A visit to the remote Pacific island ecosystem losing protections

I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is the Sunday story from up first. Way out in the Pacific Ocean, there are tiny islands known as Atolls that few people have ever seen. They're home to some of the most pristine ecosystems in the world. These islands and Atolls are U.S. territories, but no one lives there permanently. Really, they belong to the wildlife. Like big colonies of sea birds. Riding coral reefs. And farther offshore. Pots of melon-headed whales. The waters around these Atolls are protected as U.S. marine national monuments. Together, they cover more than a million square miles of ocean. They're the country's largest fully protected conservation areas. Now the Trump administration is trying to change that. President Trump is opening some of these protected waters to commercial fishing. And this is reigniting a battle between the fishing industry and conservationists, as well as native Hawaiians. NPR's Lauren Summer got some special permission to visit one of these Atolls. Today, on the show, she takes us to this wild remote place. She reports on what's at stake and what it means for conservation across the U.S. Stay with us. We're back with a Sunday story. I'm with reporter Lauren Summer, who recently traveled to one of the world's most remote ocean atolls. Hi Lauren. Hey Aisha. So you took this trip to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Describe where you went and how you got there. Yeah, so I went to Palmyra atoll. It's about a thousand miles south of Hawai'i. It's about as far from a continent that you can get on the planet. And it's definitely not a place where you can go like book a ticket online to get there. It took months for me to get permissions to go. Because it's a national wildlife refuge that's off limits to the general public. And, you know, even packing took me some extra work, which actually started in my kitchen. Okay, so now my clothes, my shoes, everything is bags. So I had to dig through my freezer, you know, make some space for all that old like crusty ice cream. Because everything I was bringing with me needed to be frozen in advance for 48 hours. No, I can't close the freezer. Yeah, I mean our freezer is always jam packed with like, you know, pizza bites and pizza bagels for the kids. So I understand that. But why in the world did you have to freeze your clothes? Yeah, so the idea is to kill off any hitchhiker. So these are like bugs or seeds that might actually get brought with me that are not supposed to be on Pamyra atoll. So, you know, I had all my ziplock stuff all frozen and then I took a flight to Honolulu. And then I got on a small charter jet that makes the two hour flight to Palmyra, you know, once or twice a month at most. You know, as we came into land, I could see this bright turquoise water surrounded by this deep blue Pacific ocean. The atoll is actually a ring of low-lying islands and it's small. It's only a little more than four square miles. And right when I got off the plane, they changed the sign that said what the local population is. He's updating the population sign for the station. So from 21 to 22. This is Chris Ryan. He's the Palmyra atoll preserve manager. The lowest I've seen is seven, which is very nice, but very quiet. I mean, that does sound like a very peaceful and quiet place with that few people. But who exactly is at this, you know, station? Yeah. So the research station is run by the Nature Conservancy, which is a conservation nonprofit. They have some staff there and then there's also folks from the US Fish and Wildlife Service. And they do, you know, wildlife monitoring, scientific research, and they're also helping restore the atoll. And people tend to kind of come in and they rotate in for three to six months at a time. When the space station was going overhead, that was our closest human neighborhood for a little while. That was pretty neat. That is pretty neat. You really have to like isolation, I would think, to take that job. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of a prerequisite. It's like a personality type. But Ryan says, you know, that solitude, it gives you this window into the natural world that you never would get otherwise. It's just watching nature do its thing without people interfering. And I think that it's a very unique opportunity to observe that. That's to me the most important part about Polmyra. So Polmyra is densely vegetated. You know, lots of tropical forest and a lot of humidity. I mean, it rained a ton when I was there. Um, I mean, you know, humidity could be a lot, you know. It could be so because it gets humid here in DC. I would imagine this is probably a bit more. It was a level that I've never experienced. I mean, I was soaked pretty much the entire time I was there. I gotta ask you this because I don't know much about this. What makes it an atoll instead of an island? It's a basic question, right? So an atoll is a ring of islands because it actually formed from an ancient volcano that was surrounded by a coral reef. And this kind of volcanic island in the middle, it eroded away under the sea. But the coral reef around it continues to grow. So everything that we're on here, everything that we stand on here is on a base of dead coral, like coral skeletons. And then the fringing reef continues to expand out. Palmyra atoll was actually once part of the kingdom of Hawaii. So when the US annexed Hawaii, Palmyra came with it. And, you know, walking around, you can kind of see the evidence of that history. There are these old concrete bunkers around which are actually from World War Two when the US military was here. So, I mean, obviously, the Pacific was a big part of World War Two. Were there battles on Palmyra? No, the military, they built roads and bunkers. And they had some troop station there on