Surprise!
Bush protects NWHI
by Alan D. McNarie

By now most people have heard: the Northwest Hawaiian Islands are a National Marine Monument. President Bush signed a proclamation designating the 1,400-mile-long chain of atolls and islets as the largest marine protected area on earth. The move aroused interest world-wide (the BBC broadcast the news even before the local papers came out). But even as the first news reports hit the press, some advocates and opponents of the monument were already asking what, exactly, Bush had done, and what would happen next.
Bush's designation of the NWHI as national monument caught both environmentalists and the fishing industry by surprise. Both sides had expected Bush to act on recommen-dations for finalizing the management plan for the Northwest Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Ecosystems Reserve, not proclaim a national monument.
"There was a draft EIS [Environmental Impact Statement, for the coral reef ecosystem reserve] that was due out that morning, and everybody was curious what NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] was intending to do," said Bill Wakefield, the only Hawai'i Island resident to hold a fishing permit in the NWHI. "And Bush stepped in and said, 'It's a monument; done deal.' He just stepped in and cut all that bullshit. It had been going on for five years."
Monument vs. Refuge
Rules for the ecosystem reserve would have been created and managed by executive fiat, and could have been changed by the executive branch without consulting Congress. Congressman Ed Case (D-2nd) had introduced a bill to create a Northwestern Hawaiian Islands National Marine Refuge. Bush's national monument designation essentially did the same thing, thereby stealing some of Case's thunder and giving the president something to trot out whenever he was attacked for anti-environmental stances on other issues.
Under the Antiquities Act of 1906, originally passed to preserve Native American archaeological sites, Congress delegates to the president the power to protect as national monuments "historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest." Since Congress essentially gave the President legislative authority in this area, only Congress can rescind or modify the terms of a national landmark proclamation. (When he took office, Bush learned, much to his chagrin, that he could not reverse the several national monument proclamations that Bill Clinton issued in his last days in office.)
Bush had only used the Antiquities Act once before. But the Northwest Hawaiian Islands offered him a relatively painless way to polish his environmental image. The islands aren't likely to contain oil or natural gas reserves, nor significant mineral deposits. The lucrative pearl and lobster fisheries in the area have already been exhausted. In fact, the only significant, current commercial uses of the area are eight bottom-fishing permits held by Hawai'i-based fishing vessels. The Pew Memorial Trust had even stepped in to offer its services in raising funds to buy out the remaining fishing contracts.
The public had demonstrated massive support for protection of the area, thanks to Case's bill, to hearings for the EIS, and to an e-mail and letter-writing campaign staged by native Hawaiian and environmental groups such as KAHEA and the National Audubon Society.
"Since 2002, there have been over 100 meetings and working group sessions open to the public - including 22 formal public hearings - generating over 52,000 comments," Bush said at the signing.
Republican Governor Linda Lingle also strongly supported the creation of a federal refuge.
As a result, the president probably had little trouble in signing a very pro-environment bill. (He may not even have read it beforehand. Dinah Bear, general counsel to the president's Council on Environmental Quality, was reportedly still working on the proclamation for most of the night before it was signed.)
Provisions and prohibitions
The proclamation includes the following:
Commercial fishing will be phased out over five years. In the meantime, fishing boats are allowed to take a maximum of 350,000 pounds of bottomfish and 180,000 pounds of trolled pelagic (open sea) fish annually. Fishing is prohibited in protected areas (i.e., "any Ecological Reserve, any Special Preservation Area, or the Midway Atoll Special Management Area").
Boats and ships need a permit before entering the area, and are required to carry electronic tracking gear at all times.
Recreational use and historical visits are limited to the area around Midway Island.
No ship or boat may leave anything in the area except for "vessel engine cooling water, weather deck runoff, and vessel engine exhaust" and "fish parts" (for "chumming" or attracting other fish. Presumably, the fish parts exception would be mostly phased out along with the commercial fishing.
Native Hawaiians are allowed to conduct cultural practices and "subsistence fishing" (defined as catching fish and eating them while still in the monument area), with permits. The use of poisons, explosives and electricity to "harvest" marine life is prohibited.
