New Pacific Ocean National Monuments

While environmentalists appreciate it - I don't know how altruistic Bush's intent was... the military angle may have been his main objective.

Bush said the benefits of the monuments reached beyond nature.
"The monuments will preserve sites of cultural and spiritual significance to native peoples," he said.
"They will ensure full freedom of navigation, and include measures to uphold training missions and other military operations."

President Bush on Tuesday established three new national monuments in the Pacific Ocean, setting aside for permanent protection pristine coral reefs, the world's deepest underwater canyon and marine environments teeming with tropical fish, sea turtles, manta rays and giant clams.

Ranging from the seven-mile-deep Mariana Trench near Guam to the tiny Palmyra Atoll 1,000 miles south of Hawaii, the new monuments are spread out across the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from the California coast.
But despite their remoteness, they have close links with Bay Area marine scientists, who cheered the news...

The move follows a similar action by Bush in 2006 to establish a new monument in the northern Hawaiian islands...

Bush established the three monuments under the 1906 Antiquities Act, a law that allows presidents to set aside areas without approval from Congress. Commercial fishing, oil drilling, mining and waste dumping will now be prohibited there...

The three monuments are:

The Mariana Trench Marine National Monument, near Guam, which includes the world's deepest point, at 36,201 feet deep, and its surrounding undersea volcanoes and thermal vents.

The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, which is made up of seven areas to the south and west of Hawaii: Palmyra Atoll, Wake Island, Kingman Reef, and Howland, Baker, and Jarvis Islands, along with Johnston Atoll, a key habitat for Hawaiian monk seals, and famous for nuclear weapons tests in early 1960s.

The Rose Atoll Marine National Monument, a diamond-shaped island east of American Samoa that includes rare species of nesting petrels, shearwaters and terns, along with giant clams, reef sharks and rose-colored corals.

The United States has jurisdiction over fishing and other commercial rules in the areas because all the islands are U.S. territories.