Bigger marine sanctuary spells a ‘bold’ idea
CHRISTOPHER KELLEY / HAWAII UNDERSEA RESEARCH LABORATORY
A remotely operated vehicle called Deep Discoverer took photos of some of the species that can be found outside the current boundaries of Papahanaumokuakea, including black coral. It is one of the longest-living marine organisms, estimated at more than 4,500 years.
NOAA OFFICE OF OCEAN EXPLORATION AND RESEARCH, HOHONU MOANA
A corallium that is nearly completely overgrown by zooanthid (another type of cnidarian), and a brittlestar live in association. This particular species or coral is not commercially harvested, but is in the precious coral group that is often commercially harvested for jewelry at shallower depths.
NOAA OFFICE OF OCEAN EXPLORATION AND RESEARCH, HOHONU MOANA
This brisingid sea star was photographed by Deep Discoverer while exploring an unnamed seamount just outside the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument.
NOAA OFFICE OF OCEAN EXPLORATION AND RESEARCH, HOHONU MOANA
A squid, Walvisteuthis youngorum, is seen off Northeast Gardner Pinnacles in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands.
NOAA OFFICE OF OCEAN EXPLORATION AND RESEARCH, HOHONU MOANA
The tube feet of a sea star as it moves along the seafloor.
COURTESY NOAA
Deep Discoverer, operated by the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer, documents a bamboo coral on an unnamed seamount west of Salmon Bank, just south of Papahanaumokuakea MarineNational Monument.
COURTESY NOAA
A close-up of the polyps of the bamboo coral.
NOAA OFFICE OF OCEAN EXPLORATION AND RESEARCH, HOHONU MOANA
This glass sponge was seen on an unnamed seamount just outside the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument.
Local environmentalists, scientists and lawmakers banded together Thursday to announce that the Obama administration has responded to their proposal to expand Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument and make it, once again, the largest marine sanctuary in the world.
Representatives from the White House Council on Environmental Quality have met with stakeholders this week in Hawaii after Native Hawaiian leaders sent a letter to the administration in January asking President Barack Obama to vastly increase the size of Papahanaumokuakea to 200 from 50 nautical miles from shore.
“We urge people providing advice to the president to be bold,” said William Aila Jr., former head of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, during a press conference Thursday at the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Kewalo Marine Laboratory.
Current size of marine national monument in square miles
485,000
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Proposed expansion in square miles
625,000
Total area in square miles if approved
Aila, Office of Hawaiian Affairs CEO Kamanaopono Crabbe and Polynesian Voyaging Society President Nainoa Thompson were among the leaders who sent the letter to the White House. The Native Hawaiian leaders also asked the president to designate the state Office of Hawaiian Affairs as a co-trustee on the management committee.
The name Papahanaumokuakea pays homage to the union of two Hawaiian ancestors — Papahanaumoku and Wakea — who are credited with creating the Hawaiian Archipelago, the taro plant and the Hawaiian people.
The coalition of groups seeking the expansion maintain that the monument’s marine species, such as sea turtles, whales, dolphins, seabirds, sharks and tuna, are threatened by longline fishing vessels when they range outside the current protected area.
Since President George W. Bush made the original monument designation 10 years ago, scientific expeditions within the proposed expansion area have discovered high-density communities in which most of the animals are unknown to science, including black corals estimated to be 4,500 years old. Black corals are described as the old-growth redwood forests of the ocean.
Marti Townsend, executive director of the Sierra Club Hawaii Chapter, said, “This is an opportunity for Hawaii to protect its ocean resources and the health of its ocean, not only for the people of Hawaii who are directly relying on this as their own refrigerator, but also for the world because the oceans are dying.”
Within the region there are more than 7,000 marine species. The area is one of the few remaining predator-dominated ecosystems in the world. Large predatory fish such as sharks, giant trevally and groupers are abundant in Papahanaumokuakea waters. Elsewhere, these populations have been heavily depleted by fishing.