the islands. There was a lot of preparations here. But Ryan says it was actually pretty quiet during the war. Fortunately, they didn't get a lot of action. Aside from that, Palmyra atoll has had private owners. You know, it was considered for a destination resort. The government looked at it for a dump site for nuclear waste at one time, which, you know, did happen on some other Pacific islands. So Palmyra atoll could have looked very different today. How did it get preserved? So, in 2000, the Nature Conservancy bought it, and then the US bought most of it to turn into a national wildlife refuge. And now, there's just wildlife everywhere you look. Okay. Don't sound like birds. And I'm not a fan of birds. So, then we talked about the civilization. I know. And I know Palmyra kind of may not be the place for you, right? There were so many birds. It's like a snowstorm of birds. There's just birds everywhere you see. This is Alex Wegman, who's the Nature Conservancy's lead scientist for island resilience. There are probably about 20 to 30,000 birds in front of us right here. The birds are actually city turns. It's a black and white sea bird, and the sky was filled with them. Some of them were sitting on eggs. Some of them were like feeding their little fuzzy chicks. They spend most of our time at sea. They catch fish and squid. Because, you know, the ocean is really what connects everything here. It's where a lot of the action is. So, I went offshore. And in the water there, there are just huge coral reefs. Underwater, it's just this explosion of color. You know, it's purples and yellows and oranges. There are these kind of very delicate branching corals that are the size of city buses. And then, schools of fish are just darting in and out. This is one of the most stunningly beautiful reefs you could ever imagine. I was snarkling with Joe Pollock, who works on coral science and restoration for the Nature Conservancy. A little loss for words on this reef. Lauren, I know you've traveled to coral reefs before, but have you ever seen anything like this? I mean, no, definitely not. Because, you know, a lot of what I cover is a climate reporter or things that are in trouble, right, or in bad shape. And I've seen a lot of reefs in bad shapes. So, this one for me kind of just redefined what a healthy reef should look like. Because it's had really minimal human impacts, you know, no pollution, no developments. That doesn't mean it's untouched, though, you know, even all the way out there. Because as the climate gets hotter, the oceans are heating up and corals are very sensitive to that. You know, they bleach, they turn this white color. And Pollock saw that happen a few years ago when there was a marine heat wave and the water was hot for months and so when we came out here in late 2023 and it was just stark white it was devastating. I honestly didn't think I didn't know that it would bounce back and you know bleaching doesn't mean the corals are automatically dead they can recover and as we swam around we did see that the reef was bouncing back you know some corals were regrowing there were new baby corals around. Pollock says the healthier a reef is the faster it recovers and one of the signs this reef is really healthy uh is actually all the sharks around us. What you were snorkeling with sharks all around? There's a lot yeah it was a lot of sharks. Pamira actually has one of the highest entities of sharks in the world and the farther you go out into deeper water the bigger the sharks get. Pacific atolls also attract a lot of big species of fish that swim hundreds of miles like you know tuna and marlin. Alex Wigman says that's because they're kind of like cafeterias you know atolls are like these busy cafes of the Pacific Ocean and that is why atolls are so important because they are nutrient colts and traders they're oasis in in this vast ocean scape. And by studying Pollock atoll scientists have figured out you know just how connected this whole ecosystem is. So all the seabirds there they actually rely on the tuna and other large predators because you know tuna go after small schools of fish and they corral them near of a surface and that puts them in reach for the birds because the birds hunt from above and then the birds go back to the islands and the trees where they do something important uh which is poop. Poop what why is that important? Yeah here's Wigman explaining why. Poops called guano guano falls to the forest floor in the guano is is nitrogen and phosphorus and nitrogen and phosphorus are fertilizers for the atoll islands. So the trees get healthier from that fertilizer right the poop and then when it rains it also runs off into the ocean where researchers have found the nutrients feed the whole ocean ecosystem you know it makes the coral reef healthier. So I mean this is like a big loop then or I mean not to be cliche but the circle of life like everything kind of depends on each other. Yeah exactly yeah and it's taken a lot of work to make sure that loop is is working okay um like you know there used to be rats on Pollock atoll which were accidentally introduced and they seabird eggs and chicks so there was a big effort to eradicate rats and there are still invasive palm trees there um and those trees crowd out the native trees at the seabirds nest in so there's ongoing work to get rid of those but Wigman told me you know it's been really amazing to see how fast things have rebounded. The one where that captures my feeling when I come to Pomira really is hope it's oh yeah nature's still got it like we we may be messing things up in some places or in a lot of places but nature still has it. Even with the ways that humans have changed specific atolls these ecosystems are so healthy it's one of the reasons they were protected regulators wanted to keep them as pristine as they are and you know that's why what's