Clinton Creates 84-Million Acre Preserve to Save Coral, Wildlife

President Clinton announced Monday the creation of the nation’s biggest official nature reserve--an expanse of 84 million underwater acres along the northwestern stretch of the Hawaiian Islands--to help protect seals, ocean birds and about 70% of the nation’s coral reefs.

The president’s executive order establishes the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Ecosystem Reserve, a vast area larger than Florida and Georgia combined. The order bans removal of coral from the region and caps commercial and recreational fishing at existing, already limited levels.

The new reserve is “a special place where the sea is a living rainbow,” Clinton said at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, where giant pictures of coral were projected on a screen behind him. The order establishes “the strongest level of protection for oceans ever enacted,” and sets “a new global standard for reef and marine wildlife protection,” he told members of the audience, many of whom were wearing leis made from purple and yellow Hawaiian blossoms.

Though some fishing industry representatives voiced opposition to the reserve, the announcement was welcomed by environmental groups, which are hopeful that the Clinton administration will grant more of the items on their extensive wish list before leaving office Jan. 20.

Barbara Jeanne Polo, executive director of the American Oceans Campaign, said she was “pretty thrilled” by Clinton’s action: “Finally, the administration is looking at wilderness and important ecological areas in the ocean and thinking about using the same kinds of tools that we use on land to protect them.”

But Kitty Simonds, executive director of the Western Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Council, a fishing industry group, said her organization “would be very concerned if something was done that hurt our fishermen.”

The council, one of eight regional councils established by Congress to regulate the use of waters three to 200 miles off U.S. shores, is worried that capping the fishing level will cripple the industry and could lead to the closure of all commercial fisheries in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands except those involved in bottom fishing.

The reserve’s boundaries are outside state waters. The area encompasses 99,500 square nautical miles (131,800 square statute miles), and includes two existing national refuges for wildlife, one of them at Midway.

The order designates 15 “reserve preservation areas” totaling about 4 million acres, where all fishing, anchoring and touching coral will be prohibited. These areas include the habitat of the monk seal, an endangered species.

The order also bans oil and gas drilling and production in the reserve waters.

Clinton compared coral reefs to rain forests on land. “These remarkable living structures, built cell by cell over millions of years, are at once irreplaceable and valuable,” he said. “Coral reefs are beautiful. But more important than that, they’re home to thousands of species of fish and wildlife found nowhere else on Earth.”

The effort to protect Hawaii’s reefs by keeping them in pristine condition comes against a background of destruction, the president said, noting that 25% of the world’s coral reefs have been killed by pollution, dynamite fishing and poaching, among other causes.

Karen Garrison, senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the reserve “the first gem in the necklace of ocean wilderness areas that council believes should ring the entire country.”

“We’ve set aside more than 200 million acres of wilderness and national parks to provide sanctuaries for wildlife and ourselves,” said Sarah Chasis, senior attorney and director of the council’s water and coastal program. “But we have until now largely neglected our oceans. . . . Less than a hundredth of a percent of our oceans currently are true wilderness areas.”

Clinton has ordered the Interior and Commerce departments to work with the state of Hawaii on a management plan for the new reserve. Native Hawaiians will be allowed to continue using the reefs for “subsistence and cultural uses,” officials said, referring to limited business activities and traditional cultural and religious ceremonies.