Kudos to President Bush

I don't often say it but for this he deserves it:

President Bush will create the world's largest protected marine area today, designating as a national monument a 1,200-mile-long chain of small Hawaiian islands and surrounding waters and reefs that are home to a spectacular array of sea life, senior administration officials said last night.

In his second use of the 100-year old National Antiquities Act, which empowers the president to protect important cultural or geological resources instantly, Mr. Bush will enact a suite of strict rules for the area, including a five-year phasing out of commercial and sport fishing, officials said.

The chain of largely uninhabited atolls, seamounts, reefs and shoals, which sweeps northwest from the big islands of Hawaii, is called the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and is home to some 7,000 species of marine life, including endangered green sea turtles and Hawaiian monk seals and millions of breeding seabirds.

Earlier yesterday, the region, which at 140,000 square miles is nearly the size of California, was to have been named a national marine sanctuary, a different kind of protection that could have taken a year to enact.

But Mr. Bush, in a last meeting to consider the plan and timetable, decided to cut things short, said a senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to take attention away from Mr. Bush's public statement today. "He said, Look, I've got this authority, I'm going to use it," the official said.

"What we avoid is another year or more in process when we already have consensus," he said, noting that national-monument status avoided the prospect of lawsuits over proposed sanctuary regulations. Since the Clinton administration, environmental campaigners had pushed for marine sanctuary status for the area, and as recently as early last night they were girding for months of public debate over the proposed sanctuary rules with a few groups representing Pacific fish-processing companies and fishing fleets.

Last night, representatives of the conservation groups were at first startled by the sudden switch, but were then exultant.

"This is really for the first time saying the primary purpose of this area of the ocean is to be a pristine, or nearly pristine, kind of place," said David Festa of a private group. "It would take it off the books as a fishing ground. That's really the first time we'll have done that in any kind of sizable area."