Guano Mining, Navassa Island

The George W. Bush presidency was airlifted away on Tuesday, letting historians get to work making claims about just what it all meant. These scholars were, if we are to believe cable-news talking heads and the former president himself, his target audience during his lame-duck months—the “legacy building” interregnum.  Following in the footsteps of his predecessor (Clinton signed his Roadless Area Conservation Rule, keeping 58.5 million acres of national forest land away from extractive industries, just over a week before moving out of the White House), Bush looks to etch a place for himself in the exalted narrative of the history of conservation in the United States.  Harnessing the power of the dubiously applicable 1906 American Antiquities Act, he created by executive decree marine reserves throughout the Pacific—in the Northern Mariana Island, the equatorial Line Islands, and the Rose Atoll, a tiny ring of coral making up a portion of American Samoa.

The story told in the media is one strictly about conservation, sparing few superlatives. White House Chairman on Environmental Quality James L. Connaughton (a former energy lobbyist, Superfund opponent, and author of a 1993 article entitled “Defending Charges of Environmental Crime—Growth Industry of the ‘90s”) raved that “These locations are truly among the last pristine environments on Earth.” Agence France-Presse’s account announced these three reserves will “nudge out the Phoenix Island Protected Area, established in 2008 by the South Pacific nation of Kiribati as the world’s largest protected area,” the latter’s measly 164,200 square miles trumped by Bush’s 195,280. The Pew Group’s Joshua Reichert went on Living on Earth last week and admitted, “Frankly, it’s more of the surface of the Earth that George W. Bush has protected than any other person in history.”

So we can tell this story with the former president our modern equivalent of by-gone macho conversationalists Teddy Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. But what other story could be told? What happens when we try to put these reserves not into the history of conservation but into the history of these watery parts of the world?

Tim asked, in his post here last week announcing the reserves, “Who knew that the U.S. had jurisdiction over the Marianas Trench?” The question is a good one.  Each of places where Bush designated reserved has its own story of how it ended up under U.S. jurisdiction. But, there are two watershed years: 1856 and 1941. 

1856 marks Congress’s passage of the Guano Island Act. Promoted in the Senate by William Seward, the noted expansionist who championed the annexation of Alaska (“Seward’s Folly”), this legislation was ambivalent about expanding national boundaries yet passionate about dung. The agricultural miracles of guano were heralded by proponents of so-called “book farming,” who promised its high levels of phosphorous could restore the tired soils of the tobacco piedmont. A Peruvian monopoly on the guano market set prospectors’ sights on bumps of land in the Caribbean and across the Pacific which, for millennia, had served as the toilets of seabirds. Seward’s act promised that “whenever any citizen…discovers a deposit of guano on any island, rock, or key, not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other government, [it shall] be considered as appertaining to the United States.” The word appertaining is purposely vague. In fact, the State Department in 1931 admitted that it was “difficult to determine the exact legal significance of acts performed under the Guano Acts.” Legal significance aside, dozens and dozens of islands, reefs, and atolls were claimed. The U.S. still counts among its territories several former guano claims: Baker, Howard, Jarvis, and Wake Islands; Johnston, Kingman, and Palmyra Atolls; and Kingman Reef—all of which together now comprise Bush’s Remote Pacific Islands National Marine Monument.

Legal historian Christina Duffy Burnett argues that the Guano Island Act’s “obscure terminology” helped the U.S. government “find ways to take control over territory while avoiding many of the responsibilities that sovereignty implies.” So federal protection of the territory waxed and waned with federal interest in the territory. Burnett’s prime example is Palmyra, “claimed as a guano island, abandoned, claimed by Hawai’i, annexed by the United States along with Hawai’i, included in a statute ‘incorporating’ Hawai’i into the United States, excluded when Hawai’i became a state.” Now it exists as a constitutional oddity: our only “incorporated” territory, enjoying “more comprehensive constitutional protections than any other nonstate area claimed by the United States,” including Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands—where four million American nationals live their lives.

