The Ragged Edge of the World (31 page)

Bush's executive order establishing Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument can only be described as wonderful. The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands already had some protection—presidents have recognized that Midway is a special place since the era of Teddy Roosevelt—but when Bush gave Midway and adjacent atolls monument status, he also imposed protective measures developed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that were strictly focused on preserving the ecology of the marine preserve.

The story of how this protection came about offers a glimpse of how Washington works. As was the case with Yellowstone Park in the nineteenth century, Midway's ace-in-the-hole was that it had no economic value. At 28 degrees North latitude, the atoll is subtropical, and while air temperatures in January are pleasant, the water is cool (Midway represents the northern limit of coral), making the atoll less attractive as a winter retreat for human snowbirds.

Every conservation victory needs a champion, and from what I can gather, a key player in establishing the monument was Laura Bush. Through meetings with former Coast Guard admiral Roger Rufe (then with the Ocean Conservancy and now with the Department of Homeland Security), the first lady became interested in marine issues, particularly the fate of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. A screening of a National Geographic documentary about the islands was arranged at the White House, and the president remained for the subsequent presentation by Jean-Michel Cousteau.

Bush was taken with the idea of establishing the world's largest marine sanctuary around the islands and atolls that link Midway to the main Hawaiian chain. His interest astonished many in the environmental community. David Helvarg, for instance, executive director of the marine group Blue Frontier, quipped, “Perhaps he thought the monk seals were an oppressed Christian group.”

In any event, Bush decided to go ahead. As Andy Read explained it, the Fish and Wildlife Service was charged with drawing up a set of rules to govern access to and use of the area. Assuming that this would be a protracted negotiation, the wildlife service came up with a very strict wish list, in the belief that some of these rules would inevitably have to be given up. But then Bush decided that it would be easier to designate the region a monument, which he could do by executive order. Rather than spend time developing a new set of regulations, he directed the involved agencies to use the rules that the wildlife service proposed. Thus Bush created the largest marine protected area in the world, governed by the most conservative and conservation-minded set of regulations yet imposed on a U.S. site.

This decision garnered so much positive publicity for the beleaguered president that he set in motion plans to establish a number of other monuments in the final year of his administration, protecting Palmyra Atoll and the Marianas Trench, among other marine treasures. Helvarg believes that this late-developing interest in monuments exactly recapitulates President Clinton's flurry of monument designations at the end of his second term. In Clinton's case, it was Bruce Babbitt who planted the idea that through executive orders and the establishment of monuments, he could protect more land than Teddy Roosevelt. Arguably, protecting isolated parts of the oceans is easier, but it is also arguable that the oceans are most in need of protection.

That became obvious once we began to tour the island.

But first, a little background.

When it emerged from the sea some 28 million years ago, Midway was situated where Oahu now stands. Continental drift has been moving the Pacific plate slowly northeast ever since. Within Midway's encircling coral are three islands. At 1,200 acres Sand, the only inhabited island, is the largest, followed by Eastern at 334 acres and then Spit, which at 6 acres is a mere dot.

The atoll almost, but not quite, qualifies as a Pacific tropical paradise. It has the requisite white-sand beaches and achingly blue lagoons, and when the weather holds it's pleasant enough. In winter, however, the northern Pacific's big storms regularly march through. Midway also has more infrastructure than the stereotypical paradise. Sand and Eastern still bear the marks of the war, including miles of runways in various stages of decomposition. (Only the main runway on Sand, where we landed, is maintained, since it provides the sole emergency landing strip for large planes in the northern Pacific.) Aprons, hangars, fuel depots, pillboxes, barracks, sheds and other legacies of past wars and struggles also cover the land. There are older ruins as well, such as the decaying remains of the veranda-skirted cable station built in 1905 for employees of the Commercial Pacific Cable Company, the enterprise that built and maintained the transpacific portion of the world's first round-the-world communication network. (No trace remains, however, of the posh hotel built in the 1930s by Pan Am to lure notables like Ernest Hemingway and John D. Rockefeller.)

Much of what remains is gradually returning to nature, and there is actually a good deal of charm in the sun-bleached, slowly slumping structures left behind. War has left a more lasting imprint on the ecology of the island. For instance, the Navy dredged a channel to accommodate big ships and built a sea wall, both of which affected the water flow in the lagoon. The iron in the sea wall fertilized algae growth. This and other changes fostered the invasion of the ciguatera dinoflagellate, a toxic, single-celled plant that accumulates in fish and leaves them inedible for humans. (My wife, Mary, got as sick as she's ever been in her life after getting ciguatera poisoning from sushi in San Francisco.)

Left to its own devices, nature could probably accommodate the lingering impact of war, but it's having a harder time dealing with the by-products of peace and prosperity. Walk anywhere on the runways on either Sand or Eastern Island and you will see scattered skeletons containing boluses of fiber and plastic, the remains of young albatross who ingested one too many plastic lighters, pens or other trinkets the birds picked up on the open ocean. In fact, plastic lies everywhere on Midway, and virtually every bit of it has been transported there in the stomach or beak of an albatross.

All that plastic serves as a reminder that we can run but we can't hide from the detritus of the consumer society. There is nowhere more remote from the making or use of plastics than Midway. No matter, it makes its way there, courtesy of ocean currents. Midway has the misfortune to lie in the sweep of one of the great gyres of the North Pacific.