Oil, gas and mineral extraction-even exploration with that in mind-is banned.
The monument will receive a Hawaiian name. "This process is being overseen by the Native Hawaiian Cultural Working Group of the NWHI Coral Reef Reserve Advisory Council," noted a KAHEA e-mail shortly after the signing ceremony.
Removing, damaging or anchoring to coral is prohibited.
Introducing alien species is prohibited.
The U.S. military and Coast Guard are exempt from all the monument's rules, but "all activities and exercises of the Armed Forces shall be carried out in a manner that avoids, to the extent practicable and consistent with operational requirements, adverse impacts on monument resources and qualities."
However, much still needs to be worked out. The proclamation calls for the Secretaries of Commerce (through NOAA) and the Interior (through the Fish and Wildlife Service), to cooperate in administering the monument - in consultation with, in certain cases, the state of Hawai'i. These agencies already administer a complex of refuges: Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, the Battle of Midway National Memorial, and the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge, the Northwest Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Ecosystems Reserve. These existing areas will continue to be managed by their current agencies, but "in consultation" with the other agencies. Overlaying all of this will be a management plan for the monument as a whole. The development of that plan will entail more public hearings.
Conservation vs. Preservation?
Conspicuously absent from this ruling structure is the Western Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Council (Wespac), which currently has a major role in governing the area's fisheries.
In a June 19 Honolulu Advertiser article, Wespac Director Kitty Simonds raised the possibility of going to Congress to get the bottom fishery in the NWHI extended.
"It's the principle," she told Advertiser correspondent Jan TenBruggencate. "This is a healthy, well-managed fishery. It's hook and line. They're not fishing on coral reefs. There are no interactions with turtles or seabirds."
The Advertiser article also quoted Senators Daniel Akaka and Daniel Inouye, who both expressed sympathy for continued commercial fishing in the NWHI.
On the day that the Advertiser article appeared, the HIJ called Wespac's office seeking comment. Our call was returned by Honolulu lawyer/recreational fisherman Ed Ebisui, one of the council's Hawai'i members. Ebisui didn't know about Simonds' published remarks, and said he hadn't yet seen a copy of Bush's proclamation. But he defended bottom and pelagic fishing in the NWHI.
"By the sanctuary's own evaluation, these fisheries were determined to be compatible and consistent with the sanctuaries' goals and objectives," he said. "These are clean fisheries, basically supplying an essential, basic product, and that's food."
Ebisui contended, "The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands are in great shape from a biological stock viewpoint."
But he worried that closing out the NWHI's bottom-fishing fleet would have on the bottom fish populations in the main Hawaiian Islands - a population that he said had already been determined to be in "a state of overfishing" as of 2005. He noted that 25 percent of the three most popular bottomfish in the local market - onaga, opakapaka and hapu'upu'u - were supplied by the eight NWHI boats; another 25 percent by over 3,000 commercial fishing boats in the main islands, and 50 percent were imported. But he believes that those 3,000+ main island boats were only selling part of their catch, so the actual number of fish they were taking was much greater. Take the NWHI catch out of the equation, he speculated, and it "probably will cause additional stress on the main Hawaiian island fisheries."
Ebisui also maintained that a huge amount of "misinformation" had been spread about Wespac's activities. He noted that Wespac was the first to require boats to carry the electronic locating devices and that the council prohibited long-line fishing vessels - boats that string out miles of baited hooks and lines in the open ocean - from operating within 50 miles of the NWHI.
"We're not the bad guys," Ebisui said. "We use a science-based approach, and there's much, much opportunity for the public input and other people's input.... It's not this nefarious, clandestine, back room, good-old-boy process."
He characterized as "garbage" the reports that bottom fishers kill monk seals, and scoffed at environmentalists who link the crash of the lobster fishery to the starvation of monk seal pups.
"Explain to me why the pups that are born on the main islands are healthy. We've got a lot less lobster here than up there," he maintained. "There's a whole lot more forage food available for them than on the main Hawaiian islands."
