President Obama has been on a roll lately, conserving land and sea. Today he dropped another massive expansion of the National Parks and Monuments on the world, quadrupling the size of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. The monument’s expansion will put 582,578 square miles of land and sea under federal protection — a huge win for conservation and scientific research.
Papahānaumokuākea is a large archipelago commonly referred to as the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. The atolls and islands stretch into the deep blue Pacific for over 1,200 miles. That’s basically from Austin to Los Angeles for comparison’s sake. President Theodore Roosevelt was the first to recognize the area needed protecting in 1909 by creating a bird reservation. Nearly a century later, in 2006, President George W. Bush made it an official national monument.
The archipelago is one of the most biologically diverse place on the planet. One of the most extraordinary specimens living in the area is a black coral — thought to be 4,500 years old. The area is also home to one of the largest seamounts (underwater mountains) discovered, as tall as Mount Rainer in Washington State (14,000 feet high). The isles are home to 14 million birds, Hawaiian monk seals, and Hawaiian green sea turtles. If none of that floats your boat, the archipelago also includes Midway Island, where the infamous WWII battle was fought and the USS Yorktown was sunk.
Making this much land and sea a national monument means all commercial mining and fishing activities will be ceased in the area (the Feds say this will only decrease commercial fishing hauls by five percent, as they mostly fish in international waters anyway). We’ll still be allowed to recreationally fish, and native Hawaiians will maintain traditional access to the area, as will scientist for research purposes. This means that 60 percent of the federal waters off Hawaii are now closed to commercial fishing. Which should bring some much needed relief to our oceans’ already over-fished waters.
(Via The Washington Post)
