Salas touts monument plan in NPR interview

Andrew Salas, one of the advocates of the Marianas Marine Monument being proposed by President Bush, was in Washington D.C. last week to discuss his views on the subject in an interview with a National Public Radio program.

Salas, a former CNMI congressman and current vice chair of the Friends of the Monument, was interviewed by NPR’s Bruce Gellermen, host of the environmental show Living On Earth, which aired Dec. 5.

The plan to declare the CNMI’s three northernmost islands as a marine monument is being considered as part of Bush’s “Blue Legacy” project. The area covers 150,000 square miles in the CNMI that will be placed under federal protection.

According to Gellerman, the proposal has some influential supporters—including first lady Laura Bush—and prominent opponents.

Among those trying to sink the President’s plan to create this National Marine Monument is Vice President Dick Cheney, and nearly all of the elected officials of Micronesia, Gellerman noted.

“But many residents want to win federal protection, including Andrew Salas,” Gellerman said in his opening remarks for the show.

Salas identified the exact location of the area to Gellerman, saying the plan covers the islands of “Maug, Asuncion, and Uracas, and the water surrounding those three islands.”

Salas noted that the main reason for his trip to Washington, D.C. is to ask President Bush to further widen the scope of the monument, making it bigger than the 140,000 square miles monument that was established in Hawaii.

When Gellerman asked him how this would help the people of Northern Marianas, he said it would help “re-brand” the CNMI in the eyes of the global community.

“Over the past few years we’ve become a place where, you know, CNN has reported us as enslaving our guest workers, locking them up in their rooms and abusing 16-year-old waitresses. The reason why we want this thing to be [even] larger is the fact that we can use it, we can re-brand it. We have the Marianas Visitors Authority that will go out and re-brand the Commonwealth as the largest marine protected area in the world. So it would be a retooling of our ability to attract tourists to our Commonwealth,” he said.

When asked what federal protection would do for the area, Salas said the three islands are about 300 miles from Saipan and “right now we don’t have the means [to protect them].”

“It is protected by the Constitution, but we do not have the means to patrol that area and protect it. As a matter of fact, maybe seven or eight weeks ago, we caught a Taiwanese ship poaching on our waters,” he added.

He said that at its most basic level, fundamental protection is at least to keep outsiders away and to stop the poaching of fish.

“Look at what’s happening with the fish stocks all over the world. This will provide an area where fish can be protected and when they get big they can lay an abundance of eggs and they can go outside the protected areas and everybody can benefit from it,” Salas said.

Reacting to the conflicting stands of the first lady and the vice president, Salas said, “It’s not a perfect world, but we try our best.”

He said Gov. Benigno Fitial thinks of the plan “as another federal intrusion and it’s not.”

He said the association he represents has in its possession original copies of over 6,000 signatures from people in the CNMI supporting the monument.