Tropical paradise: Grey reef sharks and humpback whales are just a few of the species that will benefit from the new reserves (hit play, above, for another image).
Credit: Juergen Freund
Tropical paradise: Grey reef sharks and humpback whales are just a few of the species that will benefit from the new reserves.
Credit: Micaela Fischer/Pew Environmental Group
But the biggest flurry of letters came from Saipan, the capital and main population center of the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas.
While the Hotel Association and the Chamber of Commerce enthusiastically endorsed the monument as a way to reverse an ebbing tide of visitors, most Marianas politicians took the opposite view, largely, according to former Marianas legislator Andrew Salas and others, at the behest of the Honolulu-based Western Pacific Fishery Management Council, known as WesPac.
The agency, a unit of NOAA that sets Pacific fisheries policy, also opposed ending fishing in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. It is currently under federal investigation for illegally lobbying its pro-fishing, anti-conservation agenda by the general Accounting Office and the Inspector General of the Commerce Department, of which it is a part.
While WesPac spent several hundred thousand dollars on grants to officials who fought the proposal, Connaughton said in a conference call with reporters on Monday that he expected “those government officials are now very pleased to fully support. I think you'll find them coming out fully supportive of this conservation outcome,” he said.
And the next day in Washington DC, the visiting governor of the CNMI, Benigno Fitial, issued a statement saying, “I welcome President Bush’s historic announcement. All of us in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands appreciate this recognition of our unique natural and geological environment.”
Christopher Pala lives in Hawaii and aside from Cosmos writes for The New York Times, Science and the Smithsonian magazine. He is the author of The Oddest Place on Earth: Rediscovering the North Pole.
