Ocean Conservation

huh...I mean as a scuba diver I'm super thrilled that more oceans are being protected than ever...But it's still not okay what Bush has done to the environment and I'm still not conceding to him.

President Bush's Last Act of Greenness
By Bryan Walsh for Time

Over the course of his two terms in office, President George W. Bush has taken a lot of mostly justified flak from environmentalists. But there's one area where Bush can legitimately claim a deep-green legacy: the often overlooked field of ocean conservation.

In 2006 Bush established the 140,000-sq.-mi. Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument off the northwestern coast of the Hawaiian Islands — at the time, the largest protected marine area in the U.S. Tuesday afternoon, however, Bush will beat his own record, announcing the creation of three separate marine national monuments in the central Pacific Ocean that together will span some 195,000 sq. mi. Though greens were hoping for an even larger area, taken together, the marine monuments will mean that President Bush — perhaps the least environmental President in U.S. history — will have protected more of the ocean than anyone else in the world.