happening with those protections right now is such a big debate. We'll be right back I'm Aisha Roscoe this is a Sunday story. So Lauren you've been describing Palmira atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean it's part of this huge US marine national monument and parts of the monument may lose protections um what's going on with that. So back in the 2000s President George W. Bush established four national marine monuments in the Pacific Ocean including the one that Palmira atoll is part of. Some of those monuments were later expanded by President Obama and those protections banned commercial fishing in these waters including in areas where the US fishing fleet likes to catch tuna. So you know the fleet has been pushing to reverse the protections for years and Trump took up their cause when he came into office for his second term. These people were allowed to fish. Can you imagine that? Did you ever think that was going to happen as you grew up? In June Trump started the process to open the waters of three of the Pacific marine monuments to commercial fishing. If he succeeds fishing will be allowed as close as 50 nautical miles from shore. Whereas before the closest they could get to shore for most of these monuments was 200 nautical miles. American fishermen have never had a better ally at the White House in Donald Trump. Okay I mean I'm sure this has been probably welcome news to the fishing industry. What's been their reaction? Yeah so I went to the Hawaiian island of Oahu to find out. So the tuna fishing boats all come into appear in Honolulu. Basically we're offloading anywhere from 60 to 100,000 pounds of fish a day. This is Eric Kingma. He's the executive director of the Hawaii Long Line Association which represents the tuna fleet here. It's got to watch behind you. There's palettes being moved around of fish. She's just kind of washed behind. We went into this huge refrigerated warehouse where there were dozens of silvery blue tuna kind of laid out on ice. These fish have already been sold. These were big eye tuna and yellowfin tuna and each one is auctioned off individually to the highest bidder. So are these tuna that like end up in a can or you know that end up like in your tuna fish sale? No this is higher grade fish so it's never frozen and most of it is eaten in Hawaii in sushi or poke and the boats here go out hundreds of miles to find tuna which they catch with these hooks that dangle in deep water. There's thousands of hooks which is why they're called long liners. The whole fishery is worth more than a hundred million dollars but Kingma says the economics of their trips is getting tougher. The industry has been grinding along but the profitability side hasn't been all like grade and then you add basically a doubling of fuel prices. He says they're also facing more competition from foreign fishing fleets like from Asian countries. So opening the marine monument waters would give them more options about where to fish since foreign boats wouldn't be allowed there based on Trump's proclamation. Kingma says their fishery is closely regulated and he doesn't think fishing would harm the marine monuments. But really our view is we can have both we can have you know very high levels of protection and allow sustainable fishing in the same same place and those places are huge areas. So what do conservation groups have to say about that idea that that you can have both the fishing and protections? It's not an idea they agree with. No you can't have it both ways. Some places are just so special and so unique that they really shouldn't have human extraction taking place in them. This is Alan Friedlander. He's an affiliate researcher at the Hawaii Institute of marine biology and he specializes in Pacific atolls. He says when researchers have studied the impacts of fishing they've looked at a Pacific monument near Hawaii. It's called Papa Hana Mokua Kea and it's the largest of the foreign marine monuments. It stretches out from the main chain of the Hawaiian islands. Before Obama expanded the protection zone there was some commercial fishing near Papa Hana Mokua Kea and Friedlander says when that was happening there was a lot of buy catch. This is when fishers accidentally catch other species than the ones that they're targeting. And in 2015 the last year fishing was allowed around Papa Hana Mokua Kea. The long-line fishery caught more than 7,000 sharks. The sharks do get released back into the water but some of them don't survive. And so I would assume that's a concern for the bigger ecosystem because as we heard before all of these species are interconnected, right? Yeah, yeah that's the concern. And Friedlander says oceans will keep getting warmer with climate change so these atolls need all the protections they can get now. They are remote but represent some of the last pristine ecosystems on the planet. These are the jewels in the crown not only for the US but they're globally significant. And there is one more thing here that gets a lot of attention. Scientists have found that in some places closing parts of the ocean to fishing can actually help fishermen. You know that's because protected areas allow more fish to breed which increases the population. Then some of those fish you know they spread out. They swim into areas where fishing is allowed and that's known as spillover. So by spillover it's like the population grows and then they spread out. Yeah yeah that's the idea. And you know it's really changed the way people think about marine conservation. You know conservation it doesn't just have to be this kind of old idea that it hurts industries to protect natural places. There are times when it can be helpful to industry. But the big question here is whether this spillover effect happens with these highly migratory fish like tuna because they swim in and out of the protected areas a lot. And