Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Riches few will witness

Hawaiian island protections could mean even more limited access.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published June 19, 2006

HONOLULU - The newest national monument boasts crystalline blue water, unspoiled islands with white sand beaches and vast reefs teeming with marine life.

But unlike Mount Rushmore or the Statue of Liberty, the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands will never be a place visitors can see by just packing the kids into the car for a week.

And even Hawaiians are unsure how much access they will have.

Remoteness is one factor, as the islands are scattered across 1,400 miles of the Pacific.

Federal authorities also have long put strict limits on who can set foot in the area to protect its endangered monk seals, nesting green sea turtles and other rare species. The protected area is home to more than 7,000 species, one-fourth of them found nowhere else.

President Bush created the vast marine sanctuary last week.

"It is a place to maintain biodiversity and to maintain basically the nurseries of the Pacific," said Conrad C. Lautenbacher, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which will manage nearly all of the protected area.

The few people familiar with the riches held by the string of islands - Hawaiians who revere the area, researchers and a handful of fishermen - are waiting to find out how the area's new status will affect their access to the area.

William Aila, who has been fighting to protect the area since 1986, was pleased the president provided the maximum protection for the area.

"For Hawaiians, it's really a reconnection and taking responsibility for these islands to the north of us, what we consider our elder islands," he said.

Aila is a Hawaiian activist, fisherman and Democratic candidate for governor, as well as a member of the Coral Reef Ecosystem Reserve Council, which had been advising federal authorities in what had been a multiyear process to make the islands a marine sanctuary.

He said commercial fishing doesn't belong in the islands and that the president was right to put a five-year phaseout on the eight or nine permits in effect for the area.

But Aila said he is concerned about what traditional Hawaiian fishermen will be allowed to do in the area. According to the president's proclamation: "Any monument resource harvested from the monument will be consumed in the monument."

Kitty Simonds, executive director of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, said her organization is concerned about the commercial fishing phaseout.

"It looks good to the rest of the world. But as far as I'm concerned, it was an easy declaration because no one lives there," she said. "So all you have are the few fishermen who would like to continue their livelihoods there."

Scientists also want to know more about the declaration's effects.

"We don't know the details of what this designation will mean for the research. But we're hopeful that we'll be able to continue a robust research project up there," said Malia Rivera of the University of Hawaii's Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology.

[Last modified June 19, 2006, 05:33:34]