The commercial fishing industry opposes the proposed expansion. The Hawaii Seafood Council, Pacific Islands Fisheries Group and Hawaii Fishermen’s Alliance for Conservation and Tradition Inc. sent letters to the president asserting that widening Papahanaumokuakea’s boundaries would hurt the domestic fishing industry due to the loss of access for U.S. fishermen to fish in U.S. waters.
“The expansion of current boundaries will further disadvantage our domestic longline fishery that competes on the global market with cheap foreign imports that are harvested at higher environmental costs,” the Hawaii Fishermen’s Alliance said in a letter.
“This fishery anchors the local production of seafood consumed 40 percent here in the islands. In contrast, only 10 percent of the seafood consumed on the mainland is domestically produced,” said Neil Kanemoto, Pacific Islands Fisheries Group president, in a letter.
Not all fishermen oppose the bid for expansion. Jay Carpio, a fisherman from Maui, said tuna populations have declined due to longline fishing in Hawaii.
“We have seen the decline in tuna populations that longline fishing in Hawaii has caused, subjecting Hawaiians and Hawaii residents to import ahi poke from other countries,” Carpio said in a press release.
“What breaks my heart is you have so many local fishermen and fisher people who have a real sense of aloha aina who will refrain from fishing to help restore ocean resources, then you have these commercial takers who have no sense of that and are taking far more than their fair share,” Townsend said.
Proponents of the expansion celebrated the administration’s presence on the islands this week, saying it makes them hopeful Obama would broaden the zone.
“The very fact they are out here right now means they are listening,” said Narrissa Spies, a biologist at Kewalo Marine Laboratory. She called Papahanaumokuakea’s expansion the “easiest and most important thing the administration can do for the ocean.”
Backers hope Obama will support the proposal and make the announcement about it at the International Union for Conservation of Nature Council World Conservation Congress, which will be held at the the Hawai‘i Convention Center in September.
“It is perfectly lined up with the largest conservation conference in the world, because it would be the largest marine protected area in the world if President Obama expands it,” Spies said.
10 responses to “Bigger marine sanctuary spells a ‘bold’ idea”
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“The Native Hawaiian leaders also asked the president to designate the state Office of Hawaiian Affairs as a co-trustee on the management committee.”
There you have it! They are interested in controlling it, not conservation. Once it is declared, they will move to allow only Polynesian-Hawaiians the ability to fish there based on the made up notion of “ancient gathering rights”. Sneaky, sneaky sneaky.
Anytime you see “Native Hawaiian leaders” you know that there is a hidden agenda.
The elements of Kumulipo pertaining to the creation of the Hawaiian islands and the creation of humans can be summarized as follows.
The gods mated and gave birth to the Hawaiian islands as living beings, which remain alive to this day. Earth Mother’s name, Papahanaumoku, literally means Papa-who-gave-birth-to-the-islands. Sky Father Wakea mated with Papa who gave birth to the goddess Ho’ohokukalani, whose name means she who placed the stars into the heavens. Later when Papa was away on a journey, Wakea mated with his daughter Ho’ohokukalani (not child-molesting but a sacred ni’aupi’o mating), who then gave birth to a deformed stillborn baby Haloanakalaukapapili. Wakea and Ho’ohokukalani buried it, and from that burial grew the first taro plant. Wakea and Ho’ohokukalani mated again, and from that mating Ho’ohokukalani gave birth to a perfect human baby boy, to whom they gave the name Haloa to honor the stillborn elder brother.
The place where this beautiful creation legend gets twisted in an evil way concerns what was the role of the perfect baby boy Haloa as ancestor of future generations.
A benign interpretation is that Haloa is a Hawaiian name for the Biblical Adam — the ancestor from whom all humans are descended. Thus we are all children of the gods and brothers to the land, endowed with a divine right to receive sustenance and a stewardship responsibility to take care of the land and exercise authority over how it should be used. University of Hawaii professor emerita Rubellite Kawena Johnson, designated a Living Treasure of Hawaii, who has translated Kumulipo, confirms that this is the correct interpretation of Kumulipo.
