A U.S. fishing regulator recently recommended allowing commercial fishing across all four of the country’s Pacific marine national monuments. The Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council (Wespac) said the move is “about restoring sustainable fishing.” Conservationists and native peoples, however, say it will damage some of Earth’s most pristine ocean ecosystems. The monuments — Pacific Islands Heritage, Rose Atoll, Marianas Trench, and Papahānaumokuākea —  cover 3.1 million square kilometers (1.2 million square miles) of coral atolls, deep-sea trenches and remote islands. Image courtesy of NOAA Fisheries All four monuments have banned commercial fishing since their establishment. “I am sad that with all these restrictions in our areas, we are slowly losing some of our culture,” Wespac council member Pedro Itibus said in a press release. Many locals say recreational fishing was never banned and some sites are far from any community. “The practice of commercial fishing and the unavoidable and significant waste of marine resources caused by bycatch is an affront to Native Hawaiian practices and beliefs,” Solomon Pili Kaho’ohalahala, a native Hawaiian with Kāpaʻa, a local NGO, told Wespac in a statement. Commercial fishing would allow the use of longlines and purse seines, which result in large numbers of nontarget species — turtles, seabirds, sharks — being caught. “In 2014, before the expansion of Papahānaumokuākea, Hawaii-based longliners caught more than 5,600 sharks as bycatch in the now protected area,” Sheila Sarhangi, executive director of the Hawai‘i-based Pacific Islands Heritage Coalition and the Papahānaumokuākea Coalition, told Mongabay by email. “If you…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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