Bush the Environmentalist
This has nothing to do with Jean-Michel Cousteau or anything but the mid-ternm elections coming up. When Democrats try to portray the recent crop of Republicans as anti-environment the GOP will retaliate with this and the public will accept it as proof the Republicans are not against environmentalism. Very slick move and because it is underwater in an area not known for oil deposits it probably didn’t cost any of Bush’s corporate masters anything in terms of lost business opportunities. There is nothing environmentally friendly about Bush and his cohorts - they don’t give a damn if it affects the bottom line.
WASHINGTON — President Bush created a vast new marine sanctuary Thursday, extending stronger federal protections to the northwest Hawaiian Islands and the surrounding waters with their endangered monk seals, nesting green sea turtles and other rare species.
The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands National Monument covers an archipelago 1,400 miles long and 100 miles wide in the Pacific Ocean. It is home to more than 7,000 species, at least one-fourth of them found nowhere else.
“To put this area in context, this national monument is more than 100 times larger than Yosemite National Park,” Bush said. “It’s larger than 46 of our 50 states, and more than seven times larger than all our national marine sanctuaries combined. This is a big deal.”
Creation of the nation’s 75th national monument was announced at a White House ceremony. The decision immediately sets aside 140,000 square miles of largely uninhabited islands, atolls, coral reef colonies and underwater peaks known as seamounts to be managed by federal and state agencies.
Bush said he drew inspiration from a documentary on the island chain’s biological resources shown at the White House in April by Jean-Michel Cousteau, the marine explorer and filmmaker. Over dinner that night, Bush said he also got “a pretty good lecture about life” from marine biologist Sylvia Earle, an explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society.
