From The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson

Thank you Laura Bush, for those loving jabs you must have given your husband to get him to establish three new marine national monuments in the Pacific.

In a 2007 letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal, the first lady lamented the floating trash that was killing the chicks of Laysan albatrosses in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands after adults fed them objects they thought were food. She wrote of seeing “carcasses of albatross chicks which upon examination had fragments of plastic, including toys, cigarette lighters, toothbrushes and bottle caps in their stomachs.”

President Bush stunned environmentalists the year before by designating the islands a national marine monument. With such concern so close at hand, he turned his attention to preserving the waters over the Mariana Trench, so deep at nearly 7 miles down that Mount Everest could sink into it, as well as atolls off American Samoa and in the central Pacific. It was hard to imagine who would stand in the way of a chance for this White House to stand up for conservation.

It turned out that Vice President Dick Cheney did.

According to the Washington Post, Cheney, fishing industry interests, and local government officials complained last year that a marine preserve might damage commerce. The mayor of Saipan, the most populous island of the Marianas, wrote to Bush to say “the loss of extractive privileges of natural resources . . . far outweigh any benefits.”

White House environmental adviser James Connaughton downplayed Cheney’s concern, saying, “The vice president is flagging something I had already laid out in our policy briefings.”

Read more Environment