Bush Administration to Create Vast Marine Reserves in the Pacific

President George Bush will not likely be remembered as a champion of environmental causes.  On the contrary, he has done more than any president in recent history to weaken clean air and water laws in favor of big business.  But today, environmentalists are giving him a feather for his cap.  The Administration has announced the creation of three new marine national monuments - around remote islands in the central and western Pacific ocean.  Lisa Speer is the director of the National Resource Defense Councils' International Oceans Program.  She says it's important to protect pristine areas as reference points to measure degradation in other ocean regions.

"It becomes much more difficult to protect large areas once you have invested industrial operations already in place.  Once you have fishing, mining, oil and gas development, polluting activities, it becomes much more difficult to establish a protected area - not impossible, but much more difficult.  So, I think it's very important to protect pristine areas to the extent that we can, so that the world can continue to have some areas that remain untouched.  As we move forward, we're going to be confronting more difficult, politically difficult situations in establishing protected areas, but this gets us off to a good start."

The reserves will massively restrict oil and gas exploration and commercial fishing.  They will cover nearly 200-thousand square miles - an area roughly the size of Spain.

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