Two years after he designated what was then the world’s largest marine reserve around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, President George W. Bush fostered the expectation that his “Blue Legacy” would include an even bigger one designated just before he left office.

In August, he asked the various US government agencies and environmental and scientific organisations to examine just how far offshore should waters around 11 Pacific islands be protected from fishing and mining and turned into marine national monuments.

Marine scientists, environmentalists and New York Times editorialists urged him to protect the entire exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) off each island, which would have totalled 2.2 million sq km. That would have superseded not only the Papah’naumoku’kea Marine National Monument in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (360,000 sq km) and the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (410,000 sq km), but even the two high-seas pockets north of the Solomon islands and Papua New Guinea, which are scheduled for fishing closure in 2010 by signatories of the Parties to the Nauru Agreement and total 1.46 million sq km. (Australia’s government is examining a proposal to turn the lightly fished Coral Sea part of its EEZ, off the Great Barrier Reef, into a 357,000 sq km no-take reserve this year.)

Instead, Bush closed just 295,000 sq km of ocean, creating seven no-take zones that mostly go out from shore only 50 nautical miles (92 km) instead of the 200 nautical miles (370 km) in every direction that makes up the entire EEZ of an island. He also designated a largely symbolic monument around the Marianas Trench.

The measures, while applauded by environmentalists, led some to vow to take the proposal to the next administration.

“We look forward to working with the Obama administration to increase the size of these reserves,” said Jay Nelson, Director of Ocean Legacy for the Pew Environmental Group, who helped midwife both the Hawaiian and the Marianas reserves.

He will have a strong ally in Jane Lubchenco, a prominent marine scientist, who called for the full EEZs of all the islands to be protected before she was named to head the $4 billion-a-year National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which manages US oceans policy. As such, she will oversee how these monuments are run.

Bush’s move comes as declining stocks of yellowfin, bigeye and albacore tuna are being increasingly targeted by Atlantic fishing fleets following the collapse of their own stocks.

“The immediate effect of these trends is more documented incursions into US EEZs,” Mark Young, chief enforcement officer at the Coast Guard office in Honolulu, told Islands Business.

Many environmentalists say the time to create marine no-take areas is now, before these fleets start increasing their fishing effort in the Pacific.

Bush’s latest reserves in the Central Pacific include the islands of Howland, Baker, Palmyra, Johnston, Jarvis, Wake and Kingman Reef, making up the 215,000 sq km Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, along with the 35,000 sq km Rose Island Marine National Monument, just east of Pago Pago. In the Western Pacific, it involves a small area around the northern-most Mariana Islands.

If the Obama administration extends the monuments to the full EEZs, marine biologists like Steve Gaines say that added to the Phoenix Islands Protected Area and the Nauru Agreement no-take pockets of international waters, the measure could have some effect on the tuna stocks that provide income for many Pacific nations.

“Usually the effect of marine protected areas on fish like tuna that travel all over the ocean is marginal,” says Gaines, an authority on marine reserves who heads the Marine Science Institute at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “But if these multiple reserves are big enough, you could see increases in their populations.”

John Hampton, the Oceanic Fisheries Programme Manager at the Secretariat of the Pacific community, says that to be effective, marine protected areas need to go in tandem with reduced fishing outside those areas if the actual catch is to be reduced—something that the Nauru Agreement accomplishes by restricting fishing in the EEZs of its members as its bans its licensees from fishing in the high-seas pockets.

Ironically, the most significant opposition to extending the monuments to the full EEZs of the 11 islands had nothing to do with fishing: it came from the US Navy.

Even though Bush specified in a memorandum last August that the monument designation “should not limit the department of defense from carrying out its mission” in the Pacific, senior Pentagon officials expressed concern that it could lead to future restrictions on their ability to carry out their tasks. They cited lawsuits restricting the use of active sonar, which injures whales and dolphins, that arose from Bush’s designation of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands monument two years ago.

“Without the Navy, I think the monuments would have been a lot bigger,” said one environmentalist.

Then came opposition from recreational fishers. Eight organisations representing them urged Bush not to ban recreational fishing in any of the monuments, even though virtually none is taking place there or is likely to take place there in the foreseeable future because of their remote locations—with the exception of Palmyra, which hosts a few dozen fishermen a year.

“We do not support any unnecessary closures to recreational fishing unless there is a scientific determination that shows recreational fishing is harming the ecosystem,” said Patty Doerr of the American Sportfishing Association.

She added that the only way for a closure to be justified in the Pacific areas would be for recreational fishing to be introduced and for it to demonstrably harm the environment.

The new set of closed areas will have little immediate effect: Hawaii’s 123 long-liners were spending less than 5 percent of their time there, NOAA figures show, and the waters off the northernmost Marianas, which have few tuna, are not fished at all.

But that did not prevent aggressive pushback from Pacific marine conservationists’ old nemesis, the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, a federal agency whose executive director, Kitty Simonds, has fought restrictions on fishing for three decades.

Wespac is tasked with protecting the interests of fishing companies as well as insuring that these interests don’t reduce fish stocks, but it has presided over the rapid collapse of lobster stocks in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and a steep decline in the fish stocks of the Main Hawaiian Islands.

