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?

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