Our Newest National Monument

Today, President Bush invoked the Antiquities Act to create the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands National Monument. In so doing, he has created the single largest marine protected area in the world - at 360,000 square kilometers, the new national monument is slightly larger than the 348,000 km² Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. This is absolutely fantastic news. The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands are a relatively untouched area with tremendous biological diversity.

Although much of the area was already protected, protection came through a complex mixture of overlapping jurisdictions, with different rules and regulations governing different parts of the archipelago. The national monument designation creates a single jurisdiction for the entire area. It also provides very strong protection - within five years, there will be no fishing or extraction of resources within the protected area. Public access of any kind will be extremely restricted (the only place where it is even being considered is on Midway). Scientific access to the rest of the chain will be allowed, but only with permits, and on a limited basis. In other words, for the majority of the time the vast majority of the area will be entirely off limits to humans. To the best of my knowledge, nothing like this has ever been done before - and certainly not at this scale.

It is difficult to overstate the significance of this act. This new area is seven times larger than the sum total of the other marine protected areas in the country. It contains the primary breeding areas for the Hawaiian Monk Seal (endangered) and the Hawaiian population of Green Sea Turtles (threatened). Midway Atoll, which is included in the monument, is the site of the largest albatross colony in the world - and that's just the above sea level parts. The coral reefs in the monument are in reasonably good shape. The islands and atols are largely uninhabited, and the ecosystem as a whole has suffered relatively little damage from human activities.

Over the next several days, I'll try to put up posts about the individual islands, atols, reefs, and banks that make up the new monument. Right now, I'll close by saying something that I never expected to: President Bush, you done good this time.