Memorandum on Protection of United States Coral Reefs in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands
May 26, 2000

Memorandum for the Secretary of Interior, the Secretary of Commerce

Subject: Protection of U.S. Coral Reefs in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands

The world's coral reefs-our tropical rain forests of the water-are in serious decline. These important and sensitive areas of biodiversity warrant special protection. While the United States has only 3 percent of the world's coral reefs, nearly 70 percent of U.S. coral reefs are in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. Many of the Northwest Hawaiian Island's coral, fish, and invertebrate species are unique, and the area is home to endangered Hawaiian monk seals and threatened turtles. In 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt set aside certain islands and reefs in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands for the protection of sea birds. Today, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages this area as the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge.

In June 1998, I signed an Executive Order for Coral Reef Protection (E.O. 13089), which established the Coral Reef Task Force and directed all Federal agencies with coral reef?related responsibilities to develop a strategy for coral reef protection. States and territories with coral reefs were invited to be full partners with the Federal Government in preparing an action plan to better protect and preserve the Nation's coral reef ecosystems. In March of this year, the Task Force issued the National Action Plan to Conserve Coral Reefs. The Plan lays out a science?based road map to healthy coral reefs for future generations, based on two fundamental strategies: promoting understanding of coral reef ecosystems by, for example, conducting comprehensive mapping, assessment, legacy by 75 percent. And once again, the majority is loading up the budget hills with anti-environmental riders that would cripple the new national monuments I created earlier this year, surrender our public lands to private interests, and undermine our efforts to protect water resources and combat global warming.
Already in this year of rather hot election rhetoric?you may have noticed there's an election this year?{laughter}?there have been commitments to roll hack the efforts I have taken to create 43 million roadless acres in our national forests. We need to have a clear, national, bipartisan consensus at the grassroots level that we don't need these riders and we do need a national commitment to the environment.

For thousands of years, oceans and beaches have stirred the human imagination. Today, ocean depths offer hopes for medicine and science. They still stir the curious child in all of us. I said in my State of the Union Address that I thought in the next few years we would not only decode the human genome and find cures for various kinds of cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, diabetes, we would also find out what's in the black holes in the universe. But we are also going to find out what's in the darkest depths of our oceans, and what we find out may save hundreds of thousands of people.

Forty?five years ago Rachel Carson wrote from her Maryland home that the sea "keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and of the relentless drive of life . . . in the sea nothing lives to itself . . . the present is linked with past and future, and each living thing with all that surrounds it." If we could all think that about each other and our community?that we do not live to ourselves, that we are linked to the past and the future, and that everything that happens requires a due consideration for all that surrounds it?then America would have its greatest days in the new millennium.

Thank you very much, and God bless you.

NOTE: The President spoke at 2:07 p.m. on North Ocean Beach. In his remarks, he referred to Camlyn Cummins, president, Maryland Coastal Bays Program; Marc Koenings, superintendent, Assateague National Island Seashore; and Senator Sarbanes' mother, Matina.