The North Pacific Gyre is a wind-driven current that is strongly influenced by the spinning of the earth, as is the North Atlantic Gyre, halfway around the globe. As the current slowly rotates clockwise across thousands of miles, it collects floating debris dropped from ships, dumped into rivers, or otherwise discarded, often many thousands of miles away. Geophysics thus conspires to collect and concentrate this garbage in a giant floating patch on the ocean, an area larger than Texas that lies in the Pacific between Hawaii and California. The Hawaiian chain has the ill luck to sit precisely in the middle of the lower arm of this gyre, and, as Dave Johnston puts it, the islands act like a “comb,” trapping a good deal of the junk as it is swept past.

For wildlife, the tragedy is that the same forces that concentrate floating garbage are also vital to the food chain. While the vast expanse of the ocean seems to offer unlimited supplies of food, most of that water is nearly sterile. As Dave explains it, the oceans are dilute, so that anything that concentrates prey is important to marine mammals, birds and other predators that live off the ocean's productivity. This means that albatross, monk seals, whales and big fish look for the fronts that form boundaries between water bodies, such as the boundary between an ocean current and the surrounding water.

Albatross, for instance, look for markers like smooth surface waters, which signify a down-welling, or for choppy water, which marks the shear point where moving water meets the larger ocean. At such boundaries the differing movements of surface waters bring up nutrient-rich waters from the depths, which fertilize growing plankton, which then attract squid, which in turn feed the albatross and a host of other animals. These boundaries and convergence zones, however, also collect surface trash. The big seabirds evolved to find these zones and pinch food from the surface, and when they are feeding they don't always discriminate between a squid and a bright object like a lighter.

This became clear when Marc Romano, a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, gave the grad students an assignment. If Midway does not exactly conform to the Michener ideal of a tropical paradise, from the point of view of a migratory bird professional like Marc, the atoll comes pretty close.

Ninety-six percent of the world's black-footed albatross and 99 percent of the world's Laysan albatross breed in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, two-thirds of them on Midway alone. The sight of hundreds of thousands of nesting birds brings up surprising emotions, possibly because such immense concentrations of life also remind us of how much has been lost elsewhere. Birds were literally everywhere, and either never developed or had forgotten any fear of humans. This means that they only grudgingly gave way when we walked or pedaled about the island. Indeed, they seemed sociable and curious (though not so curious as penguins, which can't get enough of people watching).

In fact, walking among the albatross is an ego-enhancing experience. Their most common vocalization is a clacking, and when that is multiplied by many thousands of birds, the resulting background noise sounds like polite applause, which gradually swells as you pass. Notwithstanding that the clacking is probably an expression of annoyance, we all got to feel like rock stars as we moved about.

To give the students some hands-on experience with the plastics threat, Andy, Dave and Marc sent them out to collect the stomach contents of dead birds. Once gathered, the contents were dumped on a table and itemized. In bird one, a plastic comb; bird two, a lighter, bottle caps, and a stopper; bird six, a plastic spoon; and so on. One bird had dental floss in its stomach, another monofilament (which Marc says attracts fish eggs, which in turn attract albatross). The plastics are mostly a threat when the birds are young—older, more developed, animals can regurgitate their stomach contents. Younger birds can survive one ounce, but two ounces of plastics crowds out food, and they starve.

Despite plastics and other threats like the stray fishhook, albatross have better chances than most of earth's species. Marc said that the northern species of albatross had the highest survival rates of any species of bird. One study of a colony documented a 94 percent survival rate year after year for adult albatross. (This compares with 70-80 percent for puffins and 30-40 percent for waterfowl.) Wildlife officials started banding albatross on Midway in 1952, and some of those original banded birds still turn up. Further proof of the birds' low mortality rates is their leisurely approach to breeding. Many don't breed until after they are five years old, and some start as late as thirteen. If a species has a high infant mortality rate, evolutionary forces favor those that breed early and often. Marc explained that once a bird reached adulthood it really didn't seem to age any further. What must it be like to be an albatross and feel no sense of aging or loss with the passing of the seasons?

This longevity also could be taken as proof of the benefits of a virtuous lifestyle. In fact, there's something for everyone in the albatross's approach to family life. Feminists would have a hard time taking issue with the males, who pitch in and take over child rearing immediately after the babies hatch. Albatross may be one of the few species in which fathers are an asset rather than a clumsy menace around newborns. On the other hand, the “values” crowd might find inspiration in the birds' commitment to monogamy and their practice of mating for life.

Nutritionists might learn from the birds' healthy diet: squid and fish. Exercise buffs would approve of the albatross's willingness to cover large swaths of the planet just to find a good patch of squid. And in this day of scarce, expensive oil, energy-efficiency experts can marvel over the albatross's parsimonious energy use. Their graceful, tapered wings can lock in gliding position so that with favorable air currents an albatross can traverse huge distances with very little effort. They exploit the energy of storms and will ride the winds to fly 800 miles north—flying twelve hours at a stretch—to points just south of the Aleutians, where an underwater seamount causes an upwelling of the Kurosawa Current, which brings masses of squid to the surface. Once there, the albatross will bulk up before flying back to feed the chicks.

Biologists have succeeded in placing tracking devices on albatross. One bird covered 15,000 miles in 120 days, venturing as far as Japan. A computer-generated map of another bird's route near the Aleutians revealed that the bird followed the exact same path as one favored by long-line fishing boats in the area, which had the benefit of radar and sonar. For all the endless expanse of the Pacific, there turn out to be very few places to get a good meal, and so birds, humans, whales, seals and, for that matter, predatory fish all converge on the same places.