Obama in Hawaii creates marine park wider world – ANSA.it

(Alessandra Baldini) (ANSA) – NEW YORK, AUGUST 26 – It will be the largest marine oasis of the world. In the week that marks the hundredth anniversary of the National Park Service, US President Barack Obama has given birth in Hawaii to the protected marine park largest of the globe. Twice the size of Texas, for over half a million square miles in the remote waters of the Pacific, the new oasis will be a haven of biodiversity and at the same time an extraordinary tribute to the ancestral cultures of the indigenous Hawaiians whose spirits of the ancestors’ linger about those waters’. The initiative Obama quadruples the marine oasis dall’impronunciabile name Papahanaumokuakea created in 2006 by George W. Bush. The president has appealed to the US Antiquities Act of 1906 to extend the national monument area and the prohibition of commercial fishing and ‘mining activities within it. Enlargement has been greeted by praise and protests in the islands of the state where Obama was born. Gov. David Ige recalled the “tremendous” debate that preceded the executive order concluding that the expansion “was balanced and could constitute a model of sustainability for other oceans of the Earth.” Papahanaumokuakea is a sanctuary for endangered species including the blue whale, sea turtles, the short-tailed albatross and the last monk seals in Hawaii. The oasis contains some of the coral reefs in the health of the globe. Its mountains and submerged islands are home to a rich fauna of seven species including the oldest living animals on earth: blacks corals that created them ‘their habitat 4,000 years ago. A quarter of the creatures that populate the oasis are not found elsewhere, others have not yet been identified or have been only recently as the small white octopus discovered a few months ago and renamed by Caspar scientists. With the expansion of the United States now has 1,200 marine protected areas covering 26 percent of the seas, according to Lauren Wenzel, director of the National Marine Protected Areas Center. The majority, unlike that of Haiwaii that the only admits for recreational purposes, allow, however, ‘in fishing or some other form of extractive resource. The enlargement of today increases the proportion of areas really “off limits” from 3 to 13%. (HANDLE). BN /