The guy who supports off-shore drilling saved part of the Pacific

Add comment January 7th, 2009

Yep, that’s right.

WASHINGTON - Announcing the largest marine conservation effort in history, President George W. Bush on Tuesday designated three remote Pacific island areas as national monuments to protect them from energy extraction and commercial fishing.

Yes, for sure!

The additions mean Bush has set aside more square mileage of ocean for protection than any other political leader.

The three new monuments, surrounding far-flung islands, reefs and atolls scattered across the Pacific, will add 195,000 square miles of protected waters to the 135,000 square miles around the Northwest Hawaiian Islands that Bush protected in 2006.

But note this New York Times editorial …

That created a single monument larger than all the country’s national parks combined. If you judge the actions of presidential conservationists solely by the sheer size of planetary surface they protected during their time in office, Mr. Bush would outdo even Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.

This record, though, has enormous asterisks:

*The new monuments are not nearly as big as they could have been. Mr. Bush could have set their boundaries anywhere from 3 miles from the shores of the territories they encircle to the full 200 miles under United States jurisdiction. He chose 50 miles, excluding huge expanses of deep ocean.

*The protections could have been more stringent. They don’t rule out recreational fishing, for example, and do not include waters above the Mariana Trench.

*Big as they are, the monuments are not nearly enough to offset eight years of Mr. Bush’s bad environmental policies, marked by inaction on climate change, the sacrifice of millions of acres of public lands to oil and gas exploration, and indifference bordering on hostility to endangered species and fragile ecosystems.