It has even encouraged the issuance of commercial bottom-fishing and lobster-fishing permits in the National Wildlife Refuges of Baker, Howland, Kingman, Jarvis, Johnston and Palmyra, in violation of federal laws, says Jim Maragos, a veteran Fish and Wildlife Service scientist.

In Saipan, where tourism and the garment industry are in free-fall, a pro-monument petition attracted 6000 signatures and the Hotel Association and the Chamber of Commerce endorsed turning the waters around the three northernmost islands—Maug, Asuncion and Uracus—into a marine national monument.

“Almost no one is able to enjoy these islands at this time,” wrote Lynn Knight, chairwoman of the association, in a letter to Bush, while monument status would “boost the local economy in promoting ecotourism”.

In contrast, the governor and most of the legislature have voiced their opposition to what they call “The Pew Monument” in language that strikingly resembles Wespac’s.

“The opposition was led by Wespac in every regard,” said Rick Gaffney, a former Wespac council member. “Without Wespac,” added Andrew Salas, a former Marianas legislator, “the opposition would have been minimal. There would have been a bit of grumbling because relations between the Marianas government and the federal government are pretty bad these days, but that’s it, because the overwhelming majority of the people support the monument.”

Wespac is under investigation by the US General Accountability Office and the Inspector General of the Commerce Department for suspected illegal lobbying.

In a letter to Bush that received wide publicity in Saipan, Aha Kiole, an organisation essentially created by Wespac to prevent marine reserves from being created in Hawaii, accused the president of having created the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands reserve “without the participation of the Native Hawaiian people,” all of whom feel “anger, trepidation and despair” whenever the monument “is mentioned.”

Although more than 100 hearings were held on the issue over six years, the letter asserts that most Hawaiians “did not know that the Pew Foundation was planning to take three-fourths of Hawaiian lands and make it into a monument.” (In fact, the total land area of the ten-islet monument is 13 sq km, while the rest of Hawaii totals 16,635sq km).

The Marianas monument, the letter continued, “will take an integral part of the Marianas culture away from the native people—with no hope of ever getting this part of their heritage back”.

Like all federal agencies, Wespac is barred from spending federal funds to lobby the legislative branches of state and federal government. The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, and the Inspector General of the Commerce Department are currently both investigating allegations that Wespac lobbied the US Congress and the Hawaii legislature to push its pro-fishing, anti-conservation agenda, notably in creating Aha Kiole.

In Saipan, much of the political elite has ties to Wespac. The governor’s chief of staff, Ray Mafnas, is a senior, unsalaried Wespac official who collects over US$600 a day every time he travels for Wespac. Arnold Palacios, Speaker of the House, is a former member of the Wespac council. He wrote in a letter to Bush that the “loss of control over such a vast area of land and water is an assault on the traditions and culture of the islands.”

The representative Speaker Palacios appointed as chairman of the House Federal Relations Committee, Representative Diego Benavente, is a former lieutenant governor who is running for governor. He engineered the approval of two He was president of the Saipan Fishermen’s Association in 2005 when it got a US$150,000 grant from Wespac to rent and equip a store to sell its members’ catch.

But this past December, the Marianas Variety reported that the store had closed two months after it opened because of unexpected expenses “like utilities, rent, and salaries.”

Benavente was quoted as saying: “We ran out of money, basically.”

Valentin Taisakan, the mayor of the Northern Islands Municipality, which lies south of the three islands designated as a monument by Bush in January, also wrote to Bush in opposition to the monument.

Taisakan, who lives in Saipan, received a US$90,000 Wespac grant to create a fishing base in his remote municipality, but the base never opened, according to Saipan sources.

In another letter to Bush opposing the designation, Juan Borja Tudela, the mayor of Saipan, where most of the Marianas’ 65,000 people live, said the monument waters should be left under the control of Wespac, which he called “much more sensitive to the Pacific Islanders’ way of life.”

Wespac’s vice-chairman, Manny Duenas, head of a fishermen’s group in Guam, went further in his own letter to Bush. “The taking of our marine resources may be construed as being no different than cattle rustling” and it would “serve as a springboard to ensure the cultural genocide of a people,” he wrote.

The result of all this opposition, and of negotiations between James Connaughton, Bush’s environmental adviser, and Gov. Benigno Fitial, was a Marianas marine reserve truncated into three segments, all falling far short of the goals articulated by its proponents:

• The Islands Unit around Maug, Asuncion and Uracus is only 42,500 sq km instead of the 300,000 sq km proposed by Lubchenco and Pew;

• The Marianas Trench unit is 205,000 sq km, but it only protects the seabed and does not restrict fishing. The trench’s bottom fauna, including bacteria that are the oldest forms of life on earth, depends on “rain” of nutrients from the surface area for food.

• The third component is a collection of 21 volcanic vents spewing bubbles and lava of great scientific interest. But since the area protected for each vent is just over a square kilometre and some volcanoes have calderas up to 10 km across, the protection appears to be meaningless, specialists say.

In fact, the only Northwestern Hawaiian island that can be visited is Midway, site of a major World War II battle, and no more than 40 people at the time are allowed. The average this past year was 15.