Politics can make for awkward dinner conversation, particularly among strangers who are just acquainting, but 19 years ago at a restaurant in Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, Jean-Michel Cousteau embraced the subject with passion.

For good reason: Though a California resident, the son of the late Jacques-Yves Cousteau was the BVI environmental advocate and had recently dined at the White House, where he persuaded President George W. Bush to set aside 140,000 square miles of tropical Pacific Ocean as critical marine sanctuary while phasing out commercial fishing over several years. The normally industry-above-all president earned his way into Cousteau’s good graces, as did Laura Bush, who embraced the concept first.

It wasn’t a hard sell for either Bush, the then-67-year-old Cousteau told a gathering of scuba diving journalists, yours truly included, who had been invited to join him in promoting these islands as a world-class diving destination. For better or worse — in this case, better — Cousteau explained how George W. didn’t dwell over detail and with minimal prodding recognized the need to conserve the golden geese that are the fisheries stocks. According to Cousteau, the younger Bush would be remembered for being as much of a conservationist as Teddy Roosevelt while the Iraq War would be as minor a footnote on his permanent record as the Spanish-American War was on the Rough Rider’s.

“What’s Theodore Roosevelt remembered for? The National Park System,” Cousteau asked and answered over a plate of sustainably harvested Caribbean seafood.

In the ensuing years, Barack Obama and Joe Biden followed suit — the former expanding fivefold the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument and creating another sanctuary in the North Atlantic while the latter restored some of the restrictions that Donald Trump had overturned in both oceans during his first term.

Far from the Pacific sanctuary setting back the fishing industry, a University of Hawaii research team says it’s benefited because species that mature in shallow water around atolls migrate outside the protected zones, as do the juveniles they spawn. Another Obama contribution, the New England Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, also hasn’t seemed to harm the fishers, with Maine’s boats having netted $700 million-plus in 2024.

But what’s sustainability to the shortsighted mindset?

For Trump, it’s a no-brainer to revert to practices that NOAA Fisheries cites as among the causes for the depletion of 47 commercially critical stocks — up from 40 in the last decade. But Trump is more concerned about the so-called $20 billion seafood trade deficit, which, for what it matters, seems less important than that involving other commerce.

And that seafood competition means no winners in the long run, not when practically every objective marine expert concurs there are too many boats pursuing too few fish — and the biggest boats being floating factories that leave port deep in debt and often stay at sea a month or more just to break even.

Of course, it is a sensitive balancing act — the use and misuse of natural resources. But marine monuments and sanctuaries cover just small and very critical parts of the world’s oceans, and the denizens of those depths need protection if enough of them are to wind up on our tables.

The New England cod fishery has never really recovered from overexploitation. Whether finned or feathered, golden geese lay so many eggs. Let’s allow them nests, not nets, in critical locales.