President Bush Announces Ocean Conservation Area

In what critics may well see as a last minute effort to secure his place in “green” history, American President George Bush yesterday announced that the best part of 200,000 square miles of the Pacific will become areas of conservation.

All this comes just two weeks before he leaves the White House, and follows eight years of pro-oil exploration, anti-environmental programs.

Bizarrely this announcement will actually make Bush the president who will have protected more square miles of the planet than any other world leader in history.

The protected regions of the Pacific are extremely remote, and include some of the most difficult to get to and sparsely populated islands in the world.

In these areas there are many marine creatures that are facing extinction, as well as still near perfect coral formations.

This is the only time in his presidency that bush has received unreserved praise from environmental groups which have continuously attacked White House policies throughout President Bush’s term of office.

The measures are rumoured to have been strongly opposed by the president’s right-hand man Dick Cheney and equally strongly defended by the president’s wife, and perhaps the real thrust behind the idea, Laura Bush.

The area includes almost one third of the incredibly remote islands in the western part of the Pacific, namely Mariana Islands, American Samoa and tiny Rose Atoll.

All of these places are very small but their legally owned areas of ocean are vast, amounting to over 195,000 square miles.

Very roughly speaking this is an area equivalent to the massive American state of Texas.

Included in the area will be the deepest point on the planet, the Mariana Trench, a huge slit in the ocean bed deeper than Everest and five times the volume of the Grand Canyon.

There will be no commercial fishing permitted in the conservation area, which is technically three separate areas.

Recreational fishing will be strictly controlled and there will be no mining and perhaps most crucially no oil and gas exploration.

Bush has not managed to satisfy many marine conservation experts who wanted a 200 mile exclusion zone around each of the islands, as the new conservation areas only stretch 50 miles out to sea.