But environmentalists point out that only a handful of the endangered Pacific monk seals give birth in the main islands. Most of the world's surviving 1,400 monk seals are born in, and must be fed from, the ecosystems in the NWHI. The Advertiser recently reported that the lobster population in those islands were showing no sign of recovery, and that the lobster trappers, when the fishery was active, had also pulled out 197 species of "by-catch," such as eels and octopi, which may also have been food sources for the seals.
Despite the science that Wespac claims to rely on in its decision-making, much remains to be learned about the immensely complex ecosystem that comprises the living ocean - including facts such as what, exactly, is required for the healthy diet of a nursing monk seal.
Ebisui sees the battle over the NWHI as a fight between "conservationists" (those who see the ocean as a series of resources to be conserved and used) and "preservationists" (those who do not want the system used at all).
The monument's supporters argue that it's difficult to manage the ocean's degraded ecosystems without a healthy, pristine system as a benchmark. The NWHI, with their 4,500 square miles of reefs and 7,000 known species of marine life, may be the last, best hope to preserve such a system; the research conducted there may help the world to better understand and manage its dwindling fisheries elsewhere.
At the signing ceremony, Bush quoted preservation advocate Jan-Michel Cousteau: ""How can we protect what we don't understand?"
"Ninety-five percent of our planet's oceans have yet to be explored," the president added. "We're just beginning to appreciate what the seas have to offer humanity. The waters of this new national monument will be a living laboratory that offers new opportunities to discover new life, that helps us better manage our ocean ecosystems, and allows us to pursue advances in science."
A Tale of Two Fishermen
Wespac currently divides the NWHI into two fishing zones: the Ho'omalu Zone in the northwestern half of the chain, and the Mau Zone, closer to the main islands. Fishing permits are issued for one of these two zones. One of the few fishermen who use the Ho'omalu zone is Bobby Gomes, who recently spent $400,000 a new boat.
"I guess we sort of saw it coming - the sanctuary, but not the monument status," he observes. "I guess it's a little bit disheartening to see my career cut short."
He says that while many of the permit-holders have other sources of income, he depends exclusively on fishing. For three decades, he's made his living from the sea. Fishing, he says, has been good to him; it's allowed him to buy a house and a new boat, and "I've never been laid off in 30 years." But he admits that he doesn't just fish for the money; he fishes because he loves it. When the fishery closes, he says, "I don't just lose my living, I lose my way of life."
"I live a humble life, but it still pays the bills," he says. "I've never really fished to be rich. It's sort of like the old days; you just take what you need."
He sees himself as a good steward of the sea. If the fish seem to be declining in an area, he says, "I just give it a rest, because if I hurt it, I'm not going to hurt anybody but my own family."
Like Simonds and Ebisui, Gomes maintains that the NWHI's bottom fishery is still healthy.
"I've never had a problem finding fish up there," he says.
But Wakefield, who holds a permit in the nearer, more heavily fished Mau zone, tells a different story.
"When I first started, I was up there 6 to 7 days [on an average trip]. Then it started going 9 days, 10 days, now it's going 14 to 17 sometimes," he says.
He believes that the numbers of onaga, 'opakapaka and hapu'upu'u are all shrinking. "The uku is less desirable, and there's a lot of that up there. Those other three species are declining."
He fully supports the national monument status for the islands, which he calls "the best thing Bush has ever done." Lately he's been letting his boat go out without him, while he concentrates on a new career in coffee farming, because, he says, he could foresee what was going to happen with the NWHI. But he says that the closure of the fishery will still be a financial hardship for him and his family. Like Gomes, he hopes that any buyout will compensate him for his investment and for lost future wages.
Jay Nelson of the Pew Charitable Trust has been working on that buyout plan. He says the Trust has "talked to a number of foundations and individuals about putting together a buyout fund." But he says that no "final plans" have been made.
Nelson does not think that Bush's decision on the monument was entirely political.
"It would be hard to argue that that was their sole motivation for it, given their five years of effort," he says. He notes that former president Bill Clinton had signed the bill creating the Northwest Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef EcoReserve System; but that designation, unlike a national monument, could have been revoked. Instead, the Bush administration let it stand.
"In a way, through inaction they agreed with Bill Clinton," Nelson says. "They've sort of earned their chops in terms of moving toward the protection of it."

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