WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 (UPI) -- U.S. President George Bush designated "three beautiful and biologically diverse areas" in the Pacific as marine national monuments Tuesday.
Bush signed proclamations creating the Marianas Trench, the Pacific Remote Islands and the Rose Atoll marine national monuments.
"Taken together, these three new national monuments cover nearly 200,000 square miles, and they will now receive our nation's highest level of environmental recognition and conservation," Bush said in remarks at the White House before signing the proclamations.
Bush set aside the areas as national monuments under authority granted him by the Antiquities Act that President Theodore Roosevelt signed in 1906. The designations bar resource destruction or extraction, waste dumping and commercial fishing.
The marine national monuments "will allow for research, free passage, and recreation -- including the possibility of recreational fishing one day," Bush said.
"For seabirds and marine life, they will be sanctuaries to grow and thrive," he said. "For scientists, they will be places to extend the frontiers of discovery. And for the American people, they will be places that honor our duty to be good stewards of the Almighty's creation.