There was renewed interest in the picked-over guano islands when the U.S. declared war on Japan in December of 1941. Landing strips paved the little bit of surface area they offered (and still stand out starkly on Google Earth). The Mariana Islands, at the time occupied by Japan, were invaded by American troops and served as an important U.S. naval base in the war’s Pacific theater. The islands already had a fifty year history of colonial contest, and (a bit ironically) the UN’s mandate for the self-determination of colonized peoples led to a vote among northern Marianas to remain a U.S. territory, “which many believe institutionalized,” according to diplomatic historian Don Farrell, the partition of the colonial era. This vote would allow Bush to establish the Northern Mariana Islands National Marine Monument. 

While the portion of the Samoan archipelago named American Samoa had been annexed in 1899 (wiping away the ten-year old treaty with the U.S. and Germany permitting self-government), the Second World War profoundly Americanized it.  Indigenous islanders were outnumbered by American Seabees, and the nationalist movements one saw earlier in the century did not reappear after 1945—although local leaders resisted the Department of the Interior’s attempts at incorporation. The resulting U.S. authority in the region permitted Bush’s creation of the Rose Atoll National Marine Monument.

From 1945 on, the entire central Pacific became a nuclear landscape. The Enola Gay took off from the Marianas’ Tinian Island. The Marshall Islands (which had been invaded, occupied, and annexed in a manner similar to the Marianas) became the center of extensive U.S. hydrogen bomb testing, with three islands of the Bikini Atoll vaporized in the “Bravo” detonation, and 3,100 Bikinians displaced permanently.  Samoans still today work to call attention to the ill effects of three decades of French atomic tests. And, Johnston Atoll, at the same time as its surrounding waters transform into a national monument, will soon see plutonium waste buried under its coral.

How does this narrative transform how we think about these new conservation areas? 

For me, the answer lies in a phrase used in almost every media account to describe these places: “relatively uninhabited.”

This employs the rhetoric (and so, the ideology) of wilderness. Wilderness works to, among other things, annihilate history. There necessarily must be no human history if there are to be claims to the title of  “pristine.” So we don’t hear about the centuries of indigenous habitation, extractive industry, colonial warring, military seizure, atomic free-wheeling, and so on. To cover over this history is unjust and invites folly. It is also scientifically irresponsible, as we hear about the exquisite biodiversity—the unspoiled coconut crab—and nothing of the human mark left on these places. Can we talk ever of “pristine” oceans, even in places far removed from phosphate mining and fallout? 

More importantly, the phrase marginalizes and disempowers human beings. Just how many people live in a “relatively uninhabited” landscape?  The specific, detailed, and lengthy accounting of the reserve’s biota exists in the press reports alongside vague, general, and rare mentions of people. The Economist has the most to say on the matter, but even here we don’t know whether the “recreational fisherman” are the region’s native peoples or white millionaires from San Diego and Tokyo. Commercial fishing is banned outright (along with tourism and resource extraction), so we can be sure if anyone in the region made a livelihood in these places, they will do so no longer.

In truth, I am ignorant of the human interactions—economic, political, and cultural—with these places.  But the White House and its supporters from the big environmental NGOs have done nothing to rid me of that ignorance. The journalists offer no voices from these places. We are to celebrate Bush’s moral break—for the good of the Earth—with Cheney’s pro-industry stance.  It all makes me uneasy. 

After all, it’s a unsettlingly familiar pattern: Bush using executive decree and the authority of tangentially relevant legislation to enact his designs on a people over whom we continuously assert control and influence yet extend protection only when it is in our self interest.  The region is one in which our history shows us to enter chiefly for its resources and military advantages. And here, as in Iraq, President Obama is left with the task of figuring out how to foot the bill.   

The ends are not troubling; but must we dismiss the means? The virtuous name of conservation—the Nez Perce of Yellowstone, the Blackfeet of Glacier, and the Havasupai of Grand Canyon would all attest—can cover all manner of sins. For me, I’m sorry to see Kiribati, conservers of their home ground, lose the record.