Save Our Marine Monuments
What's At Stake
Commercial exploitation puts our nation’s underwater treasures—as well as endangered whales, ancient corals, seabirds, and other marine life—at risk.
Home to both the smallest and largest species on earth, our oceans brim with diverse and breathtaking wildlife. Recognizing the fragility of these ecosystems, presidents from both parties have designated special marine areas as national monuments—also known as “blue parks”—for permanent protection.
But former President Trump worked to eliminate safeguards for marine national monuments—like Northeast Canyons and Seamounts, Rose Atoll, and the Pacific Remote Islands—by shrinking their borders, giving industry a green light to exploit their resources, or both.
NRDC has been instrumental in the protection of America’s marine treasures, and we continue to fight for our oceans and the life they sustain. Our lawyers have helped successfully defend the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts, a spectacular deep-sea area with underwater mountains that rise higher than any peak east of the Rockies and canyons that plunge deeper than the Grand Canyon. Commercial fishing and other extractive practices such as deep-sea mining and oil and gas drilling would wreak havoc on this area’s ancient corals, the endangered and iconic sperm whale, the elusive Cuvier’s beaked whale, and many other species.
In October 2021, the Biden administration announced that it would restore protections to the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts, undoing the previous president's attempts to open up the vulnerable ocean ecosystem to commercial fishing.
Monument designations preserve biodiversity hot spots like these for future generations. With your help, we can save our blue parks from irreparable harm.
Call on the Biden administration to take bold action for our environment
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By providing a safe haven for marine life, free from the pressures caused by commercial extractive activities like fishing, drilling and mining, such areas help support healthier and more resilient populations.
The judge importantly found that the word “land” in the Antiquities Act isn’t limited to dry land—it also includes submerged land, as all three branches of the federal government have long agreed.
339
The number of animals sighted during a spring survey of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, including 12 beaked whales, which are rarely seen
