commercial fishing in
five years, brought that process to a satisfying and necessary close.
In some ways, Mr. Bush's decision was supremely easy — the end of commercial
fishing will affect only eight fishermen. But even so, the mind reels a
little at what Mr. Bush has done. The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands are a
vast place few Americans have ever visited or ever will. But they are
being protected anyway — not for divers, fishermen or cruise ships, but for
their own sake, for science and forever. Mr. Bush made exemplary use of
presidential power yesterday. We hope he does more of it.
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