G.W. Gets His Planet On....

Mr. Bush’s Monument
NY TIMES
Published: January 6, 2009

Try this on a globe sometime, or Google Earth: Looking head-on at the planet, spin it until Hawaii is a little north and east of center. What you’ll see — besides the barest fringes of America and Asia up there, New Guinea and New Zealand down there, and lots of island dots — is all blue.

This is the vast stage on which President Bush is trying to salvage his environmental legacy.

It’s strange but true. Mr. Bush, who has been monumentally indifferent to the health of continents and the atmosphere, is going down in history as a protector of the oceans.

On Tuesday, he designated three huge areas of the western Pacific as national monuments, declaring that their fish, birds, reefs and other marine life were more important than commercial fishing, drilling and mineral extraction. The protected waters encircle the Northern Mariana Islands (including the Mariana Trench, the deepest canyon on Earth) and parts of a sprawling collection of reefs and atolls known as the Line Islands.

They are a dazzling world of undersea volcanoes, pristine reefs, endangered seals, turtles and whales and intact food chains ruled by sharks.

In protecting nearly 200,000 square miles of ocean, an area far bigger than California, Mr. Bush has outdone his decision in 2006 to set aside 140,000 square miles in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands.

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.