**** Cheney battles Laura Bush over protecting Pacific Ocean
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/phot...crawford_2.gif
**** Cheney battles Laura Bush over protecting Pacific Ocean
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/pres...1/04/whale.jpg
With less than three months left in the Bush administration, the battle over protecting two vast areas of the Pacific Ocean from fishing and mineral exploitation is raging as if the president's legacy depended on it.
Which, actually, it does.
On one side is first lady Laura Bush, who according to the Washington Post has asked for two briefings on the issue from the White House staff, and has asked her aides to confer with scientists on how to preserve diverse ecosystems.
On the other side is Vice President **** Cheney, who along with some officials in the Northern Mariana Islands argues that banning fishing and mineral exploration will hurt the region's economy.
"It's hard, but it should be," said James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. "These are big, consequential, national decisions that have international ramifications."
In August, President Bush told several federal agencies to begin working on a plan so that he could create two "marine conservation management areas" in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth between Japan and Guam. That move -- if it happens -- would greatly expand Bush's environmental legacy, adding vast territory to the 140,000 miles he designated for protection in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands in 2006.
It would also protect blue sharks like the one above from shark finning, the practice of removing the dorsal fin from sharks for such Asian delicacies as shark fin soup. According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, hundreds of thousands of finned sharks are incidentally caught by fishermen chasing swordfish and tuna in the waters off Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands.
-- Johanna Neuman
