Pacific Sanctuary Gets Bush’s Signature

President Bush created a vast new marine sanctuary Thursday, extending stronger federal protections to the northwest Hawaiian Islands and the surrounding waters with their endangered monk seals, nesting green sea turtles and other rare species.

The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands National Monument covers an archipelago 1,400 miles long and 100 miles wide in the Pacific Ocean. It is home to more than 7,000 species, at least one-fourth of them found nowhere else.

“To put this area in context, this national monument is more than 100 times larger than Yosemite National Park,” Bush said. “It’s larger than 46 of our 50 states, and more than seven times larger than all our national marine sanctuaries combined. This is a big deal.”

Creation of the nation’s 75th national monument was announced at a White House ceremony. The decision immediately sets aside 140,000 square miles of largely uninhabited islands, atolls, coral reef colonies and underwater peaks known as seamounts to be managed by federal and state agencies.

Bush said he drew inspiration from a documentary on the island chain’s biological resources shown at the White House in April by Jean-Michel Cousteau, the marine explorer and filmmaker. Over dinner that night, Bush said he also got “a pretty good lecture about life” from marine biologist Sylvia Earle, an explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society.

In introducing the president, First Lady Laura Bush quoted Mark Twain, who once described Hawaii as “the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean.”

Conrad C. Lautenbacher, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which will manage nearly all of the protected area, said: “It’s the single largest act of ocean conservation in history. It’s a large milestone.”

He added: “It is a place to maintain biodiversity and to maintain basically the nurseries of the Pacific. It spawns a lot of the life that permeates the middle of the Pacific Ocean.”

It is only the second time that Bush has invoked the 1906 National Antiquities Act, which gives the president authority to create national monuments to preserve the nation’s ancient cultural sites and unusual geological features.

Bush had planned as late as Wednesday to use the National Marine Sanctuary Act, a law that would allow challenges from Congress and others.

“As we drew closer and closer to our target to propose a marine sanctuary, and coupled with his great experience with Jean-Michel Cousteau and Sylvia Earle, he realized that we had the consensus, that we had run the process, and the time was right to just get the job done,” said James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Designating the area as a national monument takes immediate effect, Connaughton said, and the government doesn’t have to wait to begin a five-year phaseout of the eight or nine commercial fishing permits in the area and to impose strict prohibitions on any other extractive uses.

In February, Bush used the antiquities law for the first time when he declared part of the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan a national monument. The site, covering less than half an acre, marks where an estimated 20,000 slaves and free blacks were buried in the 18th century.