But Hawaiian sovereignty activists twist the creation legend to say that Haloa is the primordial ancestor only of ethnic Hawaiians. Anyone who has at least one drop of Hawaiian native blood is a descendant of Haloa, but nobody else is a part of this family. Only ethnic Hawaiians are children of the gods and brothers of the land, while nobody else ever can be who lacks a drop of the magic blood. Therefore ethnic Hawaiians have a divine right to rule Hawaii. This is an evil fascist theology to justify ethnic Hawaiian racial supremacy.
Read more about Hawaiian religious fascism at
http://www.angelfire.com/big11a/HawnReligFascism.html
today’s Hawaiian sovereignty activists are disrespecting their ancestors and reviving the ancient religion — not because they sincerely believe in it, but cynically, as a tool to assert political power and racial control of government decision-making. In recent years we have seen sovereignty activists physically blocking construction of the world’s largest billion-dollar telescope on a mountaintop (Mauna Kea) because, they claim, that mountain is “sacred.” They have blocked the Army from doing live-fire training in a valley (Makua) which, they say, is “sacred.” They have blocked construction projects where old unmarked burials are inadvertently discovered because, they say, native Hawaiian bones are “sacred” and must not be disturbed. The volcano is “sacred” and its flow of lava must not be diverted even when towns are threatened. Pu’ukohola Heiau is sacred as well as all other heiaus and nearby lands, along with Pu’uhonua o Honaunau (place of refuge), Kukaniloko (the “birthing stones”) near Whitmore Village, the entire island of Moloka’i (belongs to the goddess Hina), and of course Iolani Palace (where the spirit of Queen Lili’uokalani still lives). Indeed, every square inch of land and ocean is sacred. The most recent claim (April 2016) is that the entirety of Papahanumokuakea is “sacred” — a huge area of the ocean and islands comprising the entire archipelago spanning 1600 miles from Lo’ihi to Kure Atoll, with all the land and water between, probably extending as an enormous rectangle 200 miles into the ocean in all directions around all the large and small islands. Such a rectangle would be about 500 miles wide by 2000 miles long — 1,000,000 (one million) square miles.
On each of those and numerous other similar situations, Hawaiian activists demand race-based veto power over decision-making, and millions of dollars in payoffs to racial organizations.
The correct name for what is happening — asserting a theological justification for race-based political power — is Hawaiian religious fascism. It’s just as destructive to the Aloha Spirit in Hawaii as radical Islamism and radical Zionism are to the Middle East and Europe. It’s long past time for Hawaii’s political leaders to stand up against Hawaiian religious fascism.
Leaving aside your paranoia, apparently fueled by white man’s guilt over the centuries of Eurosuprenacist racism now culminating with destruction of the ecosystem, what about the issue at hand – expanding the monument?
I think it’s a great idea, as are our National Parks in general.
Get off your hobby-horse and try to focus, Kenny-boy.
Danno — See Manoa, below.
Yeah, right, make a cadre of political insider hacks guardians of a precious resource. Why? Well, because the OHA wants it to be so. Shady insider politics at play as usual. The OHA is a STATE Hawaiian entity that already miserably failed in doing a good job in the Hawaiian and public land trust it was set up by the legislature to control. The ocean is ‘DYING’? Is it, really. Well if it might be then we need the Zierra Club political wonks to “save” it.
Yes! Let’s give all our rights to the Feds with nothing in return. Don’t be surprised when they change the rules and start mining the ocean’s riches and leave the State out in the cold.
I’m sure a government 4000+ miles away will be a better steward than the people who live in the area.
What this is really a blatant power grab by OHA to take control of an area that they have no business or experience to manage. What will the State have to pay OHA to “manage” this resource? Will Hawaii taxpayers have to foot the bill for the enforcement and management of this new obligation? Then realize that the cost of food for Hawaii residents will only go up as the fisheries resource this area encompasses will no longer be available. It is essentially the equivalent of taking all the farm land on Oahu out of use. Our marine food sources would now be “off limits” and we will become dependent on foreign ocean resources. This is a very STUPID IDEA.
Megadittoes Manoa!
The ocean needs all of the help it can get.