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
Ending a five-month suspense, President George W. Bush this week took a bold step in ocean conservation, breaking a record he set previously with the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, by closing to fishing seven remote patches of Pacific Ocean that, put together, would be larger than Spain.
The decision seems to be an effort on Bush’s part to leave some lasting positive legacy. Though much admonished for other aspects of his environmental record, Bush’s marine monuments, now totalling 850,000 km 2 – far more than ever created before – have delighted marine scientists at a time the oceans are suffering from overfishing and the effects of climate change and acidification.
But by extending no-take areas to 50 nautical miles (92 km) off 11 islands to create a new area of 505,000 km2, he still fell far short of the 1.9 million km2 of fishing-free ocean he could have imposed if he had closed commercial fishing in the entire Exclusive Economic Zone off each of the islands. The zone extends out 200 nautical miles (370 km) from shore.
"The monuments will prohibit resource destruction or extraction, waste dumping and commercial fishing," Bush said to reporters on Tuesday. "They will allow for research, free passage, and recreation - including the possibility of recreational fishing one day. For seabirds and marine life, they will be sanctuaries to grow and thrive. For scientists, they will be places to extend the frontiers of discovery."
Jay Nelson, Director of Ocean Legacy for the Pew Environment Group in Washington DC, called Tuesday’s move “The single largest marine conservation act in history. We hope that other maritime nations with a history of conservation achievements, such as Australia, will take this example and improve on it,” he added. “The Coral Sea is a perfect example.”
Imogen Zethoven, Coral Sea Campaign director, said she hoped the process to create the Australian preserve would be completed next year.
Pew has been advocating turning 357,000 km2 of ocean in the Australian EEZ off the Great Barrier Reef into a Coral Sea Marine Park where fishing would end.
The proposal is being considered by the government. The Pew group also helped midwife the Northwestern Islands reserve, which Bush turned into what was then the biggest in the world two years ago.
Following Bush’s own 360,000 km2 Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in the Northwestern Hawaiian islands in 2006, the government of the central Pacific nation of Kiribati in 2007 declared half the EEZ of its uninhabited Phoenix Islands the 'Phoenix Islands Protected Area', gradually putting 410,000 km2 off-limits to fishing (see, Ocean wilderness is size of California).
Kiribati went on to join a group of other Central Pacific nations in the Nauru Agreement that will effectively end fishing in another 790,000 km2 of international tuna-rich waters around the equator by 2011, the same year fishing is scheduled to end in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
Most of the islands and their reefs in Bush's new monuments are already protected, so the main beneficiaries will be declining stocks of bigeye and yellowfin tuna, and along with the birds, sharks, turtles and dolphins that are accidentally caught by the tuna long-liner boats.
Biologically rich but fragile seamounts, vulnerable to destruction from trawlers, will also be saved.
The first marine monument, and the most interesting to science, surrounds the islands – all of them uninhabited nature reserves – of Maug, Asuncion and Uracus in the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas, just south of Iwo Jima, Japan. A second part protects the Marianas Trench, further south. Their sponsor is also Pew.
The Marianas are rich in submerged volcanoes and in biodiversity. Maug, whose caldera forms a lagoon that extends down 245 m, has amazing underwater vents that acidify the water column above so that a dead zone lies right next to one rich in coral and fish, say scientists who have dived there.
They predict that the place will be intensely studied in the future to understand how coral reacts to the acidification that is expected when the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed into the oceans.
Asuncion Island erupts so often that it’s known as “The Lighthouse of the Western Pacific.” It's a unique platform to observe the rapid birth, death and rebirth of coral and other marine life, something that occurs much slower elsewhere.
There's also a seamount with a so-called ‘champagne vent’ sending up bubbles of liquid CO2 that look like they came out of a sixties lava lamp, say experts. Nearby, millions of mussels thrive, despite the acidity leaving them with paper-thin shells, as does a fish believed to feed directly on bacteria at hydrothermal vents.
“All it would take is a few trawlers to go through there and it would all be wiped out,” says Robert Embley of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who has dived there.
The second monument, in the central Pacific islands, was proposed jointly by the Marine Conservation Biology Institute and by the Environmental Defence Fund, whose vice-chair, Jane Lubchenco, has been nominated to head the $4 billion-a-year NOAA, which manages U.S. oceans policy.
As such, she will oversee how these monuments are run. Nelson said Pew hoped to work with her to extend the area to the full 200 miles.
Called the Remote Pacific Islands National Marine Monument, it totals 225,000 km2 and includes five areas: Howland and Baker, in the Phoenix Islands; Jarvis, just south of there in the line islands; Palmyra and Kingman Reef, also in the Line Islands; Johnston Atoll and Wake island, two atolls west of Hawaii that are so isolated they are not part of any chain and are host to military bases.
The others are National Wildlife Refuges whose reefs are already protected.
As less than five per cent of the fishing of the Honolulu fleet of long-liners takes place in the EEZ of these islands, officials said the closure of one-fourth of those areas will have negligible effect.
Finally, the Rose Atoll National Monument, in American Samoa, protects the 35,000 km2 of waters off the world’s smallest atoll, which boasts some of the densest coral cover in the world.
In creating these monuments, Bush faced objections from three quarters: the Pentagon, recreational fishermen and politicians in the Marianas.
Though Bush had specified that monument designation “should not limit the department of defence from carrying out its mission” in the Pacific, environmentalists said senior Pentagon officials had told them they were concerned it would do just that.
They cited lawsuits against military uses of sonar in war games off the Hawaii monument as an example. “They didn’t care about the degree of protection,” one activist said, “but they did care about size.”
Recreational fishers also fought the move. “We do not support any unnecessary closures to recreational fishing unless there is a scientific determination that shows recreational fishing is harming the ecosystem,” said Patty Doerr, Ocean Resource Policy Director of the American Sportfishing Association.
She added that the only way for a closure to be justified in the Pacific areas would be for recreational fishing to be introduced and for it to demonstrably harm the environment.
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.
