President Donald Trump said Thursday that he was allowing commercial fishing in one of the world’s largest ocean reserves, introducing industrial operations for the first time in more than a decade to a vast area of the Pacific dotted with coral atolls and populated by endangered sea turtles and whales.
Trump issued an executive order opening up the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument, which lies about 750 miles west of Hawaii. President George W. Bush established the monument in 2009 and President Barack Obama expanded it in 2014 to its current area of nearly 500,000 square miles.
A second executive order directed the Commerce Department to loosen regulations that “overly burden America’s commercial fishing, aquaculture, and fish processing industries.” It also asks the Interior Department to conduct a review of all marine monuments and issue recommendations about any that should be opened to commercial fishing.
“The United States should be the world’s dominant seafood leader,” Trump wrote.
The marine monument, a chain of islands and atolls amid more than 160 seamounts, is a trove of marine biodiversity. Environmentalists said opening the area to commercial fishing would pose a serious threat to the area’s fragile ecosystems.
Trump, accompanied in the Oval Office by a fisherman from American Samoa and Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen, the territory’s delegate to the House of Representatives, said his predecessors had deprived Pacific island communities of “fertile grounds.”
“It’s so horrible and so stupid,” Trump said. “You’re talking about a massive ocean and they’re forced to go and travel four to seven days to go and fish in an area that’s not as good.” He was referring to the time it takes fishermen to travel from their home islands to fishing grounds outside the protected area.
“Thank you, President Trump,” Radewagen, a Republican, said in a statement Thursday. “This sensible proclamation is important to the stability and future of American Samoa’s economy, but it also is fantastic news for U.S. food security.”
Radewagen in January sent a letter to Trump calling for fishing to be reopened around the monument. The economy of American Samoa depends heavily on fishing, particularly tuna.
Other Republicans said the orders allowed for responsible commercial fishing that would be an economic boon for Americans in Hawaii and the Pacific territories.
“Our fellow Americans in the Indo-Pacific region rely on commercial fishing for their economic stability and their future,” said Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., who leads of the House Committee on Natural Resources.
He said greater access to fishing grounds would be a “monumental new economic opportunity.”
The executive order on the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument said that existing measures, such as the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act, would sufficiently protect the area’s resources, species and habitats.
Environmental activists said the Trump administration’s claims that those laws were sufficient to protect marine life were false. They questioned the legality of Trump’s proclamation opening the monument and said they intended to sue to stop it.
“This is a gift to industrial fishing fleets and a slap in the face to science and the generations of Pacific Islanders who have long called for greater protection of these sacred waters,” said Maxx Phillips, director for Hawaii and Pacific Islands at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental nonprofit organization.
Angelo Villagomez, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a research organization, said opening marine monuments to industrial fishing “sets a dangerous precedent that our public lands and waters are for sale to the highest bidder.”
Villagomez noted that the United States controlled nearly 5 million square miles of ocean and said, “there is room for us to have the world’s best managed fisheries and networks of marine protection, safeguarding the most threatened, iconic and special places in our ocean.”
Robert H. Richmond, a marine ecologist at the University of Hawaii, pushed back on the idea that opening the monument would help the fishing industry and said there was strong data showing that large protected areas actually enhanced fishing. That’s because they provide a safe area free from vessels where fish can accumulate, grow and be in higher density where spawning is more successful.
“What they are really are bank accounts where fish are the principal,” Richmond said, “and their reproductive output is the interest.”
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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
