A Beautiful Thing

Sometimes a beautiful thing happens when you least expect it: your child's first smile or laugh; the hummingbird that mistook you for a flower; the moment you looked into a friend's eyes and saw your soul mate. And sometimes this beautiful, wonderful thing comes from the last place you would expect it. That happened today, when George W. Bush set aside almost 140,000 square miles of ocean around the northern Hawaiian islands as a national monument.

The Pew Charitable Trusts has been at the forefront of the drive to protect this amazing bit of ocean, which (courtesy the Washington Post):

"include[s] almost 70 percent of the nation's tropical, shallow-water coral reefs, a rookery for 14 million seabirds, and the last refuge for the endangered Hawaiian monk seal and the threatened green sea turtle. The area also has an abundance of large predatory fish at a time when 90 percent of such species have disappeared from the world's oceans."

Bush hasn't exactly been the darling of environmentalists during his time in office, and some sceptics are already saying that this was an easy way for him to rack up brownie points and an environmental legacy. After all, the islands are uninhabited and the commercial fishing concerns were small scale. But just this once, lets give the man the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes people do something because it is the right thing to do rather than for political gain.