so that's something scientists are still trying to figure out. Well what does the commercial tuna industry think? They told me they're really skeptical that they will see these benefits of spillover. So we've talked about the fishing industry, the conservationists, Who else in Hawaii has a stake in this debate? Yeah, so another important voice here is Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders. I start to kick who have a Kiigiloy, who's an associate professor of Hawaiian studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, about what these marine monuments mean to them. Our ancestors are going up here for hundreds of years, continuously. A huge part of that story was traditional navigation and voyaging, which was really the hallmark of ancient Pacific Polynesian society. He says Papahana Mokouakeya is especially important to Native Hawaiians because it's considered a sacred place. That region is sort of thought to be like a region of our spirit school after we pass, and where all life's originated from. And so when you read our traditional stories, it's sort of like these rights of passages that people would go up there and interact with those places and spaces. So for them, this is really sacred ground, and to open it up to commercial activity must feel like a kind of desecration. Yeah, yeah. And there are the marine monuments that are important to other indigenous communities, like in American Samoa. Kiigiloy told me they're not against fishing in general. They just don't want to see it in monument waters. And Native Hawaiian groups fought for decades to get these protections for Papahana Mokouakeya. Now, those cultural groups also help oversee it along with the state and federal government. So it's this pretty rare example of indigenous co-management with the U.S. It's not just about the ecology and the plants and the animals that, yes, that is absolutely important, but the living systems of human communities that you've all with those resources are just as important. Kiigiloy says, you know, that's been hard recognition for them to get. And they're finding the Trump administration to preserve it. So what's next for these Pacific marine monuments and what will determine if the protections remain in place? So in June, Trump announced he'll be allowing commercial fishing in three marine monuments. Conservation groups say they plan to file a lawsuit soon to try to stop that from happening. But remember, there are four Pacific marine monuments involved here, and the last one was actually opened by Trump last year. Conservation groups have already sued over that one and a judge rule that the federal government needs to do a full environmental review before changing the fishing rules. So, you know, that's underway by federal fisheries regulators right now. So even though Trump wants these waters to be opened for fishers, we don't know yet if they will be. It's possible that these lawsuits will succeed in preserving protections. But, you know, the bigger picture question here is just how much one presidential administration can do. Trump has shrunk and rolled back protections for other monuments around the US, including, you know, on land. And these monuments are created by past presidents. So some legal scholars argue that a current president doesn't have the power to undo them. That's a question that's definitely going to be taken up in the courts. And it has huge consequences, you know, not just for these Pacific marine monuments, but for other public lands in the US. So, Lauren, obviously, there are a lot of big questions about the future here. But in the meantime, can you take us back to Paul Myra? Is there one moment that will stay with you from your time there? Yeah, I mean, there was a lot that was memorable. But one thing I haven't mentioned is the crabs. There are a lot of crabs on the atoll, including the largest land crabs that exist. They're called coconut crabs. They're actually like the size of small dogs like Chihuahua's. But one evening, we were actually out on the beach and we saw something kind of amazing. So that's kind of quiet, but if you listen really closely, that kind of like clinking sounds, it's more than a hundred climate crabs gathering together in a huge group. They're strawberry-hermit crabs, and Alex left and told me that pretty reliably, these crabs get together every evening. Why are they all together? We don't exactly know, but we think this is a social gathering. There's no real food for them here, but they come together. Maybe they want to do some shell swapping. Maybe they want to make some crab babies. Or maybe they just want to talk to each other. So it's like a hermit crab, a networking event, a cocktail party, just to get together. Yeah, that's pretty much it. And to see this big group of crabs covering the beach, it's kind of like this normal routine thing there, but it really was just a reminder for me of how wild the place is and how unique that is in the world. Lauren, thanks so much for taking us to this place that we would not get to experience otherwise. Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me. That was Lauren's summer for NPR. Lauren's reporting was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center. If you'd like to see photos from Lauren's trip, you can find a link to the digital story and our show notes. This week's episode of the Sunday Story was produced by Sharon Machihi, and edited by Ginny Schmidt, fact-checking by Aida Porosad, and engineering by Onley Huang. Special thanks to Joe Pollock for his recording of the Melon-Headed Welles. The rest of the Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo and Ben Rappaport. Our supervising senior producer is Leana Simstrom, and our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. I'm Aisha Roscoe, and up first we'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.